The stories were commissioned to run on Eileen Gunn's The Infinite Matrix[1] but were published in the Sci Fiction section of SciFi.com, between 2001 and 2003.

[2] The stories were published as they were written, about which Swanwick said, "It made the sequence into a kind of performance art, something akin to being a trapeze artist, which is a possibility not normally open to a writer.

[4] In 2009, Swanwick posted the stories on a weblog dedicated to the purpose.

[5] The theme of each story in the collection is inspired by the element it is named after.

The book also includes an afterword by the author, and a foreword by Theodore Gray who was awarded the IgNobel Prize for Chemistry in 2002.