Most cultures want to memorialize, if not actually venerate, those who have died, and we do it mostly with cemeteries. But in an agrarian society with a limited amount of arable land like the one in my story, wasting so much valuable farmland on a graveyard makes no sense. I considered all the cultures that preserve their dead in such a way as to keep them visible and, in a way, part of the living community, and combined that with a society with an almost instinctive need to make the best use of space and resources. In that context, the role of the skull-carver made perfect sense.

It’s the worms. Giant tunnelling worms are not my terror. Tiny parasitic worms are my terror. I grew up in Idaho, surrounded by sled dogs. Worms, man. Worms. Tiny worms that get bigger as they eat you from the inside? Oh, holy. There’s something about how worms are, the way they can subdivide. Chop them up, and back they come. That’s some classic nasty.

I found Audoghast while reading a book about Moslem travellers and explorers. [It] really is “forgotten”—Audoghast was a wealthy, good-sized metropolis once, but nobody’s ever yet found any trace of its ruins.

What I really had in mind while writing the story was the fiscal cliff in the news at the time. I created a scenario of perfect doom, and told the story of bickering politicians unable to reach the compromise that might save us all.

Q: Ultimately, Schwartz chooses to remain in his fantasy world and exits the starship. Is mortality a theme you explore often in your work? Are there certain themes you find you return to? A: There certainly are, and mortality is one of them. Didn’t someone say that love and death are the only important themes for fiction?

The troupe [believes] they have the function of upholding the order of the universe. That kind of ritual needs no audience except creation itself. The actors may also be their own audience—a sort of ever-ongoing roleplay.