Christopher Nolan is a master storyteller. His movies deploy plot, theme, and character with a finesse few other directors in Hollywood are capable of. And his ambition… Well, let’s just say that after seeing Interstellar, it’s easy to walk away feeling like other blockbuster filmmakers aren’t even trying. We’re thrilled to announce that Mr. Nolan is now bringing these formidable talents to WIRED as special guest editor of our December issue.

Our collaboration began a few months ago, when we began discussing what kind of issue he would build. His latest film is solidly in the science fiction genre, but we looked for themes from his entire career. We wanted to draw from everything from Memento and The Prestige to The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception. But most of all, we wanted to give him license to create a magazine version of the kind of rich, detailed, and complex worlds he builds for his films. We wanted something that would reward scrutiny and attention to detail. We wanted something readers would want to come back to again and again, the way that we all love to go back and study his films.

One proclivity we noted early on is Nolan’s tendency to play with time: To jump around in a nonlinear narrative, or even, as is the case in both Inception and Interstellar, to have characters and settings that move at different speeds. He is equally interested in perception—how the viewpoint of a character shapes what that character is capable of, and how differing viewpoints can create tension and drama.

But talking with Nolan, one other thing that became abundantly clear is his formidable intellectual curiosity, which ranges from history to mathematics to physics—he even refers to the structure and rule sets of his films as their “geometry.” (Perhaps it’s just what happens after hanging out a bit too long with famed Astrophysicist Kip Thorne talking about black holes.) Our conversations ranged from the famous 1886 book Flatland, about life in a two-dimensional world, to the reasons nothing can travel faster than light. And we knew we had something.

So our entire December issue will be dedicated to the theme Time, Space, and Multiple Dimensions, directed by Mr. Nolan. We believe its innovative structure is something no magazine has tried before. Further, we are also announcing that next week will be Christopher Nolan week on WIRED.com. We promise some truly mind-warping stories from this collaboration. But for now that’s all you get—sorry, we don’t do spoilers.