[The story] is set in a world where matter transmitters are taken for granted by most people, at least by the youngest members of society, who have entirely grown up with them. This technology, d-mat, doesn’t use a wormhole or anything like that: It analyses a thing, destroying it in the process, and then creates an identical copy somewhere else.

My passion is fairy tales and how they adapt across cultures and time, so I was sort of fascinated by how I could work them into an urban, very non-European, very modern Australian setting.

I think the whole secret of happiness, in this or in any other society, is to be deeply and genuinely interested. In anything: politics, your children, your job, soccer, quilting, collecting beer steins—it doesn’t matter. “Hobbies” is an inadequate word for what I’m talking about. The point is that when you are sincerely engaged with something, you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning with some degree of pleasure.

I started with the title and the premises of written magic and a sunken, haunted ship.

I had quite a bit of fun with imagining the backstory of Morbid Management—the idea being that a dinosaur-based rock act would only be the latest in a string of epically tasteless ideas that have all gone wrong in one way or another. Oddly, though, once I started thinking about robot cover bands, I wondered why someone hadn’t already done it in real life. And then (long after the story) I found out about Compressorhead, the all-robot Motorhead cover act! They sound like fun.

Late Imperial China never developed an independent legal profession as we understand the term in the West. But the complex social and economic life during the Qing Dynasty created demand for individuals with litigation expertise. And so the songshi (“litigation masters”) were born.