“Focus” appeared in the May/June 2016 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It was my second story in Analog in the last six months (the previous one having appeared in the December 2016 issue). The simplest way to sum it up is to say that it’s a story about how companies parasitize everything—or, rather, convince us to allow them to parasitize everything to better serve their ends. The story is set in Vietnam—in Saigon and a South Korean-run factory in an industrial complex in nearby Bình Dương Province. While my wife and I were in Vietnam in May 2014, there …

My short story “Prodigal” appeared in the December 2016 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It was, in fact, honored as being the cover story , with cover art to match: the first time a story of mine was honored in this way. “Prodigal” is a story with a long history. I originally drafted it at Clarion West during the summer of 2006, essentially on a dare by my classmate Ben Burgis. Some of the scientific groundwork in this story was actually laid in a novella I wrote even farther back, in 2001, titled “With My Mouth.” (I know, I know, the …

“The Incursus, by Asimov-NN#71” appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Big Echo. This story was written in Saigon one afternoon when I asked myself what an AI would think about the Turing test, and when I’d just finished reading Stanislaw Lem’s wonderful A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of reviews for nonexistent books. I think Lem’s an underappreciated giant, and one of these days I’m going to sit down and read every one of his books that’s available in English. As for the subject of the story: personally, I don’t think the Turing test is particularly useful as a metric for anything: sociopaths …

“ἱερὸς γάμος” [Hieros Gamos] was published in Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis, which was edited by Scott R. Jones and published in May 2016 by Martian Migraine Press. It’s basically the origin story for the leader of a cult worshipping an unnamed entity from some forgotten corner of the Cthulhu Mythos, one residing at the site of the temple of the old cult of Eleusis. (Because, yes, the original Eleusis cult actually worshipped it.) Believe it or not, this story was inspired by my studies of Ezra Pound’s massive poem titled The Cantos, which contains many references to the occult; among them, the fixation Pound …

“The Spurned Bride’s Tears, Centuries Old, in the Rain” appeared in issue 5 of Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, a wonderful publication out of Singapore. During the winter of 2010, I spent approximately two months in Indonesia (with much of that time spent in Depok, an exurb of Jakarta), where my then-girlfriend—now my wife—was studying Bahasa Indonesia, the official national language of the country. Indonesia’s not an easy place to be, at times: Jakarta’s traffic is pure insanity, and I got the worsst food poisoning of my life there. But the place had a powerful effect on me: rereading …

“The Return of Sarnath” was published in the original anthology Cthulhu Fhtagn! Weird Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Ross Lockhart and published by Word Horde on 15 August 2015. (It’s available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, or at the website of the publisher, Word Horde.) As with “Of Melei, of Ulthar”—a story to which this one is inextricably linked—this story is set in a version of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands setting, albeit one that is far in the future of the Lovecraft wrote about. Specifically, the setting is a future Dreamlands that has changed and progressed, as any world would, over such a long …