I also did the sorts of worldbuilding exercises that I usually do when writing a novel. I spent time looking at maps of China, and using street-view to spend time going down roads.[10] (The township of Maxi, where much of the book is set, is a real place.) I generated random dates and checked the weather. I looked at budgets, salaries, import/export flows (especially GPUs), population densities, consumption trends, and other statistics, running the numbers to get a feel for how fast and how big various things are or would be.
have you written elsewhere about this process?
Nope. If you have specific questions I’d be happy to answer them.