Most of my story ideas come from mashing together whatever I’ve got in my head, and sometimes the things in my head are close to home. Around the time I was drafting this story, there was a rockslide at Snoqualmie Pass. That particular slide involved relatively small rocks, but in the past there have been rockslides involving boulders the size of cars.

I never really lived near the woods, but I had friends who did. We’d run around and skin our knees and climb boulders and jump into sand pits and it never occurred to us that anything we did was remotely dangerous because little girls are immortal, after all.

The notion of children who remain children permanently inevitably called up the idea of Peter Pan, who inevitably invoked the phantom of the Great God Pan and his seductive pipes.

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.