Goodreads asked Jerry A. Dowless Jr.:

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

Jerry A. Dowless Jr. In January 2009 I was in the hospital, sick with a serious infection. My company was the second volume of Neal Stephenson's baroque trilogy, The Confusion. It was one of the most powerful reading experience's of my life. It got me thinking about the role of history in shaping the present. Of course, I'd had an interest in alternate history long before that, having read Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle long before that. But coming out of that experience, I knew I wanted to write a different type of alternate history, one that wasn't going to be a dystopia, one set in Renaissance Europe, one which would be set at the dawn of the alternate world and not at its conclusion, where part of the suspense would be the nature of the world being created, and its difference from our own.

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