What is the Captain Žukov origin story?

I stole the surname from my best friend. I don’t think he knows. (Andrej, if you see this, text me, I want to know if you’re secretly reading my work.)

The truth is, in a story like this, my characters exist almost entirely on the page. They shape and are shaped by what is around them. There’s not much I can say beyond what I’ve written—except, perhaps, that Žukov is someone who has been many things in life. He is like a tree in which there are three blackbirds.

What made you take on this story in the first place?

This story was wholly inspired by the video game Dyson Sphere Program, in which I’ve logged an embarrassingly large number of hours and which—despite being a factory sim with almost no plot—is responsible for some of the strongest emotional reactions I’ve had to any video game. Let me explain.

Dyson Sphere Program is a game about turning things (like ores) into other things (like refined metals), until eventually, after dozens of hours of gameplay, the other thing is a Dyson sphere. It’s hardly a unique concept—Factorio is the more high-profile game in this genre—but what sets it apart is its sheer scope. This is a game that takes you from one small planet to a vast logistics network spanning countless solar systems in the local star cluster. It’s a game that simulates the Kardashev scale, and once you start approaching type III, there’s little to do but let the mechanism you’ve built do its thing. You’re free to come up with increasingly imaginative designs for the Dyson spheres themselves. You’ve left the menial tasks to the machines and can focus on the beauty of what you’re creating.

Then the planets you’ve built on start running out of resources. These are mostly barren places. There are leafy, life-bearing worlds in the game too, but I bet I’m not the only person who left them alone as much as possible. After a while, though, you start questioning even that decision. What is it that makes a barren place expendable? It has a past, too. A history. Perhaps there was life there once. Perhaps not. You start, in an odd sort of way, to grieve.

That’s where the story began. I think we—humans collectively, I mean—have just about understood that we have a responsibility towards the Earth. I also think there’s a subset of people who believe the problem could be solved if we just shifted our exploitation of our environment outwards—to the moon, to Mars, to the asteroid belt. They’re wrong. No matter how far or how wide we travel, we will always have a responsibility to the places we visit. Taking our problems elsewhere is not a solution.

Anyway, Dyson Sphere Program—great game, will eat your life for a few months, may induce a minor existential crisis, 10/10.

I love the form that this story takes. What made you choose these kinds of sections and how intentional were the metaphors associated with each section?

The first impulse I had for this story was a desire to catalogue the images in my head. That’s where the structure came from—entries in a catalogue of Dyson spheres. But as writers all over the world are constantly bemoaning, vibes do not make a story on their own. So I thought, okay, let’s make this a progression. A journey. Maybe the story will show itself that way. The question became, who are the characters, and how are they reacting to what they see? That was key for me, because the way megastructures are portrayed in science fiction, the principal reaction to them is very often the same: a cold sort of awe. There’s plenty of that in this story, of course, but thinking about the other ways one might respond—the excitement of an explorer; the curiosity of an archaeologist—was crucial in making the progression work. That’s where intentionality comes into it. I knew what I was trying to evoke. Everything else was serving that aim.

What was the biggest challenge of writing such a piece? Was it the form? Was it the structure? Was it the theme?

The characters, or rather the intersection of theme and character. I knew I wanted this to be quite short, because it’s difficult to maintain a list structure for too long, which meant there was no space for extensive character development. I knew this would have to be an omniscient narrator right from the start. It took a while to figure out how to make these two characters—there had to be two—more than just travellers on the road I’d made. The thing that made everything fall into place was that shift into first person plural at the end. (I like nothing better than a surprise first person narrator.) I wanted the reader to question who’s telling the story. I wanted them to stop and wonder, if the narrator and the characters were both encompassed by that we, then who is the listener? Or to put it another way: who is the warning for?

Is there a line in the story that you’re especially fond of, or that has a particular meaning to you?

There’s a line in Hollow Knight, one of my favourite games—clearly this story has a video game theme—that goes “the refuse and regret of its creation.” It’s not that prominent. Probably most people who play the game forget about it. But for some reason it really stuck with me. I think it’s “refuse” the noun. An easy word to trip over if you’re expecting the verb. So when I wrote “imagine the refuse of Venus in their place,” that’s what I was drawing on. Refuse and regret—that’s what this story is about, really.

What kind of research did you have to do in order to fully flesh this story out?

I learnt the term “station-keeping” while researching this story, which I find wildly evocative. It’s like the inverse of that classic James Inglis story about space probes. Instead of endlessly travelling, endlessly staying in one place. I did a fair amount of reading on Dyson spheres and what a realistic (you know, relatively speaking) version of one might look like, which helped inspire the difference between the second and third sections, and also I finally learnt how a solar sail works. And I read way too much about X-ray binaries while trying and mostly failing to make the fourth section plausible. I’m not sure why I felt that part needed to be plausible given, uh, the rest of it.

Is there a project you are currently working on? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

The first time I answered this question in Lightspeed, three years ago, I said I was working on a novel that I hoped would be done soon. Well, it was done, and then it became undone, like novels like to do, so I’m still working on that. (Answering these questions is my current method of procrastination.) I’m working on a second novel, too—a political fantasy—which is half done, but on hiatus while I figure out how to incorporate a major plot overhaul. They’re completely different but also basically the same, because all my novel ideas have the same premise: Change Arrives in a Weird City. It’s a winner every time.