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.

I’m the sort of person who can easily accidentally vanish into writing for weekends at a time, and never manage to see the sun. I’d say the major difference between me and Maureen is that I really try to avoid falling into that mode unless I have a project to finish. For her, it’s her default mode and pretty much her entire mechanism for coping with the world.

I try to write about serious things with a slightly comic bent. I have to keep reminding myself that there’s a thin line between ironic twists and the descent into buffoonery. Then I have to remind myself to watch for that line and stay on the right side of it.

The word selfie is pretty well known now, thanks to Ellen DeGeneres and the Oscars, but it was relatively new to me until six months ago. I tried to push that word to its logical extension: another self, walking around on a temporary lease for a specified purpose. If I had a selfie, I’d send her off to grade college essays all day while I wrote the great American novel in coffee shops.

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.