[The story] is set in a world where matter transmitters are taken for granted by most people, at least by the youngest members of society, who have entirely grown up with them. This technology, d-mat, doesn’t use a wormhole or anything like that: It analyses a thing, destroying it in the process, and then creates an identical copy somewhere else.

My passion is fairy tales and how they adapt across cultures and time, so I was sort of fascinated by how I could work them into an urban, very non-European, very modern Australian setting.

I think the whole secret of happiness, in this or in any other society, is to be deeply and genuinely interested. In anything: politics, your children, your job, soccer, quilting, collecting beer steins—it doesn’t matter. “Hobbies” is an inadequate word for what I’m talking about. The point is that when you are sincerely engaged with something, you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning with some degree of pleasure.

I started with the title and the premises of written magic and a sunken, haunted ship.

I had quite a bit of fun with imagining the backstory of Morbid Management—the idea being that a dinosaur-based rock act would only be the latest in a string of epically tasteless ideas that have all gone wrong in one way or another. Oddly, though, once I started thinking about robot cover bands, I wondered why someone hadn’t already done it in real life. And then (long after the story) I found out about Compressorhead, the all-robot Motorhead cover act! They sound like fun.

Late Imperial China never developed an independent legal profession as we understand the term in the West. But the complex social and economic life during the Qing Dynasty created demand for individuals with litigation expertise. And so the songshi (“litigation masters”) were born.

[I] said to myself, “But what if you could just mine games?” Then I decided that war was a game made incarnate, and there was a woman strategist who was out to completely outsmart him. It grew from there.

I think the repetitive quality of the story is similar to certain fables or folk stories, which often feature an element that repeats and gets worse every time.

My child, your Elder will now tell you of a time long, long before you were born, an age of darkness, in which our People of the Sci-fi had no women. Among the People were only men. The men did all things well and bravely. They went where no man had gone before. But women they knew not, except as depicted upon the covers of their magazines, having large breasts and screaming.

Years ago, in one of my creative writing classes, another student asked what the plural of “nemesis” was, and it sparked this big debate, not just about the correct word, but if you could ever have more than one nemesis and if a word like nemesis should even have a plural form. So I start thinking about superheroes, naturally, because I’m a geek, and that’s kind of what I do, and I start wondering if a superhero could just decide to replace his nemesis if he ever actually succeeded in killing him.