Goodreads asked Michael Marshall:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Michael Marshall I've been fascinated by how life might have begun since I was a child: I remember reading a children's dinosaur encyclopedia and being struck by the immense blank that was the Precambrian. It's one of the deepest questions science can ask, alongside how the universe began and how/why consciousness exists. I've written and read lots of stories about the origin of life, but I always got frustrated by the need to focus on just one of the hypotheses - none of which, I'm pretty sure, can be entirely correct. I wanted to explore all of the leading ideas, to compare and contrast them, and see if that pointed the way towards a "grand unified theory". I eventually realised that this book didn't exist (at least, not for a general audience) - so I wrote it.

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