‘Sky Daddy’ Takes Airplane Fetishization to New Heights

Kate Folk sits in an observation lobby at SFO, watching planes glide gracefully skywards. An adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco, Folk has been thinking a lot about air travel lately. The main character of her forthcoming novel, Sky Daddy (April 8; Random House), is sexually attracted to planes.

By day, the book’s protagonist Linda earns peanuts as a content moderator for a tech company based in Menlo Park; by night, she ogles plane wreck footage and rides the AirTrain around SFO, cruising for new lovers.

“An international airport was my version of a speed-dating event,” Linda explains, typifying the novel’s understated humor.

It’s a premise that would be easy to exploit for shock, or for laughs. (Most people can’t talk about objectophilia or David Cronenberg’s Crash with a straight face.) But Sky Daddy isn’t here for cheap thrills. Instead, the novel lends a gently empathetic ear to Linda’s taboo desires, which keep her at a melancholy remove from the rest of humankind.

Ironically, Linda’s alienation is what makes her predicament so relatable, says Folk. Linda “wants connection with people, but is also really afraid of it.”

“We were two lonely people passing time together,” Linda says of the guy from work who serves as her beard, “though perhaps that was all a relationship was.”

By contrast, you can practically hear Linda’s voice get breathy as she describes her real paramours: “What man could propel himself to a speed of 150 knots…? What man could carry me across continents and seas, all while keeping me warm and oxygenated inside his aluminum torso?”

Folk herself isn’t so seduced by the glinting silver bodies on the tarmac. “Everyone hates flying, and so do I, a lot of the time. It’s become so everyday for us that it’s a chore, like taking a bus in the sky,” she laughs, looking out the window at a taxiing jetliner. Yet at the same time, she points out, flight entails feats of engineering “that previous generations of people would be amazed were even possible.”

That fruitful paradox — the banal rubbing shoulders with the miraculous — is part of what made Folk want to write a novel about airplanes. Other inspiration came from an “eerie” flight simulation video channel on YouTube that a friend sent her way. “You’re in the cockpit, and you see the controls just moving on their own,” she says of the animations, which reproduce historical plane crashes. “It made me think about the planes as sentient beings, doing their own thing.”

Linda’s ultimate goal is to “marry” one of these “fine fellow[s]” of the firmament (ideally a certain 737 with whom she has a steamy past, though she’s none too picky) by dying in a plane crash. The novel’s romance plot is infused with increasing suspense and menace as Linda grows desperate to put a ring on it.

In Folk’s view, Linda channels a common “feeling of society being at a dead end, with climate change and everything happening politically,” Folk says. “What were once considered the normal steps in an adult life either don’t seem possible anymore, or people just think, ‘What’s the point?’”

Readers of Folk’s debut short fiction collection, Out There, will find throughlines with Sky Daddy’s focus on unorthodox love. For instance, in Out There’s title story and in its closer, “Big Sur,” foxy androids charm and scam women so sick of deadbeat men that they often prefer to be catfished by a bot.

Folk has lived in San Francisco for 17 years, during which time she earned an MFA at the University of San Francisco and served as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her intimate knowledge of our region’s psychic and physical geographies adds a chilly realism to Sky Daddy’s descriptions of Daly City, the Richmond District, and Burlingame, where Linda hornily watches planes take off and land.

What makes the Bay Area the right setting for this tale of oddball desire? For one thing, says Folk, Silicon Valley has long been the birthplace (and deathbed) of eccentric fantasies, from the Gold Rush to tech startups. She wanted to explore the shadows cast by all those soaring dreams.

Case in point: as a content moderator, Sky Daddy’s protagonist belongs to the “underclass of tech workers who have to do the dirty work” for social media sites that want to protect their users from disturbing images and text, says Folk. Overseas and in the U.S., low-pay employees like Linda “are tasked with absorbing all of this awful content and taking on this trauma, [theoretically] for the collective good — but actually, just for these companies to be able to do things as cheaply as they can.”

In a world that bleak, Linda’s longing for a sublime ending is perhaps not so impossible to understand. “I think it’s a common desire for one’s life to have meaning and to be pulled along by something bigger than you, and very powerful,” Folk says. In the distance, another plane nimbly frees itself from the SFO runway, soon to look down upon us all from 20,000 feet.

‘Sky Daddy’ is released on April 8, 2025. Kate Folk appears for reading and discussion on Wednesday, April 9, at Booksmith in San Francisco; Thursday, April 24 at Book Passage in Corte Madera; and Saturday, May 3, at Womb House Books in Oakland.