“The Final Blow” is the first-ever story in my “The Gods Have Gone” universe. As a fan of fantasy, I’ve always wanted to create a fantasy setting where there is no metal. Development of metal opens up the inevitability of advanced technical development, so what kind of stories could be told in a setting without metal? I’ve played with this concept in my “New World” mythos, which consists of two stories (“Victim with a Capital V” and “Throwdown,” which are in the anthologies Unfettered II and Unfettered III, respectively). Those stories are set in our world, but one set 2,000 years after bioengineered bacteria destroy all metal.

The inspiration for the spider drones came from the artist Louise Bourgeois, who did a series of spider sculptures in bronze and steel. Her spiders are terrifying, dynamic and futuristic. They are inert but very much alive and the experience of viewing them at SFMOMA changed me. The spider, to me, is industrious and beautiful. From a biomechanics perspective, there is no piece of man-made technology that approaches its sophistication. I imagine the singularity as occurring in a place where nature and technology are indistinguishable.

I’ve had this image in my head for a long time—two old friends, moon colonists and blue-collar workers, whacking golf balls off a lunar escarpment and jawing about the first time anyone (Alan Shepard, Apollo Astronaut) ever teed off on the moon. I’m not particularly a golf fan, but the image was so compelling I was determined to build a story around it. The second inspiration was decidedly less fun—the heart-wrenching experience of watching my mother-in-law slowly decline with dementia over a period of about fifteen years.

I have a word quota, best described as, “If I get 1000 words down, I did not fail today.” I try to get substantially more done, and when zooming along on a project that’s going well, I manage two or three or four times that much. In practice, this does not mean I produce the equivalent amount in publishable fiction, as a substantial number of stories trail off and must be abandoned, and some, inevitably, don’t find anybody who loves them.