Welcome to Lightspeed Magazine! We’re honoured to share your story “Mother’s Hip” with our readers. Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

Corey Jae: The original impetus behind the story was wanting to talk about trans motherhood; it’s a complex topic and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find two trans women who feel the same way about it. For me, I long thought parenthood meant becoming a father, and I had absolutely no interest in that—mostly for reasons that should be obvious now . . .

But when I transitioned, I realised it was actually motherhood I had missed out on, and that kind of broke my heart a little bit. So I wanted to use this story to both process that realisation and grieve the chance at motherhood I lost, which I hope comes through clearly with how Hynd deals with loss.

In terms of cultural influences, the mothership itself was very much inspired by the carrier aircraft in Genocidal Organ (I recommend both the novel and the anime film), and Hynd’s integration with the ship was heavily influenced by the character Seria Mau Genlicher in M. John Harrison’s Light—the way she’s written as a character, the way she’s embodied, and the absolutely horrific process of her k-ship transformation.

Maddison: I think the physical aspects of motherhood that I’ll probably never get to experience were part of it for me. I feel a sort of inner yearning for it. Part of the horror of the story is in that emptiness being filled with something horrible. The way poverty turns people into soldiers, then war turns them into monsters, breaks their minds and abandons them for it. Cybernetics being used to transform us into genocidal robots rather than to enrich our lives.

The other cultural touchstone for a lot of the stories we’ve worked on together is ‘90s action videogames, with Zone 66 (1993) in particular serving as a minor inspiration for this story. The game has a fucking stellar anime-inspired intro cutscene showing a city getting nuked that’s lived rent free in my subconscious since I was a little kid. [CJ: Mine too.]

I drew from the imagery of that game with the idea for the Wraiths and Revenants, specifically. I think it helped cohere the fictional aerial battlefield that functions as the backdrop for the story: taking something meant to be exciting and turning it into the tragedy that war actually is. The anarchist soldiers fused with their machines fighting back against our bomber who is trying to destroy them. There’s meant to be a kind of symmetry to it, I guess.

The centrality of Hynd’s conditioning to the narrative, and her actions when its comforts were undone, felt to me like the logical endpoint of propaganda. What led you to focus on this particular thread in the context of a human becoming a war machine?

It’s explicitly a response to the ways that trans women are dehumanised, commodified, and othered in this patriarchal society for our lack of reproductive capabilities, which itself is inherently misogynistic, by enforcing a cis woman’s only value as being her reproductive capability, which is neither permanent nor guaranteed. Sadly, a lot of cis women don’t realise this is a shared struggle (read Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, girl).

It’s also about identifying with a body and psychology other than human, a robot or an object in particular: I (Maddison), have written similar stories on the same subject before. But it’s different in this piece because it’s assigned to or forced on the protagonist by her state. A little bit like Isabel Fall’s masterpiece I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter, but focussed on the way it feels emotionally to find your gender best expressed as a weapon of war, and the trauma that would probably follow afterwards.

I understand narratively why Hynd was physically wired into the mothership—because the story wouldn’t work otherwise—but throughout the story I kept wondering why it wasn’t being operated remotely given the story’s own context. How did you think about this while putting the story together, and was the physical connection theme there from the beginning?

It was definitely there from the start, because as a story about motherhood it needed to be rooted in the physicality of the body. It had to feel intimate so that the reader feels it when her children—and even her motherhood—are torn away from her. But there was also more to it.

Part of it was simply commenting on the perceived disposability of trans bodies. The physicality of her transformation was a method to externalise the abstract psychological transformations you have to make as a trans woman to survive in a hostile and dangerous world. Combat as a metaphor for transphobia and capitalism.

There are reasons for it in the logic of the setting too: Embodied ships like Hynd are more invested in the outcome of the battles they enter, since any one of them could mean her death, which acts as insurance of a sort for a very expensive piece of military equipment. The story also suggests it’s possible that living in this state allows you higher mastery of the aircraft than telepresence would.

Writing collaboratively is an entirely different kettle than writing something on your own. Going off ISFDB, I see that you’ve written together in the past; how does your collaborative process differ from when you write alone?

Maddison: We’ve written quite a lot together now and I personally find it even easier than writing on my own. I’ve collaborated with a few other writers in the past and haven’t really been able to say that before. I’d describe the process as communicative and fluid. We usually share physical proximity while we’re writing, sharing a laptop or typing into a television from the couch. That also probably helps. We share a lot of interests in terms of politics, inspirations, and aesthetics too. There’s not a lot of disagreement when it comes to style. We generally trust each other’s process. She gets my work, and I think I’ve got my head around hers as well. Which means I rarely have to feel like I’m fighting with her or pushing for anything.

Corey Jae: For me, the best part of our collaborative partnership is that when a story is not just “mine” I have a much clearer view of it—there’s no room for self-doubt when Maddison and I write the story together and talk through every aspect of it as we go. Because of that I can see when we’re landing the story exactly how we wanted, or even better than we planned. I trust our partnership a lot, and doubting our work would be an insult to that.

Also, Maddison has been a huge help to me going through my transition, which fed into us starting to collaborate in the first place. So when there’s a particular theme or one both of us want to explore, we’ve probably already talked about it, or can have an in-depth conversation about it and explore all the angles in ways that I couldn’t necessarily do on my own (she’s smarter than me, after all ;) ).

And we have a lot of fun with it . . .

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Also out this month, we have a story in Grimdark Magazine, which is a hyperpop inflected piece of grimdark cyberpunk, and in the next couple of months we’ll have stories in the Wrath Month (bona-books.com/projects/wrath-month)and Monster F*ck anthologies (and you can find our prior work at Strange Horizons (strangehorizons.com/fiction/crisis-actors) and in Interzone (shop.interzone.press/b/E76yw). We’re also in the process of planning some longer works that we’ll start work on soon. A novelette, a serial, and a YA novel also set during the Amazon War, but following a group of teenagers from the anarchist side. Think a queer, trans, cyberpunk subversion of Tomorrow, When the War Began (only other Aussies will get this reference . . .).

For our sins, we’re both active on Bluesky, so following us on there is probably the best way to stay in the loop for both our current and future projects.