Review of “Helicopter Story” (2020)
Isabel Fall (writer).
Read in 2024.
In a future North America ravaged by climate change, a government crew destroy a school in territory controlled by a repurposed, pear-planting AI.
On the level of worldbuilding, this is only marginally different from Stand on Zanzibar (1968). That book already had resource scarcity, inscrutable near-AGI, military “eptification” dehumanizing its soldiers, transhumanism, and geopolitical instability. “Helicopter Story” adds climate change, popularized in the 1980s. In military SF, the reactionary Starship Troopers (1959) is more exciting and The Forever War (1974) transgresses further on sex and gender, while leaving its protagonist behind. On the level of prose, Fall tries for the precision and modernism of “Spider Rose” (1982), and does OK.
What’s new in this story is its contemporary perspective on gender. That is also the reason why the story got a sconce in literary history. It was originally titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”, a transphobic joke that had been popular five years earlier. Judging by editor Neil Clarke’s notice on retracting the story from Clarkesworld, and Emily St. James’s 2021-06-30 Vox article “How Twitter can Ruin a Life”, Fall’s intention was to undercut the joke from a trans woman’s perspective, without going public in that identity. Consequently, the story had a turbulent reception. It was caught in the opposing force fields of the trans community’s openness to the subjectivity of its members and its outward wariness against persecution.
Fall’s premise is that scientists discover the exact neuroendocrinological mechanisms of gender and use those same mechanisms to implement something like Brunner’s eptification. Basically, when you undergo this treatment as an adult, your interest in conforming to gender-related social norms is replaced by vocational diligence with sexual contamination. This is not a strong premise, but it’s stronger than the hypnosis and hypnopedia that had been commonplace solutions in the SF of previous decades. The idea is certainly worth a short story in itself. In its politics, the story is also more sincere and better than, for example, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018), despite repeating the mistake of anticipating the reader’s reactions in too much detail.