Goodreads asked Steven R. Southard:

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

Steven R. Southard My most recent book is a collection of two short stories--"To Be First" and "Wheels of Heaven." "To Be First" was inspired by a Mythbuster TV show episode where they tried to replicate a myth about a manned rocket launch in the Ottoman Empire in 1633. I got to wondering what would have happened if the episode had been true and the Ottomans had become the major world power. It's a humorous story about the first trip to the moon in 1933.
"Wheels of Heaven" was inspired when I came across some mention of the Antikythera Mechanism, a complex geared machine from ancient Greece. I wondered how it came to be in the debris field from a shipwreck off Antikythera Island.

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