As for the grittiness of the setting, all you have to do is look to our own world to see the growing gap between the rich and poor.

There are very few stories about older people in our field, or any other, for that matter. Most of the time, older people show up as disapproving parents or other authority figures.

I think writers should write what they know—but if they don’t know it, they need to learn it. And that includes all the sciences.

Charlie is in effect visiting the underworld, and trying to rescue Georgie. At bottom this is an Orpheus/Eurydice story of someone (a poet!) going under the earth to bring back a dead love, and failing.

The one thing we as humans consistently show is that we’re survivors. We have yet to wipe ourselves off this planet once and for all, and I don’t think that’s an accident.

As far as the “creation myth” side of the story goes, it basically hit me as a concept without a story attached—just the idea that someone ought to write a creation myth about Martian terraforming.

I love the idea of this time period where to them technology was indistinguishable from magic and it served the same function in a lot of ways in their literature that magic does in ours.

I had a dream that my brain was trapped in the body of a giant tank-like spaceship, and that I was fighting a war on an alien moon—trying to hide in a crater as enemy ships hunted me.

Originally “constellations” was the theme of the anthology this story first appeared in and as soon as the subject was mentioned and I had the project to do I thought of how the patterns in the stars were manmade things.