Introduction
Sheri Singerling’s novelette “Paper Airplane Poet,” published in Clarkesword, operates as a companion piece to her debut novel Blessed is the Rot (Book 1 of the Bit trilogy), set within her Alfom shared universe. The story introduces readers to Tillie, a young low-blood woman in the stratified city of Simetria, whose catastrophic loss of family precipitates a radical reinvention of self through an encounter with a clandestine poet of the upper class. Situated at the intersection of secondary-world fantasy, Lovecraftian cosmological horror, and socially conscious literary fiction, Singerling’s novelette achieves something quietly ambitious: it refuses the conventions of both the rescue narrative and the cautionary tale, reframing what might superficially read as a young woman’s exploitation as an act of self-determined survival. The thesis of this review is that “Paper Airplane Poet” deploys its non-Euclidean horror scaffold not merely as genre ornamentation but as a sustained structural metaphor for class violence and the distortion of selfhood under conditions of poverty and gendered precarity—conditions Tillie subverts, rather than succumbs to, through strategic agency.
Plot, Setting, and Characters
The story unfolds in Simetria, a rigidly bifurcated city organized around distinctions of blood purity and spatial geography: a lower city of crowded hovels and mercantile labor, and an upper city of limestone facades and curated flower boxes. The world is haunted by “distortions,” non-Euclidean ruptures in space-time that corrupt human flesh, producing “affliction”—a condition of grotesque, endless metamorphosis only terminable by total dismemberment, the ritual “mercy killing” performed by state-sanctioned surveyors.
The story opens on the day Tillie, twenty-one, watches her father die of affliction and her mother become infected as a consequence of staying by his side. Orphaned, homeless, and employed in exploitative labor, Tillie stumbles upon the Paper Airplane Poet—anonymous verse dispersed from a church bell tower—and climbs to confront the author. The poet reveals himself as Nicolus Yevin, a deacon who had accompanied Tillie on the worst day of her life. Tillie proposes to exploit her physical resemblance to Lady Sophie Roshem, a high-blood surveyor; Nicolus redirects her toward Madam Gerton’s establishment, A Taste of Refinement, an upscale service house where employees impersonate high-blood figures for wealthy clients. The story concludes months later, with Tillie thriving in her new role and receiving a poem from Nicolus expressing guilt over his facilitation of her placement. She amends its final line, replacing “betrayed” with “saved”—an act of authorship that both closes and reframes the story’s arc.
Critical Analysis
Themes and Ideas
The story’s governing concerns are class mobility, gendered bodily autonomy, and the creative versus exploitative dimensions of performance. Tillie inhabits a world in which her body is perpetually subject to others’ appetites—Jacub’s predatory gaze, the landlord’s assault, the catcalls of the street—and the primary question the narrative poses is not whether she will escape this condition but how. Singerling is careful to foreground that escape, in Simetria, is never clean. The institution Tillie enters is unambiguously transactional; the story does not sentimentalize it. Yet it insists on a distinction Tillie herself articulates: “If a man touched her, he had paid for the privilege. It was a transaction when in the lower city it had always felt like a theft.”
This distinction echoes debates in feminist theory about agency within constrained systems. Wendy Brown’s analysis of freedom as always already conditioned by power structures is useful here: Tillie’s freedom at A Taste of Refinement is not freedom from patriarchal economy but a renegotiated position within it, one that affords her protection, literacy, and economic sufficiency unavailable to her outside it (Brown 5–7). Singerling neither celebrates nor condemns this; her prose maintains a disciplined neutrality, allowing readers to hold the ambivalence without the story resolving it for them.
The distortions and affliction function thematically as a literalization of the way class society deforms those it marginalizes. The afflicted are fragmented, uncontrolled, subject to endless metamorphosis from which only violent dismemberment brings peace. Tillie herself experiences a figurative affliction following her parents’ deaths—her consciousness “a series of still images, flashes of scenes interspersed with a blackness”—a dissociative rupture that the text codes in language continuous with the horror cosmology. Recovery, for Tillie, involves the re-imposition of a coherent self, achieved not through restoration of her prior life but through the deliberate construction of a new identity: Lady Sophie Roshem.
Form and Style
Singerling narrates in close third person, maintaining intimate access to Tillie’s interior while preserving a slight remove that prevents easy sentimentality. The point of view is scrupulously aligned with Tillie’s perceptions and gaps in knowledge—she cannot read, cannot decode Nicolus’ advanced ritual notations, cannot penetrate the masks of the high bloods she observes—and this epistemological constraint becomes a formal enactment of class exclusion. The reader, like Tillie, is positioned outside certain registers of knowledge until gradually admitted.
