# I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter

![Book cover of I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter](/books/covers/clarkesworld_issue_160.jpg)

by [Isabel Fall](/books/authors/isabel_fall/)
★★★★★

## Review

_I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter_, by Isabel Fall,
is a novelette about a pilot whose gender is reassigned to "attack helicopter"
to make her a better soldier. It follows Barb as she bombs a high school,
wrestles with what she's become, and asks what gender even is.

I can't write about _I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter_ without acknowledging the controversy that
surrounded it. It was published in January 2020 in
[Clarkesworld][clarkesworld-issue] and almost immediately [provoked
outrage][vox-controversy]. People accused Fall not of
reclaiming the transphobic joke, but of furthering it. She was harassed until
she [asked to have the story taken down][clarkesworld-statement]. It still
earned a well-deserved [Hugo][hugo-2021] nomination, under the title _Helicopter Story_. I'm saddened that we drove away a brilliant new author,
and that I likely won't have the chance to read more of her work.

[vox-controversy]: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter
[clarkesworld-statement]: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/
[clarkesworld-issue]: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_160/
[hugo-2021]: https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2021-hugo-awards/

Isabel Fall does three things brilliantly in this story:

First, she builds a world believably in crisis. Climate change has rendered
the equator uninhabitable; refugees flee north and sell themselves as
mercenaries to buy a place for their people. AIs run both the United States
and its enemies. They keep civilization running, but they're black boxes no
one understands, demanding behaviors that seem insane---like bombing a high
school or [planting pear trees everywhere][paperclip]---and no one dares
question it, unable to tell what is crazy and what is critical to survival.
Scientists have mapped the parts of the brain that handle gender, and the
military has co-opted the technology to make better soldiers. And Isabel Fall does it all in under 8,000 words.

[paperclip]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer

Second, Fall tells the story of Apache Mystic pilot Seo
Ji Hee, callsign _Barb_, a "XX-karyotope somatic female". The army reassigns
Barb's gender identity to "attack helicopter" to make her a better pilot. Barb
is comfortable with what she's become, but her gunner Axis is not. Axis feels
the wrongness of bombing a high school on an AI's orders as a dysphoria,
something his new gender insists on but which he isn't comfortable with. Barb
reflects that someone has to carry a conscience, and maybe that is a new form
of queerness. The story interweaves their mission with flashbacks to Barb's
life as a woman---how gender shaped her then, and how it makes her a better
warrior now.

Third, Fall uses rhetorical questions that make you, the
reader, examine your assumptions about gender. They don't come off as
didactic; they fit perfectly into the story. As a straight cis male, I knew
gender was constructed _and_ performative, but I didn't really **understand**
until Fall asked me:

> [...] if your body-fact is enough to establish your gender, you would
> willingly wear bright dresses and cry at movies, wouldn't you? You would
> hold hands and compliment each other on your beauty, wouldn't you? Because
> your cock would be enough to make you a man.
>
> Have you ever guarded anything so vigilantly as you protect yourself against
> the shame of gender-wrong?

The majesty of this story is how well Isabel Fall pulls it all together.
She moves from story to world-building to dialogues about gender without
interrupting the flow, without it feeling unnatural. There are books I read
and think, "I could do that", like [Dick](/books/authors/philip_k_dick/)'s [_Ubik_](/books/ubik/). I could
plot it, write the prose, stick the landing, probably, maybe. Then there are
works where I'm forced to admit the author had an ability completely beyond
me. Faulkner's _Absalom, Absalom!_ is one. [_Disco Elysium_](/books/disco_elysium/)
is another. _I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter_ is a third: how Fall weaves
the three pieces together, how she achieves so much in under 8,000
words---given a million years, I couldn't come close.

Fall is also subverting a tradition in science fiction
of softening machines by giving them female identities. Perhaps the most
famous example is the computer from _Star Trek_. We also see it in the [_Bolo_](/books/series/bolo/) series: in [_Little Red Hen_](/books/the_triumphant/#little-red-hen), a tank's female identity makes
it protect its crew but drives it insane when they die; in [_Miles to Go_](/books/the_triumphant/#miles-to-go),
a Bolo falls in love with her commander and dies for him. Fall instead writes about a woman made into a machine, who
trades her softness to be a hardened killer.

This story reminded me of a few other works. The focus on the spectrum of
gender is similar to [Le Guin](/books/authors/ursula_k_le_guin/)'s [_The Left Hand of Darkness_](/books/the_left_hand_of_darkness/) with
its androgynous aliens. Fall's story is sort of
an inversion of [Wells](/books/authors/martha_wells/)'s [_The Murderbot Diaries_](/books/series/the_murderbot_diaries/), in which a weapon wants
to become more human. And modifying Barb's fundamental nature to make her a
better weapon echoes [Watts](/books/authors/peter_watts/)'s [_Blindsight_](/books/blindsight/), where the crew of
the _Theseus_ has modified themselves to better perform their tasks in a
transhuman world.

_I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter_ is one of the best stories I've read, an example of how
science fiction can make us see our world and ourselves differently. I wish Fall had the chance to write more.

## Related Books
- [_Ubik_](/books/ubik/) by [Philip K. Dick](/books/authors/philip_k_dick/) --- ★☆☆☆☆: Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, is a 1969 science fiction novel about a prudence organization that hires out anti-psis and anti-precogs to protect people’s and corporations’ privacy. Everything begins to fall apart when they’re lured into a too-good-to-be-true job where their boss is murdered. Suddenly, reality starts deteriorating, with objects reverting to older versions, and the characters start dying one by one.
- [_Accelerando_](/books/accelerando/) by [Charles Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/) --- ★★☆☆☆: Accelerando, by Charles Stross, is a hard sci-fi fix-up novel. Originally published as 9 separate stories, it follows 3 generations of the Macx family as they upload, fork, merge, and scatter across a solar system slowly being converted into computronium.
- [_Field of Dishonor_](/books/field_of_dishonor/) by [David Weber](/books/authors/david_weber/) --- ★★★☆☆: Field of Dishonor, by David Weber, is the fourth book in the Honor Harrington series. It reduces the scale of the narrative, trading fleet battles for political maneuvering and personal grudges.