Any story based in something fantastical, whether it’s superheroes or sword-and-sorcery, needs a human element the reader can latch on to emotionally. I am a huge history buff and read on that subject widely, and I especially love New York City history, where I’ve lived for two decades, so you manage to just pick up details that you can then deploy in a natural way in fiction that seems organic.

I think the technology is at the point where people can readily log everything they do, if they want to, but it’s not really mainstream yet. There’s no killer app, if I still can use that term without sounding facile. I like the idea of memory aids—and, going even deeper back in time, full-blown nostalgia engines—but I’m not going to do it myself if it takes any effort at all.

I’ve always been drawn to genre mash-ups, I think, because they’re a way to honor traditional tropes and yet cast them in a new light, to essentially play tropes off against one another. For me, the western has always been one of the most adaptable—it works well with fantasy, horror, or even science fiction. For me personally, there’s just something about many of those western tropes that appeals to me.

I was honestly surprised the first time someone asked me what crimes the prisoners in “Deep End” had committed and then wondered why I hadn’t named these offences. Where I come from, imprisonment is largely a given for huge percentages of the population. Whatever one has done doesn’t matter much—punishment is based more on WHO ONE IS.

A midrash is a story created about characters or events of the Bible, sort of filling in gaps in the text with creative imagination. The original rabbis considered these divinely revealed, and the stories were usually pious. I prefer a modern sensibility and ideas that challenge traditional pieties.

We live in a society that fetishizes military hardware. It’s on movie posters, in our games, our bestselling books. There are discussion forums full of people arguing whether this plane could outfight that one. And I totally understand this: I think it’s the same psychological engine that brings people into Pokémon, or bird watching, or sports.

As a lover of horror fiction, I’ve always said that fear is the strongest human emotion, but it’s not. Grief is. If you ever felt lovesick, you know what I mean. When it happened to me, I curled up on the couch literally for weeks.

The idea that robots don’t feel emotions is even older than the word “robot”; Tik-Tok, the mechanical man of Baum’s Oz, predates Čapek’s work by many years, and Tik-Tok was described as being incapable of emotion. I think it might be because we associate the coldness of metal with emotional coldness; I’d bet that the earliest stories of rag dolls coming to life didn’t portray them as being unemotional. I don’t think the characters in “Exhalation” behave in a particularly robotic manner.

I began doing a series of stories set at the end of planet Earth, a kind of a slow decline, for a book called Sunfall. And the story of Paris, which is one of Europe’s oldest cities, dating back to old Lutetia, and its relationship to the Seine, and the melancholy of a lot of French literature, conjured a city enclosed, many-tiered, in which the Seine cascades as a waterfall. I then saw one lone figure standing poised for self-destruction on that brink.

My friend Pancha loves to read about plagues, natural disasters, and historical events like the Donner Party—basically, anything about extreme survival situations. We always joke that she’d be the best person to have on hand in a global-scale disaster, because she knows all the ways people can die. But she also has severe fibromyalgia. I wanted to write about a character like that surviving in a post-apocalyptic world through knowledge.