The attraction of steampunk is […] piling together all these disparate aspects and finding a way to make it all work. One way to look at it—this is Jules Verne’s Paris, and the thought of dirigibles mooring to the Eiffel Tower just seems so perfect you wonder why it never happened for real.

I’ve always thought that at heart “The Little Mermaid” was something of a proof against love. It’s more a story of desperation, and escape, and a sort of casual cruelty no one in the story can really help—it’s a cruel story because it’s just the nature of things to be cruel. I wanted to explore the themes of isolation and terrible transformation, and adjust the vectors of yearning a little.

Q: How did Eight Episodes start for you? A: What I recall is imagining a television show that didn’t survive and that slowly, stubbornly revealed its true meanings. When I began work, I probably had only a rough idea of what the mystery was.

My father was an analytical chemist and my mother was a librarian, and I was an intense and constant reader. The three of us suffered in different ways from the death of a child, who was with us “every furlong and fathom,” though not often mentioned by name. What happens in the story is like and unlike my family—as if taking place in a different, more volcanic realm of the multi-verse, with different and more excessive versions of us.

This will sound weird, but I was dreaming that I was a young kid walking through an airport. In the dream, the first line of the story came to me: “Every time I fall asleep I wake up in a different body.” As soon as I dreamed that sentence, I snapped awake and ran to my office to write it down. The story flowed very smoothly from that—it was one of the easiest and quickest stories I’ve ever written.

The idea really started with thinking about the “of Mars” books and what they would actually look like from a Martian perspective. After reading Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, it’s hard to take the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels seriously, although they’re still fun to read. But I thought about what would happen if those sorts of adventures, the human being on Mars adventures, were staged, were performance.

When I think about unicorns, I think about girls and horses. (Girls love horses.) Then I moved to the whole idea that a unicorn can identify a pure or virginal woman. Which led me to the idea that cultures throughout history and currently seem to be obsessed with sexually innocent women, often at the expense of those women. Whenever I think about things like that, I get a little angry.

I believe we’re defined by how much we consider the needs of those below us—our employees, our children, our obstacles. Selfishness is a matter of forethought. As a missionary in the best and worst parts of California, I spent a lot of time around people of widely different social classes. Most people treat food as a right, whether they’re talking about tilapia or a can of off-brand tuna—and the closer they get to the tilapia end of the spectrum, the more they feel they deserve it. When I do that, I’m ashamed; when I see other people do it, I’m furious.

I think what it was that helped me come up with this story was the idea that there is so much going on around us that we miss—not so much the size difference, as it is here—the ant we unknowingly crush, etc., although that’s part of it, but just the other cultures and signs and matrices of knowledge that, because we are unaware, they remain invisible to us. We live in a world of worlds, but we rarely see beyond where our own begins and ends.

I’m a big fan of leaving a little narrative wiggle room, and in this case, you can choose to believe whichever viewpoint you prefer. They’re all credible, after a fashion, and they all undermine one another just a tiny bit, which I enjoyed.