Ideologically, I have a lot of problems with that, especially when people toss around that form of story as realism. What's called "realism" is actually highly formulaic.

There were a lot of apocalypses that didn't make it into this assemblage because they didn't suit the world. And defining that world and figuring out what its wobbly borders were was a long-term and exhaustive process. I had all of these different ways of categorizing the apocalypses I had made. I had a period of time where I cut them up.

Follow Through is elegant, sure footed, smart—a nest of sticks that won’t stay sticks—a nest of sticks that snowballs—scary and marvelous.

I think we are living in an era of being hyper-concerned about, Is it us? Because we have this historical awareness. People really want to know: will it be us or our kids or our grandkids to live through this? We don't want it to happen, we don't want to be the ones with the poisoned water, but at the same time, I think there is this curiosity, like, Am I one of the "lucky" ones who gets to be here at the end? That's the tension I'm interested in.

One of the reasons I like to hang out with scholarly types is they can do a broad reach conceptualization of things that is astonishing to me. I'm really good at the particulars but I have to do an immense amount of critical thinking to make something larger of it.

So many of the stories are about perspective and viewpoint. It's not just about seeing and revelation. The idea of having many different stories from many different perspectives has something to do with me trying to deal with the impossibility of having a wide enough view to say anything really convincing on that scale.

The short story is so much about inevitability and this feeling that things always had to be this one way, and I wanted the apocalypses to blow that idea apart. I hope it feels that way. I hope the book invites people to read the stories in order and then, if they feel like it, maybe not read them in order the next time.