Last year, my sister fell victim to a ransomware virus that caused her to lose a lot of important files, including irreplaceable photos. Some of my recent stories have involved brain implant technology, so I started thinking about what ransomware would look like in a future in which such technology is a part of everyday life. You could look at it as a cautionary tale, but I didn’t write it with that intention.

I spent my first twenty-five years as a musician in a family of musicians. The funny thing is, none of them were into rock’n’roll. Classical, Dixieland, Chicago jazz, early polyphonic choral music, even screech’n’fart, as we fondly called stuff like Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg. As a child I was told that rock’n’roll is a gateway drug to heroin, so I didn’t discover it until I went to college. But music is music, eh? Kind of my point in this story

Istanbul and Budapest are two cities that I love, with rich histories of political resistance—but also imperial power, too. Both have been at the centers of empires that lasted centuries. And Turpan, in western China, has occupied a place of strategic importance for over 1,500 years. Enormously important historical events took place in these areas, so it makes sense that important future events would happen there too. I like thinking about how history continues to affect us, even in a world of sentient drones.

In this setting, the terms “magic” and “scientific” could only combine in an oxymoron. Magic is about the power of will, but for that power to be applied it has to be controlled and focused. There are techniques for that, many of them very difficult, which have to be learned and practiced. So it’s definitely more of an art than a science; talent comes into it, but so does study and practice

I’d been working on a big space-opera called “The Lacing.” The editor who was interested in it—Richard Evans—died and I was more and more involved in political activism; I also ceased to believe that I was, or could be, a writer of SF rather than fantasy. So I bundled up every single good SF idea I had ever had—except for the ones which were allocated to “The Lacing,” in case I ever went back to it—and thought of a story in which I could use them all.

Societies have their rituals for grief. We have wakes and we have funerals and we have our lists of expected—and acceptable—behaviors. We have unofficial rituals as well—when someone famous dies, we go back and we read their stories or watch their movies or listen to their music. Grief is a big thing.