Books

My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Kameron Hurley to talk about how the power of preternatural calm relates to The Mirror Empire. —————————————– My mom and I share a similar superpower – the ability to stay preternaturally calm during times of great stress and turmoil. Grievous injury, car accidents, difficult births… if something horrible happens, we’ll calmly bind wounds, give the injured a soothing pep talk, call 911 and do the shit that needs to get done, with no shaking or screaming or crying or fuss. This response to times of great stress has made nearly every movie where folks scream and seize up and flail in the face of terror difficult for me to watch; I never find it terribly believable. Yes, of course, you startle for a minute, but then you center yourself, you go cold, right? You move through it. Breakdown later, when you have the time. In truth, this calm in the face of extreme stress has gotten me called all sorts of names over the years:  unfeeling, inhuman, monstrous. What many folks don’t understand about this stress response is that it’s not that I don’t feel things – it’s that I simply delay feeling them. When the stressor has passed and everyone is cared for and there is nothing more to do, I crash. I’ve used this response to trauma a few times in building characters in my novels, too, most notably in the character of Lilia, the protagonist of my novel The Mirror Empire, whose ability to push through horror makes her one of the few people in her country who can adjust to the coming war of attrition thrust upon her pacifist people.