Please tell us a little about yourself and Wilma Dunn.



My name is Nathaniel Hicklin. I’ve been writing for about 20 years now, ever since changing majors in college from engineering to theater. So, it’s not much of a surprise that I wound up writing science fiction, I suppose.

I’ve always written stories that take place in some kind of heightened version of the world, anything that allows me to depict things the way I think they ought to be, rather than being bound by the way things are. Because what else is storytelling for, if not to show people how much better things could be?

How did you construct the world within Wilma Dunn?



My mantra as I was writing the story was never to answer a question without asking three more. I obviously wanted Wilma to start with plenty of questions to give her a reason to move through the story, but I didn’t want the world to resolve itself and start making sense as the story reached the end. I wanted her journey to feel like quantum physics or astronomy, with every new level of understanding revealing more unknowns. I also just added some things because they amused me in the moment, and then I let those little gags suggest other details that they made necessary, until the gags had grown like mushrooms into whole new worldbuilding features.

How did you research your book?



As with most of my work, I started the story as a way for me to offload a bunch of the many facts I know, so I developed the bones of the story around that. After that, I started brainstorming neat little ornaments to hang on the story like I was decorating a Christmas tree, and I did a few deep dives on Wikipedia to flesh those out, like the history of coinage in America and lists of metal alloys with neat names. For example, I needed to nail down the geography of the town of Crate, the size and population and so on, so I looked up Wapello, Iowa—a town where my family has some deep roots that’s around the right size—and I gave Crate the same stats.

Was your storyline something that you envisioned from the beginning, or did you build on it as you wrote your novel?



I knew the vague shape of the story mostly from the beginning, but I absolutely did not determine all the details until I needed them, just so things would stay fresh and fun. In many cases, I didn’t determine some of the facts about the characters until I’d written the scene where they reveal them. A lot of the surprises came to me while I was away from the computer and thinking of what I wanted to do next, when I was thinking of how a scene or conversation might go, and part of me interrupted to say, “You know what would be really messed up, though?”

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.