Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

This is our discussion of the story:

The New Mother by Eugene Fischer

This novellawas originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, April/May 2015. It's available to read on-line .

This story is part of the 2015 Nebula Award nominees short story discussion.

I found this a really interesting novella, smartly written and with several things to recommend it. I'm really glad it's recently become available to read online (because digging up old issues of Asimov's magazine isn't always convenient for expanding the number of readers.)

A pregnant reporter is writing an investigative article about a recently discovered, sexually-transmitted disease with an unusual effect: it women to spontaneously become pregnant with clones of themselves. (So not only does the disease render men obsolete for reproduction, it would also seem to render them extinct.)

The reporter conducts a number of interviews while investigating the story, including with scientists & public health officials, and there are opinions on whether it's really a disease or an evolutionary change to a new subspecies.

Mostly Tess is focusing her story around a religious cult whose leader performed involuntary hysterectomies on a number of children born from such a woman, believing that without a male seed, the children can have no souls. And mostly, she's hoping to score an interview with the woman from that cult who gave birth to those children, apparently the patient zero.

The story has a lot of hard biological and genetic science sprinkled in, and also a strong human interest component (including the reporter's thoughts on her own pregnancy, mixed with speculation about what a future society with such a sub-species might become. The journalist point of view works really well for dropping in all sorts of interesting "facts" as well as opinions.

I just finished this one, and I quite liked it. I thought that all the varied reactions to the disease that the author was able to show through the investigative article story line were really fascinating. Not to mention realistic. I could absolutely see things playing out in just this way. That speculation was really the strong point for me. This isn't an action-based story, but the ideas were so intriguing that I couldn't help but keep reading.