We had a blast yesterday at the Three Parts Dead ask me anything event—even with the extremely odd reddit outage that occurred in the middle & broke up our momentum. The Craft is too powerful for the modern internet! Sam Altman needs to summon more demons. Or fewer demons. On second thought, let’s not give Sam Altman any more ideas. Thanks to all readers who dropped by and participated—it was great to talk to you all and I look forward to doing it again next month, when Two Serpents Rise is up for the Craft Countdown! You can read the whole AMA here, but I thought I’d pick out a few of the longer answers for your reading pleasure.

TyGuy_8 asks: In returning to Three Parts Dead I was surprised how much of the lore that is a greater focus in later books is established here. How much of the world did you have built out before you started writing?

Great question. I knew a lot and if I did my job right, I didn't know as much as it seemed. I had a sense of how dense I wanted the world to be or seem—a place reminiscent of our Earth, where every historical moment and movement and situation means many different things to many different people even if there is broad agreement on the facts. So I created a very thick world at the focus of the story (AC, Kos, Tara, Ms. Kevarian, etc), and suggested a lot around the edges.

It's kind of like playing Go—I've used this analogy before—where you spend the opening game placing stones around the board in a structure that can develop in many ways depending on the demands of the later game. (At least that's my understanding of it, I'm not very good at Go!) When I turned to other parts of the world in later books, I used that loose structure as a framework to build around, knowing that I had to be consistent with—and fit in with—previous books.

I did know the broad arc of world history in the last two hundred years—the God Wars and the post-War order. I knew about Gerhardt, and I knew that the apocalypse of the God Wars had not been evenly distributed. I had a general sense of the thematic conflicts & I knew that when I explored them more deeply, any apparent consistency within a side would decompose into a bunch of internal factions with their own conflicts and beliefs. I knew about the silhouettes of Temoc and Ms. Kevarian and Caleb and the King in Red, though of course I hadn't met them yet.

Another way to think about it: our eyes only have maximum full-color resolution, I'm told, in an area about the size of a quarter held at arm's length. Peripheral vision is apparently largely monochrome? But our eyes move around a lot and our brain knits that data into a seemingly full-color sense of the world. That's how I try to write!

Gnopie asks: The Craft Sequence world largely does not have anything comparable to cell phones or email in widespread, casual use (I know there are nightmare telegraphs used by Craftspeople for business and people who share a god can communicate via prayer but these don’t seem widespread). How does this impact social life in the world of the Craft? How does one typically make plans with friends or schedule dates in Alt Columb? Is it different in Dresidiel Lex or other non-theist settings?

That's a great question, and the lack of the mobile internet has become one of the big differences between IT (and social life) in the Sequence and the increasingly-unreal "real" world. In 2008, the iPhone was one year old, and Facebook was 3 years old. I got my first US cell phone in 2005. I made the nightmare telegraph (and postal systems) a more developed part of the world as the Sequence went on, but I couldn't quite see my way clear to writing the book where everyone gets an iPhone. Everyday people in the Sequence communicate through developed local post systems (rat couriers, for example), the nightmare telegraph (by paying NT firms, not by navigating the system themselves), or the old-fashioned way, by wandering around and looking for folks. And yes, it does differ wildly from city to city. In DL there are more courier rats and golems; in theist settings you can use priests or shrines to post prayers to other faithful.

maratai asks: Hello, Max! Looking forward looking forward. What playlists (if any) did you have while writing this? Unless you prefer writing NOT to music, in which case disregard.

Did you have any keystone texts (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, cereal box ad copy...) that inspired you, for good or ill, while coming up with the world?

Playlists! Love it.

I used to write with music 100% of the time—I used to write in coffee shops every day & the music helped me not eavesdrop & kept me in rhythm. When I work in my own office (most of the time these days, b/w Covid and parenting) music can sometimes feel a bit much.

Most of Three Parts Dead was written (and rewritten) to Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet's soundtrack for The Fountain, and still when I get to a Craft Sequence climax I'm likely to put "Finish It" on repeat. It's the whole vibe. Beyond that I've made a lot of writing playlists but the most enduring one is made up of a bunch of old OC Remix and game / anime soundtracks. Halo, Bastion, Cowboy Bebop, Hellsing, Mass Effect, Transistor, Tron: Legacy, Hades, Sword & Sworcery. Working on Last Exit I spent a lot of time with Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts and Together.

Keystone texts: oh, man, this is a fun one. Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America was a big one. Seeing Like a State is another. David Graeber's Debt I read after the Sequence had achieved most of its form but it was confirmatory. Terry Pratchett, Roger Zelazny, Dorothy Dunnett, Robin McKinley, Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game; I didn't read Sarah Caudwell until I was working on Wicked Problems but she sort of snuck time-traveler style back into my DNA. FFVI, Crono Trigger. Order of the Stick. I could go on, and on, and on.

BravoLimaPoppa asks: u/MaxGladstone ok, 3PD is an urban fantasy, a novel take on things, a critique of capitalism and many other things, but how did you deal with making it a murder mystery? And do you feel like you played fair with the readers in giving them a chance to figure out who dunnit?

Murder mysteries are really hard to structure in some ways but in one way they're kind of easy: the writer (who wants to know what happens) is in the same place as the detective (who wants to know what happened/is going on). So you can explore a setting or a set of characters or even a mood with a detective, and then ask yourself, as a writer, what explanation fits the facts. The trick with murder mysteries in fantasy, though, is that the readers of fantasy don't know the rules of your particular world, so it's harder to play fair. I tried my best—in general, where the Craft books act like murder mysteries, I lean more into innovative approaches to motive and opportunity, since innovations of 'method' can be reduced to 'magic.' But a proper, genre-savvy mystery reader would likely figure out 3PD simply because there aren't enough compelling alternative suspects.

And—to shift gears rather abruptly. My old stomping grounds in Somerville, MA have been in the national news recently for truly awful reasons: the abduction of a college student by ICE in retaliation, it appears, for an op-ed. This is America, 2025. We must all stay vigilant, and stand up in what ways we can. Massachusetts folks, I haven’t had a chance to look into it deeply but I have heard that lucemass.org is a good resource if you’re looking for ways to help protect yourself or your neighbors.

Take care of one another, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.