Joseph O’Neill on the Burdens of Superpowers

In “The Flier,” your story in this week’s issue, the narrator, who’s been suffering from an undiagnosed physical ailment, suddenly discovers that he can fly. Unlike most fictional characters granted such powers, the narrator finds his new ability “loathsome and embarrassing.” Why isn’t he more excited?

He doesn’t like how flying makes his body feel. He can’t see the upside or romance of moving through air rather than over land. He is much more comfortable with the terrestrial and the down-to-earth. He has an ideology that involves a suspicion of stupidity, and he places a high value on humble, practical actions, and on invisible structures of good. I’m with him on that score.

Of course, his flying prowess comes with new responsibilities and risks. What are the general guidelines and considerations when deciding how to use this power?

In the matter of responsibility, he seems to embrace the “first, do no harm” ideal, although the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t occur to him. As far as personal risks go, these are, of course, serious. The first thing that occurred to me when I tried to put myself in his shoes (or, more likely, his socks, since he seems to be something of an indoorsman) was the hideous attention that would inevitably follow. You’d probably be the most famous person on the planet. You could wear a mask, I guess, like the kid who is Spider-Man. It’s hard to see it ending well. Ask Icarus. Ask the Ottoman aviator Ahmet Çelebi. Reportedly, he leaped from the Galata Tower, in Istanbul, and used a contraption of his own making to glide or fly across the Bosphorus. This would have been around four hundred years ago. The sultan, spooked, exiled him to Algeria.

You mentioned that part of the inspiration for this story was your distaste for superheroes. What is it that you find so unappealing about them?

I’m not against superheroes as children’s entertainment, although there, too, I have my misgivings. I’m somewhat irked about the titanic cultural proportions, in the world of grownups, of Iron Man and Batman and Captain America and the rest of those goofballs. The elevation of fantasy as a way of investigating the human experience has been taken to a depressing extreme. Then, as I began to write the story, I found myself interested in the profound human needs that must be reflected in this fascination with superpowers—in particular, the profound wish for another dimension of being, presumably beyond the scope of scientific knowledge. It took an act of will to not put the word “miracle” into this story.

I’m afraid I have to ask: If you were able to choose a superpower, which would you choose?

The power to vote fifty thousand times in Wisconsin in 2020. I’m aware that this isn’t satisfactory from the point of view of democracy, but, hey—it might save the world.