I think [power armor/mecha is] just damn cool to look at. It’s raw power built to smash and blow things up. There’s an aesthetic appeal, too, and a lot of variation on how that can come about—either more brute, more graceful, or more robotic in appearance. The idea that you can add extensions to your own body, in a way, and become an arsenal is probably attractive to people on all sorts of levels. There’s that idea of indestructability.

That which any given person finds exotic or sexually unconventional, that’s not something that can be nailed down with a straightforward answer. These are things determined by the sum total of our life experiences, formative influences, particular cultures, etc. It so happens that I find cyborgs sexy, though I have no idea why. There’s a reason, or reasons, I’m certain, I just don’t dwell on what they might be. I sit down to write a story like this and I’m following unconscious impulse as much as conscious intention.

How do chance and habit and the laws of nature play out on a grand scale? The origins of uncertainty in the macroscopic and microscopic realms are actually quite different, but in this story I’ve messed with that quite deliberately. I’ve also had to think about how we do science in the mundane world, including the unfortunate separation between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures,” the humanities and the sciences. I wanted to come up with imaginative alternatives—because it is both important and interesting to think about alternatives for things we take for granted.

The story came entirely from the first image: wondering how cats do that thing where they seem to edit reality and retroactively insert themselves in your lap after you’ve repeatedly tried to keep them out of it.

I’m drawn to characters with imperfect knowledge of events, because they seem real to me. This is the human condition. We all have to operate daily without the data needed and all of our lives are severely impacted by events we don’t witness and are powerless to affect. By the ends of my stories, the reader knows at least as much as my narrator knows and sometimes more; if I know more than the narrator, then I mean for the reader to know that, too. Whatever questions remain in the story are questions for which I don’t have the answers.

Ah, science fiction—how I doted on the stuff from exuberant boyhood into sullen post-adolescence, a span of time encompassing Captain Video and Again, Dangerous Visions. In somewhat less general terms, between the ages of ten and about twenty-eight, I described an arc through Jules Verne (admittedly, a tough go at age ten), H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Philip José Farmer, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Barry Malzberg: ontogeny roughly recapitulating phylogeny.

A lot of my fiction is a retelling of something or other, because I have serious problems with the philosophical underpinnings of a lot of stories, and it often seems to me that the best way to answer them is to rewrite them in a way that lays bare the absurdity.

We are technological creatures, and use the products of our scientific discoveries for various ends. Sometimes the results are predictable; often, they are not. Biotech is a strong presence in our lives today. As our scientific and engineering abilities become ever more finely honed, targeted biotech applications will become ubiquitous, with anticipated and unanticipated results.

We so often punish the one who is different in our societies. Perhaps it’s a leftover of our “mass production” mentality from the WWII years, or a more primitive “tribal” mentality, but we are not happy with someone who does not fit the specified mold, who marches to a drummer that the rest of us can’t hear. We are not tolerant of “different,” and I think it’s one of the biggest weaknesses we face as a race—that inability to value the unique.

I think one of my favorite things about “Alarms” is that Cara doesn’t even recognize her superpower when she gets it. That may be the way with all of us. We may have superpowers we don’t even recognize as such.