The pacing is notably deliberate in its early sections, crowding the reader into the same claustrophobic experience as Tillie in the lower city, before opening into the relative spaciousness of the upper city and Nicolus’ estate. This spatial rhetoric is sustained at the level of sentence structure as well: the lower-city prose runs in dense, comma-heavy accumulations, while the upper-city sequences allow for longer, more syntactically elaborate passages. The effect is of a text that physically performs the geography it describes.
Imagery clusters around two opposing poles: the geometric and the formless. The Euclidean—circles, formulae, symmetry—signifies order, safety, and the divine in Simetria’s theology. The non-Euclidean signifies corruption, dissolution, and horror. Tillie’s ritual scribbling of the circle-area formula (A = πr²) is, within the world’s logic, an act of civic and spiritual maintenance, but Singerling inflects it with class pathos: Tillie’s “childish scribbles” beside Nicolus’ “elegant and learned flourishes” expose how even access to the sacred is stratified by education. Paper itself functions as a sustained symbol throughout: Tillie cannot read the paper airplanes Nicolus throws; at the story’s end, she can—and she writes on one, amending his poem. The arc from illiteracy to authorship is the story’s quietest but most significant transformation.
Tone is one of the novelette’s most accomplished features. Singerling avoids both the melodramatic register that the story’s material might invite and the ironic detachment that might feel evasive. The prose maintains what one might call a composed gravity—grief is present but never performed; Tillie’s practicality reads not as cold but as a hard-won psychological necessity.
Characterization
Tillie is rendered with considerable care as a character who defies the passivity conventionally attributed to women in analogous fictional situations. Her decisions—to climb the tower, to leverage Nicolus’ secret, to decline the fairy-tale of the Sophie Roshem double scheme in favor of Madam Gerton’s offer—are consistently active, strategic, and self-aware. Her interiority is marked by a kind of lucid realism: she mourns her parents without collapsing into grief, she feels attraction to Nicolus without indulging the fantasy past its usefulness, and she decodes his investment in Vergil with perceptive clarity.
Nicolus Yevin is the story’s most complex secondary figure. His function as the Paper Airplane Poet—dispersing anonymous verse from a height above the lower city, refusing to sign his name—figures the asymmetry of his position: he is moved by the suffering below him but unwilling to attach himself to it publicly. His guilt, legible in his departing poem “A Gift,” is genuine but also self-absorbed; his apology seeks Tillie’s absolution for his discomfort rather than addressing any actual harm. Singerling’s willingness to hold this ambiguity—Nicolus is kind, instrumental in Tillie’s survival, and also constitutively incapable of full solidarity—gives the story its ethical complexity.
Lady Sophie Roshem appears only briefly but functions as a crucial structural element: the double whose existence enables Tillie’s reinvention, and whose surveyor’s authority inverts the typical power dynamic, suggesting that class, rather than gender alone, determines access to autonomy.
Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Context
“Paper Airplane Poet” participates in a well-established tradition of secondary-world fantasy that uses invented societies to defamiliarize real-world class and gender structures. Works by authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin and N. K. Jemisin have demonstrated the capacity of speculative world-building to render social critique at once more immediate and more philosophically tractable by placing it within systems whose rules are made explicit (The Left Hand of Darkness; The Fifth Season). Singerling’s Simetria operates in this tradition: the blood-caste system, the spatial segregation of the city, the Church’s role in maintaining ideological order—all are legible as analogues of real historical arrangements while remaining coherent as fictional constructs.
The Lovecraftian cosmology that underlies the affliction lore deserves specific attention. Singerling appropriates the Lovecraftian lexicon—non-Euclidean geometry, the corruption of the human body by contact with incomprehensible otherness—but strips it of its reactionary valence. Where H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is frequently identified by scholars as encoding anxieties about racial and cultural contamination (Houellebecq 73; Joshi 209), Singerling’s distortions are indifferent agents that “don’t discriminate”—striking high and low bloods alike, undermining the caste theology that claims divine sanction for its hierarchies. The non-Euclidean becomes, in this reading, not a figure for the foreign or the degenerate but for the indifference of a universe that refuses to ratify social arrangements. Tillie’s trajectory is thus not a survival of cosmic horror so much as a survival of social horror, with the cosmological frame functioning to expose the latter’s comparable irrationality.
Postcolonial frameworks, and specifically the work of Frantz Fanon on the psychic dimensions of class and race stratification, illuminate Tillie’s consciousness throughout. Fanon’s analysis of the colonized subject’s internalization of inferiority—and the violence, psychic and material, required to dismantle it—finds resonance in Tillie’s refusal to mourn in ways she “doesn’t have the luxury” for, and in her deliberate construction of a new self through the assumption of a high-blood persona (Fanon 41–62). The donning of the Sophie Roshem identity is not simply mimicry in the pejorative sense; it is, in Homi K. Bhabha’s more nuanced formulation, a performance that exposes the constructedness of the original, undermining the naturalness on which caste ideology depends (Bhabha 122).
