Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Analog, Lightspeed, and Kaleidotrope, and she wrote the interactive fiction game The Luminous Underground for Choice of Games. She serves as an Associate Editor at Escape Pod, is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and lives with a robot in the sky above Toronto.
I’m part of a writing group with two friends from college, and sometime last year we chose the prompt “Illusion.” I started thinking about my time at Yale, and how we all presented these glowing, successful versions of ourselves when we first got to campus, not deliberate illusions, but subconscious ones. With that mental image in my head, I sat down and wrote the first few paragraphs of “How to Make a Man Love You,” and the rest of the story grew from there.
I think in a world where death is just a state change, we would absolutely turn the dead into one of the cogs in the machinery of capitalism, a resource to be utilized by the living, and this story takes that idea to that logical conclusion. I was inspired by the classic idea of “necromancer resurrects skeletons/zombies to do their bidding”—great, now what if it’s just the whole guy you grab, and everything that the guy knows?
Coming into my gender identity entailed undoing a lot of the messages I’d learned about femininity and power while growing up. I had to find new ways to connect to the lineage of women who made me who I am, now that I’m no longer one of them. Darla is experiencing that same tension, and is ultimately assured that it’s okay for her not to be a woman. I wrote this piece out of a desire for that same reassurance.
This phenomenon of entitled men and suffering women is universal, but my experience of it derives from my culture. I think I was using this story to speak out against this status quo, and while this story takes place in historical times, the imbalance between how men and women are treated has not improved substantially even in recent times.
Living in New York City for so long, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, yet in subsidized student housing, and then living in Harlem, I was always struck by the apparent modernity of NYC contrasted with its stark class and race disparities. There was so much privilege and poverty, and a racial divide that struck me as very distinct. I don’t know why I was surprised by that, but I was. There is a way, in particular, that living in NYC makes you callous to others, including the unhoused.
Being powerless and voiceless for too long creates a weird dissonance. So when a ray of hope actually presents itself, it comes as a shock. It’s only when that initial feeling of shock and helplessness abates that one can learn to pick up the pieces and move on.
For me, in this story, colonialism was a bigger issue. I live and teach college English classes on the edge of the largest reservation in the US, the Navajo reservation, and many of my students are from the nearby Hopi and Apache reservations as well. How could I have a story set in Holbrook, AZ, with no Native characters, and yet how could I, a white writer, create a believable and non-stereotyped Native character? Merlene is a woman and has depression because those are two things I do know about, and I tried to add a touch of reference (the ‘rez,’ her aunties) without overstepping.
In this world, all magic comes from faith, which provides a great story engine because it forces power and purpose to stay intertwined. Somewhere along the line I created the North Star, goddess of prophecy, hope, motivation, and travel-towards. This story was my chance to give the North Star her moment in the light, elusive but clear.
In one of the earliest golem stories, the Golem of Chelm is destroyed because its creator fears it will eventually consume the whole world. However, in Jewish stories, the creator of the golem isn’t an all-powerful figure who has succumbed to hubris, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, summoning magic he cannot control. He is a member of an oppressed community trying desperately to protect the people he cares about. I think the golem myth is one example of how we can reimagine our relationship to the things we create.
Any superhero origin story is, in essence, a tale of loss and recovery. You gain superpowers, but what do you lose? Your old job (lame as it was), potentially old friends (if they were really friends), and your old lifestyle. You gain the power to protect—or destroy—the things you or other people hold dear, but lose the chance to ever live an ordinary life.
