There is no point and no juice in a retelling that doesn’t cast the original material in a different light. The impulse to retell is simply not there without that sense that something new can be said. So I’m always hoping for a story that surprises, but this desire is central in a retelling.

I don’t know that it’s possible to really have a nonhuman point of view. No matter what we describe, we anthropomorphize it. For instance, would an alien spaceship really fall in love with a man? Probably not.

If we’re to find solutions to the environmental and ecological challenges we are facing, I think we need to actively and hopefully seek them. Clara and the other characters in the story are caught up in contemplating their extinction. They’re convinced of its inevitability, and therefore have given up on the future. I hope humanity doesn’t spend so much time mourning ourselves that we forget to believe in the future.

Back in 2011, Jonathan Strahan invited me to contribute to an anthology of “science fiction set in a settled, industrialized, pre-starflight solar system,” and my immediate response was more or less, “I want to go to there!” I never really thought of myself as someone who wrote hard SF (and the invitation specified “original hard SF/action adventure”), but I always kinda wanted to be, so this was a great excuse to stretch those wings.

I have it on good authority that the invention of the Frappuccino is, in fact, the teleological purpose of the universe. The real question is: How do we live our lives now that this purpose has been fulfilled? Have we been set adrift, cosmically speaking? Should nihilism prevail? Is everything nothing? Why does my nose itch? Should I stop asking these questions?

I read up some pottery lore, and dimly recalled doing some pottery on a turntable as a boy. Then I wondered about what the meaning of such an accidental message might be. Choice of point of view character is essential, once you have the basic idea. I liked seeing this from a bureaucrat distance, to show from outside the real pivot person, the scientist who’s frustrated by his finding. I sat down and wrote the story in one afternoon.

The experiment arose from my instinct that what’s most exciting about other people, what’s most likely to inspire our passion and our empathy, is their mystery; when we cease to acknowledge that mystery and convince ourselves that we truly know them, rejecting the possibility that they might not be quite the people we imagine, is when we stop perceiving them as enigmatic other human beings and only as a type of themselves.