Playboy.com: How did you do the research that led to the intertwining storylines?

Moore: One of the first things we did upon coming up with those names was to think through the logistics of such a story. If we were going to play by the self-invented rules then I felt that the age of the characters should probably relate to the years in which their individual books were published. So we checked out the publication dates for those three books and figured that, by a kind of spurious logic, these dates must be after the events that they're talking about. So we worked out a scenario in which Alice was the oldest of the three women, Dorothy was the youngest and Wendy in between as a woman in middle life, and we figured that the only time that they could co-exist together and still be sexually active would be a time period when Dorothy would not be too young, nor Alice too old. The only time we seemed to find that worked was roughly between 1913 and 1914. As soon as we saw those dates, that more or less told us what the whole story of Lost Girls was about. We realized that this would be something that would give incredible gravity to our pornography.

Playboy.com: In the same way that in a period film the story lines up the characters in a historical context?

Moore: Well, it's just such a great contrast. You've got these three fantasy women from children's fantasy books in this impossibly sumptuous art nouveau hotel on the border of Austria, Germany and Switzerland. We researched the area as well. We found out that there is an island that is actually tropical for a few weeks in the year, even though it's surrounded by snow-peaked mountains. We realized that with all of this sumptuous art nouveau beauty and sexuality and dream-like imagination in the foreground, you really needed something huge and dark in the background for contrast. And we found that Stravinsky's first performance of "Rite of Spring" was in 1913. In many ways it pre-figured the outbreak of the First World War a year later in the reaction that it got from its audience, which was riotous. We realized that we had this event with which we could close the first book. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand -- the Archduke and not the recent British pop band -- would give an important ending to the second volume, which would spin the entire world toward the horror and inevitability of the First World War. The whole of the third book would be this gathering storm with these women trying desperately to finish their story.

Playboy.com: This is reminiscent of Terry Southern's book, Blue Movie, and how Stanley Kubrick, for years, tried to make a serious film about pornography.

Moore: I read Blue Movie back when I was 16. That may have been what actually put the idea into my mind. His parody of Stanley Kubrick trying to make an artful piece of pornography -- almost as if the very idea was ridiculous -- caught my imagination. That probably helped to put the idea into my mind and of course interestingly some of the feminist commentators upon pornography had almost similar ideas. There were a couple of feminists who were opposed to the blanket censorship that other feminists seemed to be proposing. There are a group of feminists against censorship who have been very supportive of Lost Girls. Even Andrea Dworkin -- who was one of the most strenuous opponents of pornography and who referred to it as being a blueprint for rape -- has conceded that, theoretically, a form of benign pornography might be possible. Clearly she didn't expect to ever see it, but she believed that it might be possible. It's from cues like that that we kind of took our encouragement. Theoretically, it should be possible to do pornography that does the job of pornography and yet also has the things that you might expect from regular literature or from regular art -- something that has a plot and characters, something that has nuances and metaphors and fancy French-sounding things. There's no reason that these things should be excluded from a work just because it's about sex.

Playboy.com: If you look back at censorship in book publishing of the 20th century, what was once deemed pornography, obscene or indecent seems very quaint compared to what's even on network television now. Is society ready for Lost Girls?

Moore: At this juncture in human history, we've had approximately 100,000 years to get used to the shock and horror of our own genitalia. All right, I can see it's an upsetting subject. We might need some time to adjust, but we've had these things dangling between our legs for 100,000 years. We've inspected them. We have written treatises upon them. We should be over them by now. This is a normal part of being a human being. The position against this sort of stuff and the outcry against Playboy when that first appeared in the '50s, it's always seen as the end of civilization. If we see a breast or if we see pudenda then Western culture will come crashing down around our ears. We're not supposed to know that such things exist.