Geoffrey Landis … observed that NASA had spent billions of dollars sending out probes to the planets and moons of the Solar System and then posted all the scientific data, analyses, photos, and films on the web, free for anybody who wanted to use it—and most science fiction writers were ignoring this largesse! Which seemed to me not only a valid criticism, but a great opportunity.

“Breaking the Frame” was born from photographs. My friend Maria Dahvana Headley had shown me a book of Francesca Woodman’s photos, and they haunted me—I couldn’t get Woodman’s work out of my head, and I dreamt of the pictures.

I spent a lot of time sitting in the Chicago airport, waiting to change planes, coming up with the details of this society. A few things became clear pretty quickly: With six different sexes, everything would become a lot more complicated, and you needed six sets of pronouns to differentiate them. None of the pronouns should conjugate exactly like “he/his/him” or “she/hers/her,” or you would lose some of the jarring quality of them.

She’s very romantic, as the young are romantic, but she’s also a realist, as the young can be realists if they’ve got the right temperament. I see her as making both fairy-tale and adult choices—the fairy-tale ones in Faerie; the adult ones when she is back in the real world, facing going home to her certainly-displeased parents.

he idea for this story didn’t start with memories at all—it started from some idle speculations about what it might be like to be a child on a colony ship. I wondered whether it might be easier to skip childhood entirely and emerge as a fully-grown crew member.

The Puzzle Lands books are a quirky sort of low-tech fantasy: gritty, fast-paced, and darkly humorous. The setting is entirely imaginary, but includes two cultures in conflict: the Koráyos, a stern, egalitarian people, and Lutawa, an extreme patriarchy bent on expansion.

Since much of my own short fiction stresses characterization, I particularly admire stories in which individual characters are basically absent, and the story is about entire peoples, species, ideas.

The story kind of tells its own history: I was researching the actual process of brain death, and realized what a mushy concept it really is. Basically, the body goes through a shutdown sequence, and “death” is the point at which medicine can no longer reverse the process. But that point has been moving; with CPR, defibrillators, and ventilators, legal “death” stopped being about the heart and now takes place in the brain.

In this story, the lovers aren’t magic. The only magic they really have is that they’re in love. But oh, my, god, love is major magic. There’s a reason we talk about being bewitched.

Back in the 1980s, biological science was abuzz with a new idea—that the boundaries between species aren’t anywhere near as firm and permanent as we (and Darwin) once thought. Bacteria exchange DNA with each other. Many of our own genes entered our chromosomes, originally, from viruses.