This series focuses on stories that are both enjoyable and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective. This week, let’s think about motherhood.
Parenthood is more than just genetic material and a womb, though that’s how the trouble begins in “Mother’s Day,” by T.R. North and published in Persistent Visions. I think North captures, with wry humor, how parenthood is also about the acceptance of an awesome responsibility and the realization of the incredible potential of new life.
What North does especially well is capture how parenthood can be a communal activity as well, tying the family unit into whatever community it has chosen and enriching that unit with that same responsibility and potential. And what makes this good science fiction is how North does this in the context of an alien world, with a community of humans and aliens and a cultural context vastly different than our own.
Unfortunately, I think North missed some perfectly good opportunities to insert plot-level tension into this piece. There’s still plenty of scene-level tension, and the story moves smoothly from scene to scene. However, there’s no overarching tension at the level of the plot that serves to paper over the scene transitions, so there are points as you read where there’s really very little to keep you on the edge of your seat. A few unusual events scattered here and there (e.g., “there sure are a lot of bums out today” or something to that effect repeated with increasing intensity) would work to cue the reader in that there’s something dangerous afoot, so even in the interludes where the tension in one scene has been resolved and the tension in the next scene has barely begun, the reader will still be worried about what’s lurking in the darkness just off the edge of the pages.
That said, this is still a great story and worth a read. I enjoyed it, and I think you will, too.