This is a story about desolation. About emptiness. And the way to highlight that is to make every little sound and every nagging thought as loud as thunder. Absolute silence isn’t that interesting; anyone can plug their ears. What’s interesting is a world where your full senses are alert, but there is very little there to tickle them. It’s also the challenge as a writer to make a very constrained set come alive. You don’t have weather and traffic and wildlife to paint your world with. This means highlighting what little you do have.

We talk about happy endings and tragic endings and such, but the fact is that stories don’t really end, short of the heat death of the universe. There’s always something that comes next, if there’s anyone left standing. I’ll write more about those characters or that world if the stories show themselves, but as often as not it’s best left to the reader’s imagination.

I’m not sure when I consciously realized the theme that seemed to run through shows or movies about destroying the robots/androids, or how they were an antagonistic force that had to be defeated. It always made me sad or frustrated. The way robots and androids and cyborgs can appear so very human, yet be different, or at least seen as different by the human characters, well . . . that clicked for me on a fundamental level.

In recent years there’s been a lot of good conversation about representation in adventure fantasy. One of my favorite critiques has been a response to people who claim erroneously that the presence of nonwhites and combatant women in medieval Europe isn’t “plausible.”

I wanted this story to have a very accessible point of view character—someone we could recognize and empathize with whether they were male, female, or other. Choosing the right narrator—and right distance from that narrator, whether it’s first person, third person, close third person, or omniscient—changes the overall emotional effect of the story, so I think that’s key.

A news story I saw about being able to print a gun with a 3D printer [was the seed for the story]. I just didn’t realize it would happen for some reason, even though it was obvious that we’d end up being able to print guns down the line.

Most of my story ideas come from mashing together whatever I’ve got in my head, and sometimes the things in my head are close to home. Around the time I was drafting this story, there was a rockslide at Snoqualmie Pass. That particular slide involved relatively small rocks, but in the past there have been rockslides involving boulders the size of cars.