The story also engages, obliquely but meaningfully, with feminist debates about sex work and agency. Without reducing the establishment of A Taste of Refinement to a simple allegory, the narrative’s insistence on Tillie’s reflective, informed consent—and on the qualitative difference between the violation she experienced in the lower city and the conditions of her new employment—positions it within a broader tradition of fiction that refuses to treat working-class women’s sexual choices as inherently degraded or coerced. Martha Nussbaum’s influential arguments for distinguishing among types of bodily labor and their conditions, rather than stigmatizing sex work categorically, are a useful philosophical reference point for reading the story’s ethics (Nussbaum 693–697).
Evaluation
Strengths
“Paper Airplane Poet” achieves a notable balance between genre facility and literary ambition. The world-building is efficient and evocative, introducing a complex cosmological and social system without the expository weight that often burdens speculative novelettes. Singerling’s decision to place the Lovecraftian horror in the background—as atmospheric context rather than narrative engine—is formally astute, preventing it from overwhelming the intimate human story at the work’s center.
The characterization of Tillie is the story’s most significant achievement. She is rendered with psychological interiority rarely accorded to female protagonists in secondary-world fantasy who occupy comparable social positions. Her agency, while constrained, is never negated; the narrative consistently positions her as the primary interpreter of her own experience, so that the reader’s ethical compass is calibrated through her perspective rather than through the moral adjudications of more socially empowered characters.
The concluding image—Tillie amending Nicolus’ poem—is elegant and earned. It enacts rather than describes her transformation: from the woman who could not read his verse to the woman who rewrites it, and whose rewriting is the truer account. This is the kind of closing gesture that demonstrates genuine craft.
Weaknesses
The novelette is not without limitations. The figure of Jacub—Gemma’s husband—is somewhat schematic, serving primarily as a legible threat that motivates Tillie’s departure without being developed into a character of meaningful complexity. Similarly, Madam Gerton’s presentation, while efficient, risks reproducing the archetype of the benevolent brothel proprietress without sufficient complication.
More substantively, the story’s treatment of Nicolus’ queerness—his preference for men, and his evident feeling for Vergil—is introduced and then handled with a lightness that neither fully integrates it into the story’s thematic architecture nor allows it independent weight. Given that Simetria’s blood-caste system already functions as an apparatus of social control, the implication that same-sex desire occupies an additionally fraught position in this world is legible but underdeveloped. A narrative so attentive to the gendered dimensions of class oppression might have extended that attentiveness to the intersection of sexual identity and social hierarchy more fully.
Finally, while the novelette’s status as a companion piece to Blessed is the Rot presumably answers some questions about the world’s larger mythology, readers encountering the story independently may find certain elements—the theology of the Euclidean, the history of the Others, the function of surveyors within the political order—suggestive but insufficiently grounded. The balance between what a standalone short work can afford to leave open and what it needs to establish is not always optimally struck.
Conclusion
“Paper Airplane Poet” is a quietly accomplished piece of speculative fiction that earns its emotional and thematic complexity without sacrificing narrative momentum. Singerling’s deployment of non-Euclidean horror as a structural metaphor for class violence and bodily precarity is sustained and coherent; her protagonist’s trajectory from grief-stricken orphan to self-authoring survivor is rendered with nuance and without false comfort. The story refuses both the rescue fantasy and the degradation narrative, positioning Tillie’s choices within a realistic matrix of constrained options without divesting those choices of genuine moral weight.
The work’s engagement with questions of agency, performance, and identity within stratified social systems invites ongoing critical attention. Future scholarship might productively situate Singerling’s Alfom universe within the broader contemporary tradition of secondary-world fiction concerned with labor, bodily autonomy, and cosmological indifference—alongside works by Jemisin, Arkady Martine, and Nnedi Ofosu—and might also attend more fully to the Lovecraftian inheritance the text both deploys and revises. As a companion piece, the novelette succeeds in expanding the thematic and affective range of its parent novel; as a standalone work, it demonstrates that Singerling is a writer capable of considerable literary ambition, whose Alfom universe merits sustained critical engagement.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton UP, 1995.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Grove Press, 1963.
Houellebecq, Michel. H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Trans. Dorna Khazeni. Believer Books, 2005.
Jemisin, N. K. The Fifth Season. Orbit, 2015.
Joshi, S. T. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft. Hippocampus Press, 2010.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace Books, 1969.
Nussbaum, Martha. “‘Whether from Reason or Prejudice’: Taking Money for Bodily Services.” Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 27, no. S2, 1998, pp. 693–723.
Singerling, Sheri. Blessed is the Rot. [Publisher forthcoming].
—. “Paper Airplane Poet.” Clarkesworld, May, 2026, pp. 46–67.