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.

There’s always a worry when writing an alien invasion story that the aliens will be silly, no matter how hard you try to make them interesting. Alien invasion stories belong to a subgenre with a lot of history and expectation built into it. It’s very well-trod ground, so I kept asking myself what, besides aliens, this story was supposed to be about.

Like a lot of people I’m attracted by the aesthetics of steampunk. It appeals to the anglophile and costumer in me. Also, big unlikely machines, ray guns, and all kinds of weirdness.

Conrad is a big influence in my writing—not his style or technique, but his sense of the moral forces governing our lives—and I have acknowledged that many times by giving my characters and even my stories names out of his work.

I wish I could say I was smart enough to make intentional choices when I write. But the choices actually come from my subconscious as the story is developing.

Norse-Wild West it is indeed; in addition to the small-town decay going on in the Spring, I wanted to highlight how a town can often lock out the world around it, if its concerns are all of itself.

I wrote this story in 1979, when the whole Fermi question was a hot topic and we’d come to realize that the O’Neill colony ideas of that era implied that people might well live in space indefinitely. I just put the two together.