Review: The Girl My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed

I was having misgivings about bailing out of this category. Just to recap, I read the Kaiju story and pronounced it slightly amusing but intended for an audience 10-20 years older than me who remembers the Kennedy assassination and enjoys spotting political jokes in Bullwinkle. Then I read the No Vegetables one and got upset because it reminded me of yet another incident where someone did an angry emotional explosion at me for ephemeral reasons, which is something that happens to me a lot in this particular subculture and is high on my list of reasons for backing away from it. Probably has to do with religious differences (see below). 

Then I wondered if I’d be perceived as transphobic if I avoided reading stories with transpeople in them. I’ve been mentioning inclusion info in my brief synopses because it’s front and center these days, and I do agree representation is important, even though I'm not seeing a lot by categories that I'm adjacent to, like neurodivergents and Pacific Islanders. I applied to be a panelist at Worldcon, kind of half facetiously; I’ve done it before at other cons but I’m not even sure if I’m promoting anything at this point since the dino anthology isn’t out yet. Anyway, they make you fill out a questionnaire as to whether you have any marginalized identities.

I don’t, unless you count growing up in the South Pacific. A lot of younger people see that I’m from Hawai’i and assume I’m rich, since their entire experience with the place is from the recipient side of the tourist industry, but all those tourists have more dough than my dad, who was a beach bum from LA who liked the vibe in Hawai’i and managed a store that sold suntan lotion and chocolate bars to people like Georgia O’Keefe. We left when I was ten due to my dad’s poor financial choices and my mom’s longing to move back to the mainland, but until then I was one of a handful of white kids in schools where I was outnumbered by Asians. Which I actually kind of enjoy, because I appreciate Asian culture, and I still would rather live around lots of Asians. I like their music, food, sense of humor, and cartoon mascots (I have a strong preference for Labubu over Hello Kitty).

 And I like their feminism. In South Korea there is a flavor of feminism that includes female-centric things. Such as female-gaze entertainment (e.g. K-Pop Demon Hunters, where female characters are unapologetically central and free to do things like looking gluttonous or mean, or objectifying men) and a lot of the female bonding which occurs around things like K-Pop fandom. So my feminist expression these days leans toward the practice of encouraging women to socialize at events where men aren’t centered, so they can make friends and have fun. Crafting, collecting, listening to music, reading books, doing femme stuff. Other parts of this worldview involve not dating men or having children, but I’ve aged out of the ability to do those things voluntarily, so I’m trying to focus on the part about encouraging women to have a social/public/intellectual life that isn’t about dating, mate hunting, or accommodating men’s desires.

That’s where I’m coming from when I moan about all these trans stories exploring the deeper nature of one's inner duality, while I’m busy trying to help girls ignore men better. Swimming in different directions.

Anyway, The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For disappointed me in paragraph three: “People whose minds are put into enhanced bodies always say they feel the same as ever. But maybe they just don’t remember what it’s like to feel at all.”

I’ve written many grouchy words about my dislike for psionics and bodyswap and other science fiction themes that reinforce the idea that minds and bodies are as separate as turntables and vinyl. Bodyswap is a persistent human fantasy though, and tales of people getting transformed into different sorts of people, or animals, or mythic figures, are widespread.

Here’s a Hawaiian one for you that I used to hear as a kid in school. Sometimes the teachers would just have us all sit there cross-legged, outside, listening to local stories, and there was once this guy who could turn into a shark. It was pretty obvious since he had a shark mouth right on his back, but he always wore a cape over his back (made of feathers, which meant he was wealthy enough that people didn’t tend to challenge him to a fight, since apparently he’s got connections).

He lived in a small town with a good beach, and on nice days he would park himself on a trail leading to the beach, waiting for visitors from other parts of the island, where they didn’t know about him yet. He would say “hello, isn’t it a nice day, where are you headed?”

And if the visitors said “we’re going fishing” or “we’re going swimming,” the shark man would tell them to have a nice day, and then he would sneak around through a shortcut, jump into the waves, transform into a shark, go find those visitors, and eat them.

However, if the visitors said they were going to do land-bound things, like hunting pigs, or searching for plants, the shark man would get bored and wander off to take a nap. It wasn’t long before savvy visitors learned that one must lie to the shark man in order to get uninterrupted beach access. Which led to the very important local tradition that if some nosy rich asshole asks where you’re going, lie. Maybe he’s a predator. Better to be safe, yeah?

The shark man never did a full Jack L. Chalker style bodyswap though. He was always a were shark, and you’d know it right away if you saw him naked.

