When I went to the Odyssey Writing Workshop, one of the things we talked about was that you can have a story that has a normal frog in a strange garden or you can have a strange frog in a normal garden, but it’s almost impossible to have a strange frog in a strange garden, because there’s nothing there to ground the reader. And that’s what story tropes do—they ground readers in the familiar, and let the author introduce strangeness without confusion.

It’s a self-contained tale of what happens when Zircon Border, a robot tasked with security at a hotel in downtown Chicago, asks his friend Barry Simcoe for help tracking down and disabling a sixty-ton killer robot hiding in a sunken shipwreck in Lake Michigan. It’s sort of a Lethal Weapon buddy comedy, if the Mel Gibson character were a robot. In fact, I wanted to title it “Sixty-Ton Killer Robot,” but John Joseph Adams wouldn’t let me, because he’s all serious and editor-y.

Humor is so difficult to pull off, because different people have different definitions! My first professional story, “The Wanderers,” is a dark humor story, and when it was first published, I read this review that said it was “trying too hard to be clever.” I laughed about that and said to my friends, “I am clever! I wasn’t just trying!” But the truth is some people will think you’re clever and others won’t.

I was just concluding work on my doctoral dissertation as I wrote the story, and a big component of what I was doing had to do with theories of physical space and how people exist in those spaces, using Foucault’s writing from The Order of Things in particular. When something like that is taking up that much real estate in your brain, it’s going to come out in lots of ways you maybe didn’t anticipate.