‘She says, I had no choice,’ said Josephine. ‘She says you’re holding me captive.’
This story seemed to be simply about a crazy man who fell for an inanimate object. But as we all know, that’s just not fantastic. So Tidbeck decides to give us a rather disturbing world where machine and human love each other and can even procreate. She then decides to take it a step further into the disturbing and have the new airship believe that she is being held captive and has been raped by the main character. These details make the reader’s skin crawl because we are put into the position of having to consider what it would be like to be the airship or the main character. Also, we have to consider what it says about humanity that we did not take into consideration the airship’s part in the story. We knew that she was not the original Beatrice. We knew that the main character was trying to make himself believe that she was even through the distance that she placed between them. The lack of consideration from the main character plays directly into the lack of consideration for the reader. It makes us question our own morals, but the question is disconcerting because we are thinking about an inanimate object.