This one was a long time in the making. I'm not sure why, but it took a lot more revisions and editing to get right, or at least get it to a point that I was satisfied with. The backstory of the setting is more complex than anything I've written before, I guess, and the tone was tricky to pin down. I'd recently read Cormac McCarthy's The Road when I started it, and extremely distinctive tone of that was initially an influence, though I think that the final product ended up shaking most of that off.
Much of it, of course, is also similar to my earlier story The Adventures of Tesla, albeit in a much more serious tone. There's just something about grotesque machinery buried deep in the earth that appeals to me, I guess. I'm just that kind of guy.