Fairy tales (the darker and more troubling, the better, I’m afraid) are always creeping in from the edges when I write. I owe a great deal to the folks who write (or write on) fairy tales and fairy tale retellings: Angela Carter, absolutely, and also Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Helen Oyeyemi, Kate Bernheimer. I so dearly admire writing that keeps some sort of lightness or whimsy about it—in fairy tales, these are fabulist settings, mind-bending setups, the turns of phrase.

Ages ago, I’d started a story about werewolves—I was struck by the theme of embracing the things about ourselves we’d rather keep hidden. But the story never really hung together and I abandoned it. But time passed, and it tumbled in my head, and it stuck with some thoughts I’d been having about Little Red Riding Hood. If we’re going with “embracing things we’d rather keep hidden,” there’s a lot to unpack there. Frankly, Angela Carter has already done it quite effectively (hence the call-out at the beginning).

It happened to be something I realized while writing this: that if I was going to make this a story about the conflict between Ellis’s yearning for a soulmate, and the more practical and sensible life he could have known with a human romantic partner, I could not represent a woman as his sole backup option. The implication would have been that this was the only available normalcy, and that was a false and frankly antiquated default.

I am in love with the water. I suspect it shows in a few spots in this tale. I spend my free time traveling to the water. (I’m just back from kayaking an hour ago as I reply to this.) I go to Orkney, the Hebrides, Alaska, SoCal, the bayou. At least three to four of those every year. In June, I was on a boat in Alaska, and in August in SoCal (at the beach and on a boat). In January, I’ll be in the bayou. In June, the Scottish Isles . . . and in September, the Alaskan waters also. Somewhere in there, I’ll be in Mexican waters. And weekly, I’m on the river.

I was also thinking about the aesthetics of sadism and immigration. Our president says he wants to build a “big, beautiful wall” at our border with Mexico because he thinks he will always be on the right side of it. But what will happen to human beings if artificial superintelligence decides to continue the USian project of colonization and displacement? If humanity lasts long enough, then an ASI will eventually emerge, one trained on observations made from human behavior.