My dad has always been a nervous, white-knuckle flier, and in 2018 he jointly edited a collection of stories about terror in the high skies (his copilot was horror and fantasy critic Bev Vincent). I fly quite a bit myself—I enjoy it, although I didn’t always—and on one transatlantic trip I looked out my window and imagined the cloudscape suddenly punctured by dozens of rocket contrails. When my father asked if I wanted to contribute something to Flight or Fright, this idea was already well developed.

“You Are Released” is, I suppose, my attempt to write a David Mitchell story. Mitchell is the author of Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and over the last decade I’ve sort of fallen in love with his sentences—which float and dip and soar like kites—and with his gift for kaleidoscopic narratives that quickly shift from one time and place and perspective to another. I learned a lot about the business of being a pilot from a book called Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker, who is himself a bit David Mitchellian in tone. It was Vanhoenacker who drew attention to the rather poignant phrase “you are released,” which is what traffic control always says to an aircraft as it crosses out of their airspace.

My thanks to retired airline pilot Bruce Black for talking me through proper procedure in the cockpit. His granular attention to detail made this a much better story. Usual caveat, however: any technical errors are mine and mine alone.

This may be a peculiar thing to say about a story that concerns the end of the world, but I wanna thank Bev and my dad for giving me a reason to write this one—it made me happy.

There wouldn’t be a Full Throttle if not for the support, generosity, and kindness of the editors who first published nine of the stories herein: Christopher Conlon, Bill Schafer, Sam Weller, Mort Castle, Lawrence Block, Peter Crowther, Christopher Golden, Tyler Cabot, David Granger, and Bev Vincent. Jennifer Brehl, my editor at William Morrow, read, edited, and greatly improved each of these stories. A story in these pages was specifically written for Jim Orr—I am grateful to him for allowing me to share it with a wider audience and should add that the story in question wouldn’t exist at all if not for Jim’s generous contribution to the Pixel Project, an organization dedicated to reducing violence against women (see: thepixelproject.net).