Lovecraft’s dexterous blending of science fiction and horror was certainly an inspiration for this story, but I can’t claim to produce anything near his level of cosmic dread.

As best I can remember, I thought at some point, “Wouldn’t it be cool to write a Lovecraftian police procedural?” and it was all downhill from there.

I borrowed the structure from J.G. Ballard’s condensed novels and Bruce Sterling’s “Twenty Evocations,” and strung as many ideas as I could on to the rise and fall of a corporate drone in the biohacking trade.

The type of fantasy that I most enjoy is a fantasy of revelation, a lifting of the veil, much more than a literature of escape. I think we are all living a big dream called reality.

For me, the characters always come first. I sort of inhabit them, and it’s natural that they then move through successive scenes, whether seasonal or not.

I figure if you can’t say what drives people absolutely crazy about your point-of-view character, you probably haven’t nailed their voice yet.

When I was a kid, my grandparents and doctors made me drink a lot of “bitter soup” whenever I got sick, so that part required no research at all. But to write this story, I had to study some of the theories behind the bitter soups.

I had actually read some article once in a magazine that said women responded more to men who had symmetrical faces, which just seemed bizarre and awfully hard to track.