Marney Honeycutt, seeking revenge after her family is murdered in a strike break, joins a crew of lesbian bandit revolutionaries in Clarke’s Metal from Heaven (Erewhon, Oct.).
What inspired Ichorite, the mysterious metal that powers this world?
Ichorite comes from my anxiety that fossil fuels are like corpses, a very literal dinosaur body. Imagine plastic and oil and everything we derive from said corpses being haunted, and how immense and profound the scale of that haunting would be. Simultaneously, I’m a Marx nerd. Marx writes about the commodity fetish as this capitalist delusion where we think we’re having relationships with objects instead of with each other. What would it mean if there was a substance that, in interacting with it, it becomes immediately clear that this is not the case? There’s a lot of goofy Marx interpolation in my worldbuilding. I think other Marx-heads will recognize what I’m playing with.
How did Marney’s character emerge?
She’s entirely shaped by her love of her friends and her overwhelming trauma—her world-breaking, triple-deluxe PTSD. In a revenge arc, the most important thing in a character’s life has to be the pursuit of violence, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say she follows through; this is not a novel where she goes, “but perhaps I ought to spare him.” Violence is the answer in this novel. It’s also told in direct address by Marney to someone. It was fun to think about the details she adds or omits because of who she’s talking to.
She’s also a stone butch.
I’d never seen stone butches in genre fiction, which I found disquieting, given that I am one, or was at the time when I wrote this. I was thinking about what lesbianism means in terms of class and how messy and gender-transgressive lesbian masculinity is and has been and will continue to be. Additionally, there are almost no tops in genre fiction. We are in a bottom economy, in terms of POV characters. It was fun to think about how the common language of desire shifts when your protagonist is one, strictly a top, and two, isn’t interested in reciprocal touch. It takes us outside the most readily available tropes.
This is both a queer and an anticapitalist revolution. Was it important to you to connect those two strands?
Being gay doesn’t mean you are automatically a revolutionary. But queerness is a wonderful tool of solidarity. If we think of queerness as strategy, we’ll get much farther than if we think about it as this sort of individuated thing that doesn’t rub up against all the other things that are acting together to make life pretty miserable for most people. In Metal from Heaven, I riff on the hereafter, which is me renaming the “utopian horizon,” the idea that we are always moving toward this better future and that movement itself is important. As speculative fiction writers, we get to start to imagine those better options.
