I wrote the first draft of “Babywings” after rereading Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” The older I get, the more magical realism hooks its claws deep into me. Coming at the story through this genre, at a sideways angle, has allowed me to grapple with themes that are, for me, more emotionally challenging.

To me, caste, race, class, privilege, identity, are all forms of societal structure designed to divide people into “us” and “not us.” Education, culture, and language have become part of these structures now, along with the weaponization of language.

There’s the old saw about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic; I think we were playing with the notion that magic in the hands of human beings would eventually be indistinguishable from technology—including the lifecycle that takes it from genuine awe-inspiring discovery, to commercial adaptation, to profit-maximizing iteration, to a climate-destroying tool for focusing wealth.

During the writing process, I discovered this was a story about control. Before Roger Abbott was convicted, he was a jaded man. Pessimistic and hopeless. A disgraced journalist who lost his family and found himself in a pit of disillusionment. But he wanted to share his story. His whole truth.

Embalming is clearly a set of tools that achieves remarkable results in the preservation of bodies, but of course its intention is a communication—either to ourselves or to the gods—of our feelings about death and eternity. C. S. Lewis said (I’m paraphrasing here) that we are animals, and therefore live in time, but that we are also partially divine, and therefore contain an awareness of eternity.

One thing I find interesting is the cyclical nature of humanity, of repeating pasts and histories, of being unable to move forward somehow even as time passes, at the way we always seem to be causing our own destruction even when what we truly desire is peace. Injustice is something that has persisted throughout human history, and it is something that seem as though it will always be prevalent.

So, that closure thing I mentioned—what I’ve always needed to heal, in my experience, is the community of my friends. In some ways this story is a love/thank-you note to some friends who’ve gotten me through some rough times.

Almost as soon as I sat down to start writing, I realized what mecha stories from Gundam to Pacific Rim have already demonstrated—the only reason a civilization would have to create a superweapon in the shape of an enormous humanoid figure is shock and awe.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I found myself writing a lot of stories that focused on the theme of sacrifice. In speculative media, particularly, there are a lot of stories that portray martyrdom or sacrifice as a noble or necessary cause.

The germ of this story was born in the 2021 stage of the pandemic, while watching a panel on lost Doctor Who episodes during a virtual version of our local Doctor Who convention, CONsole Room. I wanted to write about the way that seemingly frivolous things like fandom still persist.