I first read this story after the furor and the fire, after it was taken down, after all the apologies. I read this story in the quietest corner of McCarthy’s Bar, as a cisgender bisexual man who, in my wife’s words, “butches pretty hard,” watching the drunken interplay of a cross-section of San Luis Obispo dance their dance of sex and gender at one another.
And as I sipped my Guinness, scrolling down my phone, I fell into Barb’s story.
Barb is one of the two biological components of a Boeing AH-70 Apache Mystic. “America names its helicopters for the people it destroyed,” says the career soldier, with only tarnished patriotism. Barb and Axis, the gunner, fly across a Mojave Desert occupied by a hostile credit union to blow up a school in the California valley. They’re spotted by enemy craft, and hunted across the desert. That’s the story.
The real story is in Barb’s asides, on gender, on patriotism, on how the war came and why we fight. As an attack helicopter, Barb’s views on gender, on her past life as high-femme Seo Ji Hee and on performing and being an attack helicopter, on where gender comes from and what functions it serves the individual and the human race as a whole…
…isn’t my place to say. It might be in fifty years, after I’ve been digesting this story long enough. But not today. I can’t speak to that condition.
Barb is wry about the United States, and about its war against the Pear Mesa Budget Committee, but ultimately believes in flawed human oversight and its official apparatus, democracy. Barb’s isn’t the full-throated patriotism of midnight rallies or even parade grounds, but it isn’t the time-serving “just to pay for dental school” enlistment soul either. Barb believes. But Barb does not believe unthinkingly. Barb accepted a gender reassignment, not a mind wipe.
Because Barb has things to say about Pear Mesa, too. About how the Pear Mesa actuarial algorithms identified American flags as the enemy and systemically removed every one of them. About how it plants pear orchards on pear orchards, for reasons not even Pear Mesa’s subjects understand. About how Pear Mesa stayed there as the waters rose and consumed the Mississippi Valley and the Feds fled for their northern fastnesses to hunker behind polders of new Amsterdam.
And all the while, Barb performs delicate, unstable flight maneuvers (“Did you know instability is one of the most vital traits of a combat aircraft?”) and conducts electronic warfare, the way I roll my shoulders and bellow my laugh and wear a broad snap-brim fedora just so.
This story is beautiful, and to me, that’s all the justification it needed to be published and see the light of day. It is beautiful, because it is sincere. This story took a sneer of a right-wing mockery, “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter!!!” from the mouth of some red-hatted miltech LARPer, and took it dead seriously. Barb is an attack helicopter, and quickly clarifies that that is a gender assignment rather than a sexuality. Isabel Fall is completely, utterly sincere with this story, sincere about Barb’s gender, sincere about her own gender, sincere about war, and patriotism, and uncertainty, and fluidity, and instability.
That’s why it works. That’s why it’s the best science fiction short story of the year, and still will be in December.
That’s why this story is beautiful.
And that’s why it deserves to be read.
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