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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 for the grittiness of the setting, all you have to do is look to our own world to see the growing gap between the rich and poor.

There are very few stories about older people in our field, or any other, for that matter. Most of the time, older people show up as disapproving parents or other authority figures.