Learning to Fly
Inhuman Angels and Posthuman Cyborgs
Butterflies, bats, and birds have wings. Human beings do not. But since dreams of flight are deeply ingrained in all cultures (and if you believe Jung and Freud, have a profound psychological significance), stories of winged humanlike creatures, such as angels, demons, and fairies, are ubiquitous across the globe. But what do these fantastic wings really symbolize? How does contemporary SF respond to the ancient myths and legends of soaring into the sky without the encumbrance of an airplane? And are all winged humans created equal?
A closer look at the lore of flight shows that there are actually two different kinds of winged humans: those for whom the wings are an inseparable part of the body; and those for whom they are prosthetics or fashion items. The stories we tell about these two kinds are quite different. Naturally winged creatures are demonic or divine. People who temporarily acquire wings are upstarts, grasping at godhood but never quite managing to cling to it.
Contemporary SF follows this ancient distinction by making the winged protagonist either inhuman or posthuman. Both represent a break with what Nietzsche called “human, all too human” but in radically different ways.1
Angels and demons
Winged creatures of various religions and mythologies are ontologically different from humanity. In Shintoism, tengu are humanoid monsters with wings and bird beaks. In the Egyptian pantheon, Isis and Nephthys, goddesses of death and rebirth, were often depicted with falcon wings. Anemoi, the wind gods of Greek mythology, were winged; and so was Eros, god of love, even though the babylike Cupid with his tiny fluttering wings is a later invention. In Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (2nd Century AD), Eros appears to Psyche as a beautiful winged man. Psyche herself, after being elevated to the status of an immortal, also acquires butterfly wings.
Everybody is familiar with the Christian iconography of angels, but in fact, in early Christian art, angels are depicted as wingless youths. The Bible offers few hints as to the appearance of angels and when it does, they are presented as monstrous and inhuman, as in Ezekiel 1:4-28 where angels have four faces, brass legs, cow’s feet, and are standing on chariots covered with eyes. Even though this bizarre imagery gradually evolves into familiar pictures of floating draperies and fluttering wings, angels still retain a hint of monstrosity.
Angels and demons are so ubiquitous in SF, fantasy and romantasy that I need to limit myself to very few examples in order to illustrate the difference between inhuman and posthuman.
Edmond Hamilton was an important SF writer of the Golden Age (roughly between the 1930s and 1950s). His story “He That Hath Wings”, originally published in Weird Tales in 1938, combines the Superman plot with an almost-mystical allegory.
The story concerns a boy David Rand born with incipient wings that develop as he grows to maturity. David is a mutant, the result of the electric shock suffered by his parents. Hamilton tries to offer some plausibility to David’s wings by indicating other corporeal alterations of his physique, such as hollow bones, like the bones of a bird. But the focus of the story is on the conflict between David’s wings and the stifling bourgeois conformity of his environment. To get a highly paying position and to marry the girl of his dreams he reluctantly agrees to cut off his wings. But when they grow back, he can no longer deny his nature and takes his last flight, plunging into the sea and drowning.
The 1930s were the time of mutant superhumans. The Third Reich and the USSR, two warring utopias, wanted to create their own versions of the New Man. The US and the UK responded with the New Men of their own. A very partial list of SF novels dedicated to this idea includes J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), H.G. Wells’ The Food of Gods (1904) and Olaf Stapledon’s masterpiece Odd John (1935). And of course, there is the most famous superhuman of all, the original Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster in 1938, the same year as David Rand. He also flies, albeit without wings. All these superhumans represent a radical and unbridgeable break with humanity. Superman is not even a mutation. He is a bona fide alien raised by human parents.
Like Superman, David Rand is a something else, something other, than human. He is separated from the rest of us by an ontological gap he cannot cross back, no matter how much he tries. His cutting off his wings represents his pathetic attempt to blend in. But the wings grow back, and David chooses suicide rather than continuing to deny his own nature.
David’s generic offspring in SF are often modeled not just on Christian angels but on the flying demons of Western and non-Western mythologies. Examples include the vampiric angel Carnival from Campbell’s Scar Night (2006); garudas in China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (2000); and the Raksuras and the Fell, shapeshifting flyers of different species in Martha Wells’ The Books of the Raksura series (2011-2018). All these creatures, regardless of their humanoid appearance, are alien, different, and in their powers of flight, sublime. They are what Jean-Francois Lyotard called “the inhuman”: the inexplicable and inexpressible Other who is positioned beyond our ability to understand and relate to (Lyotard 1992, 5).
But there are other flyers whose wings are not an organic part of their body but rather a prosthetic or a fashion item. And their cultural genealogy goes back to, arguably, the most famous winged human of them all: Icarus.
The Boy Who Flew Too High
The myth exists in many versions, but probably the most familiar one is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. According to it, Daedalus and his son Icarus are imprisoned by Minos, king of Crete. Daedalus, a genius engineer, realizes that while Minos controls land and sea, he does not control the sky. He makes two pairs of artificial wings of wax and bird feathers, putting one pair on himself and giving the other one to his young son Icarus. He instructs Icarus to follow him, not flying too high and trying not to attract the attention of various deities inhabiting the Greek sky.
He gave a never to be repeated kiss to his son, and lifting upwards on his wings, flew ahead, anxious for his companion, like a bird, leading her fledglings out of a nest above, into the empty air. He urged the boy to follow, and showed him the dangerous art of flying, moving his own wings, and then looking back at his son. Some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky (Ovid).
Icarus, delighting in the sensation of flight, disobeys his father, and flies too close to the “devouring sun” which melts the wax of his wings. He falls into the sea and drowns. His bereaved father buries his body on the island later named after him, Icaria.
