In the case of stories like “Tongue,” I hope to shock readers by presenting a real world issue that’s so common, so routine, and yet so horrific, that it hopefully makes supernatural horrors pale in comparison. At the same time, “Tongue” is a science fiction story, because the technology that exists to make Revathi possible (in the form she is when the story opens) doesn’t actually exist yet. It’s an attempt to write SF that’s about real world problems, as against “first world” problems like most SF seems to be historically.

But what I was thinking about when writing “How To Find A Portal” was suicide. I had been struggling with depression and suicidal ideation for a while and was having trouble figuring out how to make this world feel like enough to keep me here. Suicide seemed as attractive to me as any portal would be, a path to another life maybe or at least the absence of my current life. Because suicide is such a scary topic for many people, the attractiveness of suicide is so rarely acknowledged.

I had the title written in my notebook for a long time. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it. Who were the dead boys? How can the dead send someone a mix tape? Was that literal or metaphorical or something else entirely? When I started noodling around with band names, I knew the story would deal with sound and perception, and that was when a friend led me to the idea of images embedded into songs. Which, on its own, sounds like fiction, but it’s something bands have actually done in our world.

Adam-Troy excels at the kind of moral complexity you’re talking about, and at showing how something that appears fantastic may in fact be horrendous upon reflection (see, for example, his recent kicker of a story, “James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter” in the May issue of Lightspeed). I think we were both on the same page about Su’s character from the start and didn’t feel the need to change it much from draft to draft.

Personally, I find the way that legal matters infest our daily existences utterly depressing. At the moment, thanks to a recent spell in the hospital (congestive heart failure, since you ask), I’m dealing—or, rather, my superbly patient wife is dealing—with bureaucracy gone mad in the form of the American healthcare system, so I imagine that if I were to rewrite “The Law of Conservation of Data” today, this preoccupation would show through even more clearly.