Yes, of course my fiction springs from what is observed, whether externally or internally. What I recall of the process of writing this story is that I went to the library and collected a pile of books on things that interested me such as butterflies and mythology. The writing was a process of discovery. Nothing was planned.

Culturally there is a push against angry women. You’re a bitch; you’re an ice queen; you’re oversensitive; you’re a psychotic prima donna who needs to “stop being so shrill” and chill out. You’re Courtney Love. The male-driven world is forever threatened by a pissed-off lady. And hey, you know what? FUCK THAT.

The birth scene was the one that Ann and I had the most trouble with. I wanted to write something abstract and blurry in the way that writers often do when we want to dodge details, something like “Time started to fade as she became preoccupied by her senses, and sometime later . . . “ And Ann was like, “Yeah, no, that’s not what birth is like.” She’s done it twice, so she won the argument.

I was first exposed to the idea of neophiles and neophobes by writer Robert Anton Wilson, and it’s a notion that has stuck with me ever since. I’m an unabashed neophile, but my personal belief is you’d have to be a little crazy to not be afraid of what the future could hold sometimes. On the net, I think I’m pro-new and pro-future. But there are some futures that I wouldn’t want to live in.

In this serialized novel, as in the rest of my Archonate stories, I’m looking at a civilization that is about to be profoundly changed, though almost all of its inhabitants have no idea what’s about to happen. The general inspiration came from thinking about the western world in the summer of 1914, when the civilization of Europe was about to be wracked and transformed beyond recognition, but only a few realized that “the lamps are going out and will not be lit again.”

I have been fascinated by human spaceflight since I was eleven years old and have done a lot of research into and writing on the subject — five books, in fact, with a new one on the way, in addition to a couple of dozen articles. I’ve met dozens of astronauts, flight directors, and space program types. And for years I have grown a bit impatient or even completely cranky with the way human spaceflight is portrayed.

I was writing a story for an anthology edited by Nick Mamatas and Ellen Datlow, which was about retellings of classic horror tales. Basically, at the time I was reading Pu Songling’s STRANGE TALES FROM A CHINESE STUDIO, and this was the one tale that stuck with me — because the detail of the painted skin is so horrific, I guess?