What are the origins of this story?
It came from inside my head. I’ve always liked the challenge of wrapping the largest of large-screen space operas in the tiniest package—I’ve done it a couple of times, in stories like “The Days of Solomon Gursky” and “Verthandi’s Ring.” I’d had the idea of a society where everyone is constructively a multiple personality, and my go-to space opera setting of The Clade, which is basically a very diverse all-human future—seemed ideal.
What are some of your favorite short stories?
Too too many to name, though I have an enduring love for a couple of old Irish short stories—not genre: “Lovers of the Lake” by Sean O’Faolain, about the pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg, and “Meles Vulgaris” by Patrick Boyle which very much influenced my ideas on structure, and how to dance around the deadening rhythm of ‘and-then, and-then’ story telling.
Do you have anything coming out in the months ahead?
Luna: Blood Moon, the follow-up to Luna: New Moon (out now from Tor and Gollancz in a plethora of formats. The volume goes to eleven in this one. Really. Questions are answered—and more raised . . . It’s official: the series is going to three books—I realised fairly early in writing Luna 2 that to resolve all the stories and plots and character arcs, it would have to be about eight hundred pages long. Much easier to trilogise.