One book I read as a kid claimed that when knights traveled east to attack Jerusalem during the Crusades, they sometimes got so hot that their sweat filled up their armor, drowning them. That was still fresh in my mind, so when John suggested I write a power armor story, I got the idea of a critical flaw in someone’s otherwise invincible armor that would cause the suit to fill with fluid, drowning them.

I’m happy to put things out on the street, give them away, whatever, because they’re only things. My mother came from a large family that lived in a great big house, and no matter where we lived, she always spoke of that as “home.” She and her sisters fought bitterly for possession of certain treasured objects.

I went for a walk recently through an unfamiliar neighborhood, and I thought of Amiyachi and Aihuowu. Even just a short distance away people live very differently than I do, and despite being neighbors we don’t know anything of each other. Was there an experience like that for you, before you wrote about Amiyachi and Aihuowu or after? Do you think that there are summer and winter people, or neighbors who live on different time?

So the idea came first, and the science was only secondary. The truth is, apart from the hard SF writers, much of what we call science fiction is fantasy. As far as we know, Faster Than Light travel is impossible, hyperspace is pure speculation, and traveling through a black hole will only get you squashed. (This holds with my current theory that physicists are fiction writers with calculators.) So the “magnetic field disaster” of my story is a device used to give credibility to a fancy.

This story is set in my far-future space-opera-ish Ten Thousand Worlds, a civilization extending up and down our arm of the galaxy. I’ve probably written close to a million words in various novels and short stories set in this universe, all of them at about the time that the big change from rationalism to sympathetic association (magic) is about to happen. Readers who find the setting interesting might visit my webpage and read the excerpts from other works set on Old Earth under the Archonate, as well as others of the Ten Thousand Worlds.

I got the idea for the short story after talking with my husband about a novel idea I had involving a lot of elements on androids. I had been thinking of Philip K. Dick—I always felt that the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? were fascinating, and the Blade Runner interpretations of them were equally intriguing. All these elements combined to spark the story—and another story, a book which I recently sold to Penguin/Razorbill. The short story is in no way similar to the novel I’m writing, but both were written with the same spark of inspiration.

Technology is what makes us super. Every single one of us. Smartphones put us not just in contact with other people anywhere, anywhen, and give us the ability to socially interact, but also give us access to almost any piece of human knowledge. That’s a superpower. We can’t fly, but we have machines that can, and serve you a cocktail while you’re hurtling across the sky. Superhero stories are always about an aristocracy (like vampire stories)—an elite with special abilities and agency: Technology is the great leveller. All of us can have something like that power. As Syndrome says in The Incredibles, “When everyone’s super, no one is.”

Science fiction embraces seduction. Alice Bradley Sheldon, writing under the pen name of James Tiptree, Jr. is adept at taking on this concept. With “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side,” first contact is mystical and mysterious. Every action of the Sirians is perceived as sexualized, even when the actions remain normal to the aliens. This is the same kind of enticement and curiosity that drives men and women to pursue ideas and fantastical dreams. At the same time, as a woman writing in a vastly patriarchal field, Sheldon described the plight of women in science fiction, and how essential they would be to the field.

So it is with every hero’s quest—there is a moment when the hero has an opportunity to choose ease and tranquility, where the object is obscured from view, where the sails go slack and resolve fades. And they may choose to give up and give in and give way to bliss and sweetness and sleep—and it is perilous. The Insect is fragile and vulnerable in his spirit, but he is in his body, too. And it was important show that.

This story has a complicated genesis. The short answer is that it’s a tie-in to my new novel, Twinmaker. I’ve been writing a bunch of these stories to explore aspects of the world and the main characters (including “The Missing Metatarsals” and “Face Value,” also published by Lightspeed). “Hobbyist” sprang in part from speculation regarding how death from illness is treated in a post-scarcity society. It would be easy to regard it as a vile injustice, but modern humans have always had a nuanced relationship with mortality, and that’s something I was keen to look into.