"Finisterra" by David Moles
David Moles, who makes his F&SF debut in the December 2007 issue said in an interview that his story "Finisterra" is about a would-be aeronautical engineer from a backward future Earth who finds her obscure skills unexpectedly in demand on a strange and distant planet.
"It’s a riff on an old theme — the skilled protagonist who’s called on to travel to a strange locale to do a job that only that protagonist can do, and who ends up changed by the experience," Moles said. "’Finisterra’ would mostly make sense, I think, to any SF reader back to the Golden Age — apart from the setting, it would probably make sense to Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain."
The first inspiration for "Finisterra" was an illustration called "The Engineer," Moles said. "[The illustration was] an homage to Vermeer’s ‘Geographer,’ by my good friend Lara Wells," he said. "[It’s of] a woman in early modern costume working at a window, in a room full of illustrations and models for airships and Da Vinci flying machines. A woman in Da Vinci’s time wouldn’t have had the opportunities Da Vinci had, and Lara wanted to capture that — her Engineer is trapped in that room, dreaming of flight but unable to fly. The character of Bianca Nazario came directly from that image, though I transplanted her to a different time and place, and gave her a means of — qualified — escape."
