I used to call myself an absurdist writer, back in the early 2000s—in keeping with the fact that I was doing more straight-up comic fiction. And I think that a lot of the goal of writing fiction, for me and maybe for other people too, is to point out how ridiculous and nonsensical a lot of stuff is. In this story, the media frenzy pretty quickly turns into a look at people’s unfulfilled yearning for the kind of power that they think Peter has. People fantasize about having the ability to change the world, without having to pay any price. Fantasy stories often revolve around the idea of paying a price for magic, and I wanted to approach that from a different direction.

The starting point for this story came when I wondered if crime could ever occur in a hive society. If you imagine aliens that are less inherently individual than humans, could there still be enough motive to commit, for instance, a murder? When I began writing, I had no idea how the story would end, but as I went on, it came to me that even under conditions of low individual selfishness, there might be selfishness on the group level. Everything grew out of that. The different genotypes of ammet, which could be redesigned or discontinued or even recalled if they turned out to be defective. The communal living, with refectories and dormitories. The basic drive of every ammet to do its predetermined job.

Marvin Dimitri is inspired by a family friend who has been declared dead about four times. Most of the deaths in the story are his: He went missing in Vietnam, died on the operating table, wandered back to work after they found his wrecked car.

Some writers are gardeners, just throwing interesting seeds of things together and seeing what comes out, and some are careful, exacting architects who know precisely where they’re going and what they want to accomplish. I’m definitely the gardener variety. Writing is as much a process of exploration for me as it is for the reader.

I am a terrible person who enjoys schadenfreude pie more than almost anyone else I know. People say that the internet runs on cats or porn, but I feel this is inaccurate. Beneath the layers of pornography, cats, and pornographic cats, the internet really runs on schadenfreude. This story came from reading the now-defunct Regretsy site and browsing spectacular crowdfunding failures for far too many hours. I also felt like crowdfunding has been ubiquitous for the past three years and wanted to poke at it a little bit.

What would become Augusta Prima’s world was originally born in 2005, when I co-wrote a Nordic LARP called Moira. It was a contemporary story set in the borderland between the human and the supernatural realms. The faerie folk, for lack of a better word, abducted a group of humans to examine them, and would, based on their findings, decide whether humanity should be exterminated or left alone.

For quite a while now, I’ve been writing about a highly improbable far-future human civilization called The Ten Thousand Worlds that stretches along The Spray, our arm of the galaxy. There’s Old Earth, which has become as forgotten as the font of civilization as Uruk is to us today. Then there are the Grand Foundational Domains, the first planets settled aeons ago that are now vast, complex, wealthy societies. Then there are the secondary worlds, peopled by misfits and oddballs who felt hemmed-in on the Foundationals. And there are quite a few minor and disregarded planets where you take your chances, just like backpacking through some parts of Earth today.

The initial idea I had was to write a straightforward zombie story, where the zombies suddenly stop attacking the living, and the living have to learn to coexist with their dead brethren. As I started planning the story, I just wasn’t excited about writing it as a zombie story, so I figured readers wouldn’t be excited, either. That’s when I came up with the idea of making the dead humans hosts for aliens. So the stingers came before Josephine. Once I knew what I wanted the overall setup to be, I started thinking about what sort of character and situation might make for a compelling storyline.

I had the idea for the sinister monk using bells to get around many years ago, when I was dreaming up the adventures of a character named China Scott, who was based on the amazing explorer Alexandra David-Neel. I never wrote a single China Scott story, but the images hung around.

The story grew out of reflections on how much of life for many people is spent in the fantasy worlds created by movies, books, games, or their own imagination—and also how many occupations now are carried out at a remove from the real world. Saying “the real world” seems wrong—what is reality if we’re not in it?