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.

One of the primary influences for this story was a recent trip to Indonesia. While I experienced nothing like Trenchtown in my travels, the smells, sounds and sights of Indonesia permeate “Thief of Futures.”

The long debate over the long-range fate of the universe is still unsettled. For a while the notion of a Cyclical Cosmos reigned … that eventually the Big Bang’s expansion would peter out and gravity would pull everything back into a Big Crunch.