“Listeners to my podcast heard me read this story, After the Siege, as it was written, shortly after returning home from a family trip to St Petersburg. My grandmother was born there, back when it was Leningrad, and she lived through the Siege of Leningrad as a little girl. She’d never talked to us about those years, but then, walking through Petersburg, she opened up and the stories came pouring out, stories that scared and appalled me. After the Siege is a science fictional re-telling of those stories, with much artistic license.”

“Printcrime came out of a discussion I had with a friend who’d been to hear a spokesman for the British recording industry talk about the future of “intellectual property.” The record exec opined the recording industry’s great and hysterical spasm would form the template for a never-ending series of spasms as 3D printers, fabricators and rapid prototypers laid waste to every industry that relied on trademarks or patents. My friend thought that, as kinky as this was, it did show a fair amount of foresight, coming as it did from the notoriously technosqueamish record industry. I was less impressed. It’s almost certainly true that control over the production of trademarked and patented objects will diminish over the coming years of object-on-demand printing, but to focus on 3D printers’ impact on trademarks is a stupendously weird idea. It’s as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. It’s true, as far as it goes, but it’s so tunnel-visioned as to be practically blind. When Nature magazine asked me if I’d write a short-short story for their back-page, I told them I’d do it, then went home, sat down on the bed and banged this one out. They bought it the next morning, and we were in business.”

In spring 2004, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf’s classic narratives.

The story is set in the type of police state needed to ensure that only one company is allowed to make robots, and only one type of robot is allowed.

The story follows single Father detective Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg while he tries to track down his missing teenage daughter. The detective is a bit of an outcast because his wife defected to Eurasia, a rival Superpower.”

~ Wikipedia