Maybe in some alternate universe there’s a world where all the science fiction I dislike is true. People are telepaths, who beam their thoughts at one another and sometimes spy on each other (because everyone has an inner dialogue and there are no neurodivergents in their world). They bodyswap every other Thursday (because your mind and personality are totally unrelated to the body you’re inhabiting -- yes, transfolk still do take hormones in this story's world but they're apparently super strong ones that can make you grow a uterus). And when they’re not doing that, they make clones, which are a magical sort of person existing in their own unique caste, in a world where human rights got bifurcated into Clone-Applicable Law and Non-Clone Applicable Law so that clones exist in a unique class with their own rules, like suddenly having to give up a kidney without asking why.

So yeah, clones as unique class and bodyswapping (and they don’t even have shark mouths on their back to give you a clue as to who is REALLY inside that body) are enough to get my no vote. However, I already bypassed one story in this subgroup for the ephemeral reason it reminded me of an argument I once had (in which I still feel a tad pissy, I tend to remember stuff like that forever), and I’m trying to be fair and give things a chance, so I pressed on.

 Then there’s a Boys From Brazil reference about how this corporation perpetually clones their CEO “and raises her in just the same way the Founder was raised” in order to theoretically assure conformity. And right here the science intrudes, and I feel like asking the jury if they know anybody who speaks with a different accent from their parents. I once knew a family who moved a lot; the dad sounded like Scotland, the mom like Boston, the kids like New Jersey, California, and Chicago. It was wild.

 But yeah, people in this Mythic Science Fictional Headspace where we have Clones As Unique Class and Minds Slotting Into Bodies tend to also have this view that 95% of us is directly inflicted by parenting, with trauma such as reading horror novels responsible for the rest. It’s almost a secular religion, if I can sneak in a reference to Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard again.

 I have this weird fundamentalist strain to my science fiction fandom (that likely relates to a lot of my friction with the crowd) in that I was so disappointed when psionics turned out to be a load of crap I developed this fetish for scientifically-accurate-science-fiction. Either that or science fiction that flat out admits it’s actually a magical fairy tale, like Star Wars.

 The aspect of science fiction that is more like a secular religion absorbed things like psionics back when they were potential science. The subject was interpreted by numerous science fiction authors, some of them quite brilliant, to the extent where psionics are sciencefictional [sfnal] canon while not being established science. An element people expect in a certain kind of science fiction that’s more about extrapolation in this spiritual tradition than bouncing off current science.

 It's sort of like people still writing about the dangers of miasmas because some Victorian wrote a miasma fic that was so awesome it rocked everyone’s pre-existing philosophy precisely thirty-seven degrees, and now you can go to SF cons and attend panels on The Current State of Miasma Fic even though everyone knows miasmas are bullshit. So much great miasma writing though! (And now you understand how I feel about religion.)

 So anyway, here I am, three pages into this review, ranting about how I’m reviewing science fiction because I hate science fiction, which is pretty weird, so I’ll get back to the business of reviewing a fable from a religion I don’t follow for its other qualities.

 Our main character is having a surrogate pregnancy of the Founder’s latest clone, and she also gets the honor of being the Founder’s wife and raising her latest clone to age eighteen, after which she gets to fake her own death and fade into the background. But she has trouble conceiving, so a new girl with simiar hair/eye color is found (Colleen) and she and the narrator fall in love. And come up with an escape plan to keep the baby from having the old vampire Founder mindswapped in.

 At this point I felt like I could see the ending coming, and I cruised through some Return to Oz kind of stuff where people shop for objectified bodies. I sort of thought there would be an epilogue where the baby, the first of her line raised by parents who are Truly In Love, turns out to save the world just like Harry Potter, but no, it ends with Colleen in her third trimester and the narrator burbling “We’ll have to learn to see her for who she is, not who she looks like or what her genes want her to be.”

If I was reading this in hard copy it would be flying right about now, since this tract from a religion I do not follow is winding up with an earnest summation of its philosophy, about how there’s an authentic you as well as a false you that your DNA wants you to be. Like the author sat down to write a story about clones in which DNA is the villain. And I’m not buying it. I couldn’t find much to like about this story but it seems like the kind of thing Hollywood likes -- smoothly written, discernable characters, plot involving chase scenes -- so maybe it’ll end up being a movie. Sorry Cameron. You're probably an awesome person and I'm sure lots of other people will love your story a lot. Maybe one day you'll write one that I like better. 

Here, go see for yourself.