Joe Fassler at Lit Hub: Years ago, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I found myself writing about flight. It started as just a few paragraphs, a bit of spontaneous fiction jotted down in a notebook: a man stood on the roof of a barn, wearing a pair of enormous wings built from wood and cloth. His friend on the ground—the narrator—looked on nervously, ready to call an ambulance. And then the man jumped. Somehow, he flew.
I still remember the surprise I felt as the scene spilled down the page. The thrill of liftoff, a human body lofted in midair. The whole thing only lasted a minute before the man swooned back to earth in a shuddering crash. He was safe, he’d done it. Hoarse, joyful shouts echoed around the field.
That scene became the seed of my novel, The Sky Was Ours, which has a similar pair of handmade wings at its center. It’s about a small cast of modern-day characters obsessed with finding a way to freely navigate the air the way birds do. Success is far from certain, but they’re convinced their efforts have revolutionary potential: the hope is that flight will jam capitalism’s relentless machinery the way nothing else can, allowing the earth to heal and a new, nomadic way of life to flourish. When I put my notebook away on that first day, though, I had no idea that I was embarking on a major project—or that the history of flight would become an obsession of my own.
It happened slowly. I kept returning to the scene I’d written, fascinated by something in its basic formula—man, barn, wings. The impossible pull of the sky. In time, I started to flesh things out, developing my first tentative sense of who these people were, and why they were attempting something so audacious.
Before long, I ran into a more practical question: Was a book about self-powered flight science fiction or magical realism? Was it literally, physically possible to fly like that, or could such a thing happen only in the realm of fantasy? This wasn’t a topic like time-travel or mind-reading, after all. Flight—as birds and bugs, drones and planes show us every day—really is possible, even unexceptional. But are we capable of it, physically? Did anyone really know?
More here.
