Anastasia Morandau is to a considerable extent a sort of tribute to Agatha Heterodyne, but she lives in a world that is not supposed to be at all cartoonish. She's spark-like in inventing technological weapons, but my intention is to keep all the science real, at least within a certain amount of poetic license. Along with her destructive genius, she has a nearly miraculous ability at right-handed shooting, but both these traits will eventually have explanations.

I've never really been able to buy stories whose heroines are supposed to be normal humans and yet can somehow match men twice their size in hand-to-hand combat. Why bother asking for that much suspension of disbelief? When it comes to fighting, God didn't make women equal to men. Samuel Colt did. In fact I'll be throwing in a premise that the whole Morandau clan is considerably stronger than the human average, so Anastasia will be able to fling big ordinary guys over her shoulder if she has to. There will still be lots of people stronger than she is, just not so many who can shoot better.

I have two daughters, so I'm happy to throw another entry on what seems like a fair pile of stories featuring bad-ass heroines. I can't promise that the story will be politically impeccable. In some ways it seems to be taking some traditional turns, that I don't seem to be able to help — that's the story that's come to me, and I could tell a more consistently progressive story but it wouldn't be as good. What I am trying to do is make Anastasia a consistently active protagonist. I intend the story to be such that most of the things that happen, happen because she makes them happen.

So she's a teenager without a shred of angst. The realism of the story is selective.