The plot of the 'The Curse of the Coral Bride' is loosely based on a story called "The Light of Achernar" that I did for John Pelan's anthology of tales set in Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, 'The Last Continent'. I'd always wanted to design a "dying Earth" of my own, whose inhabitants would know that the end of the world was imminent. Unlike the early fantasy writers (Including CAS) who were content to accept Lord Kelvin's theory that the sun's heat was a by-product of its collapse under the force of its own gravity--which gave it a lifespan of a few million years--I wanted to use more recent estimates of a solar life span in the billions of years. In my far future the Earth's orbit has been altered so that it can circle a much larger primary (a Dyson sphere enclosing a red giant), and the mortal humans populating it are the products of a re-creation by more advanced human-descended species that have long since abandoned the Earth to its fate...thus creating a mystery as to the reason for their continued presence on the doomed planet. 'The Curse of the Coral Bride' is intended as the first of a series whose climactic volume will provide a solution to that mystery as well as an account of the destruction of the Earth.