The myth focuses on the interplay between the human vulnerability of the father-son pair and the omnipotence of the gods. Daedalus’ wings are not magic; they are a physical gadget, made with humdrum materials and strapped to the body. In other tales of Metamorphoses, such as the story of Scylla and her father, the will of gods actually transforms human beings into birds, giving them permanent and organic wings. But the wings of Daedalus are not supernatural. They are wearable technology, powered by human muscles. They can be put on and taken off – or ripped off, as happens to Icarus. They temporarily afford humans the status of gods in the eyes of the observers, as the witnesses on the ground “stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky” (Ovid). This status is not real, as Icarus’ brutal and swift death shows. It is a semblance of divinity, bestowed by the visual impact of the wings.
These prosthetic wings represent posthumanity as opposed to un-humanity. Posthuman is that which comes after humanity but is still connected to it. It is a technologically induced change, which is neither permanent nor stable. It can be reversed or abandoned; but more importantly, it does not change the essential nature of the human. Posthuman entities are temporary cyborgs rather than permanent aliens, transformed by an artificial supplement rather than by an ontological metamorphosis. The best example of such a supplement is fashion. We create new identities for ourselves through the social language of clothes. But underneath our brand names, we are still the same “bare forked animal”.2
Growing up in the sky
In 1981, J.R.R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle published Windhaven, a collaborative novel composed of three independently written novellas. The novel is set on the planet of Windhaven populated by the descendants of a crashed spaceship. The planet is a waterworld with scattered islands and a stormy, turbulent atmosphere. To maintain a unified human culture across the islands, the descendants of the human colonists develop gliding rigs which they call “wings”. Eventually, the human society on Windhaven splits into two castes: the flyers who pass their wings on to their descendants and the landsmen who are bound to their islands. The plot concerns a woman named Maris, born into a poor landsmen family, who aspires to become a flyer and eventually wins her wings. In the process, she foments a revolutionary change which leads to the rise of the open competition for wings and a meritocracy-based new society.
The novel is a character-driven bildungsroman (the novel of development and education) paired with the story of a social change. Focalized through Maris, it gives us access to her interiority, following her through childhood to death. She is a sympathetic and relatable character struggling for recognition, status and social acceptance. The bildungsroman is a traditionally humanistic genre, coming into prominence with the rise of the middle-class in the late eighteenth century and shifting literature’s focus from divinity to humanity (Watt 2001). It focuses on the interplay between individual and society in a “disenchanted”, secular, modern world:
The flyers have an exalted status on Windhaven, so much so that they are almost treated like gods - much like Icarus is mistaken for divinity by the awed onlookers. However, their ability to fly is not an inherent quality. Rather, it is a temporary status bestowed by attachable wings. Maris’ life story demonstrates that anybody can become a flyer, resonating with our mainstream ideology of humanism and democracy.
Another interesting series of novels about descendants of Icarus is Fran Wilde’s Bone Universe series (2015- 2017) that consists of three books: Updraft (2015), Cloudbound (2016), and Horizon (2017).
In the series, humans inhabit a perpetually growing city of bone towers, whose true nature is only gradually revealed. To move among towers, humans use prosthetic wings, strapped onto the body, and requiring great skill to operate. Like Maris, the heroine Kirit has to overcome numerous obstacles to be allowed her wings. And like Maris, she is drawn into the political unrest brewing in the city which culminates in a revolution.
But Wilde’s trilogy is more than another feminist bildungsroman. While the first and second books of the trilogy are mainly dedicated to the power struggle in the city, Horizon depicts the expedition that plunges down into the cloud cover the hides the surface of the world and in order to understand the true nature of the city (spoilers alert here!). It turns out that the bone towers grow out of the stupendous creature that roams the surface of the world. This sudden and vertiginous shift in scale dislodges the centrality of the human characters’ struggles, reducing them to the insignificant mites on the body of the literal leviathan.
In Bone Universe, we have an inhuman universe inhabited by posthuman characters. The mechanical wings of Kirit are the tool that allows humans to survive in this alien universe, while preserving their own humanity unchanged. These mechanical wings are not transformative in the sense in which David Rand’s organic wings are. Kirit’s wings offer her the gift of flying, but this gift is temporary and sustained by the constant investment of human ingenuity, labor, and social collaboration. They are both a fashion accessory, as their possession signifies status in her society, and a tool, as without flying, the entire settlement of permanently growing bone towers will collapse.
So, what kind of wings would you rather possess?
Angels or Cyborgs?
Much of SF is occupied with the issue of the distinction between inhuman and posthuman. Are we going to be permanently transformed by technology into something new and strange? Or are we going to use it like Maris and Kirit use their wings - a tool that preserves our essential humanity unchanged?
Most people, I assume, would opt for the second option. The current resurgence of humanism as a moral and political force leads us to beware of radical transformation of human nature. “Eugenics” has become a dirty word (even though originally it was a project of both left and right and simply indicated the desire to improve human biology rather than kill millions of people).
But I feel differently. Is human nature really that perfect? Are we content to cling to our evolutionary flawed bodies and cluttered minds? The historical record of humanism is quite dismal (more on that in the next instalment). Perhaps we should reevaluate Nietzsche’s rejection of “human, all too human”. If I am given a choice, I would rather be David Rand than Maris; rather an angel than an engineer; rather Psyche than Icarus.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical treatise Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits was published in 1880.
William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act. 3, Sc. 4.
Works Cited
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
Ovid. "Metamorphoses." n.d. https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph8.htm#482327661. Ekectronic. 3 6 2025.