My mind is often drawn to the extremes, and when it comes to a given fantasy trope or science-fictional conceit, I often think of the first or last person to experience such a situation. Those thought experiments don’t always become stories, but sometimes they do

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.