I’ve never read a piece of fiction that more perfectly captures the experience of going to a trade convention. What inspired you to write a story set at a con?

Mine is a family that talks about our work with each other and always has been. I have fond memories of being taken along to some trade shows with my dad when I was in the twelve-fourteen age range, to stand at his booth and talk cheerfully about polymers and reverse osmosis and that. (My dad was in industrial environmental water chemistry. If your local factories aren’t polluting the water table with their discharge, thank the people like my dad. If they are . . . continue to thank the people like my dad, they’re the ones trying to fix it.) Making it a gift shop convention is tribute to my late beloved great-aunt, who was Director of Volunteers for Mercy Hospital here in the Twin Cities for years and who got some say in the running of the gift shop as one of the fun parts of that gig. Also—we don’t see enough gift shops in speculative fiction considering how often we see them in real life!

Since this is set at a trade convention, there is a constant parade of new products. Did you have a lot of fun coming up with all of these gizmos and goodies, and did you have a favorite?

I did! I love gizmos and gadgets. I desperately want the float-train for my little cousin who’s going through chemo. He would love that. I also entertained myself mightily with all of the Earth T-shirts, with their slogans all referring to—well, that would be telling. There were actually five to ten more T-shirt slogans that didn’t get used, around the same joke.

Nanites are one of my favorite science fictional inventions. What drew you to them, and how did you come up with this particular flavor of nanite?

I feel like one of the mistakes we see a lot of historically is “Oh, there’s plenty of that, you don’t need to worry about that.” On a space station there isn’t plenty of anything. You have to worry about all of it. But on a planet . . . we make the mistake of thinking that we’re basically different from a space station. We’re not. We’re hurtling through the vacuum with whatever we can manage, and we have to keep environmental parameters within narrow limits or we will suffer the consequences. So when I was thinking of planetsider arrogance, the idea of unlimited supplies came to mind, and from there it was a short hop to nanites.

Another common mistake is “This is just for fun, so it can’t have serious consequences.” Kind of a greatest hits of human error here.

At the heart of the story, there’s a tension between Earth-dwellers and those who don’t live planet-side—it’s a tension that we’ve seen in a number of other works of science fiction, with the Expanse series being one great example. Do you think that if humanity expands its footprint that this kind of tension is likely? And what inspired you to use comedy to explore this kind of difficult relationship?

I do feel like whenever humans have different experiences—so, all the time, right?—we struggle to internalize the experiences that aren’t like ours, and tension is bound to arise; the question is, at what level. If we can have a laugh at ourselves, maybe we can keep the heat turned down far enough that the worst anybody ever gets is annoyed.

Also, Earth people are super annoying. Think of everyone in your life who has ever annoyed you. What do they have in common? They’re all from Earth, right? Ugh, Earth people.

This story is set—invisibly, I think, but I’m the author so I know—in the same universe as several of my other stories that are less humor-forward. Lightspeed reprinted “Blue Ribbon,” originally appearing in Analog—that’s another corner of this universe and one where people are trying to bravely face a massive tragedy. I firmly believe that the universe, at all times, contains an admixture of both, and I’d focused pretty hard on the other side of things—it was time to take a breath and have a laugh with it.

It’s always great to share a new story from you. What are you working on right now? And do you have anything coming up in the near future that we should look forward to?

I’ve just sold another story to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and I have pieces in the works at Analog and Kaleidotrope as well. My current projects include a novel, a sort-of specialized short story thing, and new work through a vertigo arts project that I think will be particularly different and exciting. There’s always something!