My first story, “Lunchbox”, Analog, May ’72, was accepted my fourth day in the US Army (a draftee) in October 1970. I got to enjoy the sale about four minutes after mail call ’til I had to go back to doing pushups. I realized, the eighteen months I was in the Army, that if there was an East Coast Monster Emergency, I would be one of the guys sent out to stop the Rhodosaurus (or whatever).

The idea came to me many years ago, after rereading one of my favorite stories, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges story is about a secret society that creates the encyclopedia of an imaginary world, Tlön. Eventually, items from that world begin appearing in ours. Archaeologists start finding artifacts from Tlön. The story is about how imagination creates reality.

Stories let us simplify an issue so that we can see the essence of it. Science fiction lets us get closer to actual struggle by letting us find new contexts for telling stories so we can see them from new angles.

The structure was complicated because Kickstarters have so many moving parts, and there are so many decisions to be made: Do I put the updates in chronological order, or backwards like they appear on the site? … Because a Kickstarter page is so visual, I had to try and figure out the most natural and dramatically appropriate order in which to present these sections.

This is not only anti-corporate ranting. It happens to be a function of the human animal that when people are given power over you, whether as employers or governments or even as condo associations or family members or lovers, they continue to test the limits of that power until you say, “No, that’s all you get, no more, the line is drawn here.”

To me, clones are nothing more than glorified offspring—they have identical genes, but they’re shaped by their experiences just as we were shaped by ours. My clone, in a different environment, would be very different person. The question I always asked myself was: Who are these people who are so eager to clone themselves?

I’m fascinated by the idea of Distributed Arbitrage and the forecasting, and I know I’m not done with Spencer or Megan. I’m not sure what it’s going to look like, but I think I’ve got the beginnings of a novel in me. And at the end of the day, I want to hear that William Gibson read my book and liked it.

I’m fascinated by the concept of AI and—if we ever do create sentient machines—where the line will be drawn between human and machine. I don’t think it will be human goodness that will set us apart from computer brains, but rather the dark side of human nature: our neuroses, our crimes of passion.

I think of the story as a response to Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, and to similar science fiction of the era. A lot of that fiction reflects the paranoia of privilege—fear of a more (theoretically) egalitarian political system like communism, fear of external threats because the straight white men of the time simply assumed they would continue to dominate women and people of color within their own societies, and so on.

I spent a lot of time at the aquarium! I love the ocean. The mysteries of the deep sea are one of my favorite things to explore when I get bored. So I really just used several years of cumulative research, all in the same place.