Sure—you could use direct neural marketing to sell sports cars. But in a lot of ways it’s actually creepier and more interesting when it’s so pervasive that it’s being used to sell something as commonplace as a bottle of water.

I didn’t have any idea where I was going. There was just something about a girl with feathers for hair. I kept writing about her as “the girl with feathered hair” until I realized what that actually meant.

I’m an electrical engineer, and I occasionally work building hardware for neuroscience labs, … One day a co-worker and I were having a conversation about what we were jokingly referring to as “brain DJs,” the idea being that you’d take, say, EEG recordings of somebody who was in a deep meditative state (or tripping, or whatever), and then induce somebody else to match their “brain waves” using magnetic stimulation (or flashing lights, or whatever).

Every person may experience many changes in one’s life. You are willing to change yet still you may feel a bit uneasy about what may come after the change. Personally speaking, as a young writer who felt a bit bored about my old way of writing, I wanted to try something new and I was not afraid at that moment. But a good story should be the story of everyone, a story which could touch everyone. So I needed to reveal the other half of humanity: the other half that is afraid of what lies ahead.

The various elemental species revealed themselves to me one by one, at fairly long intervals. They didn’t come as stories. They came pretty much as they are in “Elementals.” Maybe at another period of my life I’d have used one or another of them in a conventional plotted story, but at this point, that seemed unnecessary. Pointing out their existence and characteristics was enough.

It wasn’t the world that appealed to me—in my head it’s just our world, a few years from now, except that a benevolent alien showed up and tried to teach us some things about engineering. My draw was Sharon, as somebody whose emotional life is out of sync with the emotional life she’s expected to have. We seem to be going through a bit of a cultural fetish for the clinically emotionally aberrant—you can’t turn around without finding Asperger’s or psychopathy or other things pop culture interprets as abnormal on that front.