Reviews for “The New Mother” Roll In

Reviews for my novella are starting to appear, so who’s ready for some aggregation?

I think the very first person whom I didn’t already know to talk about the story online was Joseph Tomaras, who quoted several lines on twitter and ended by saying:

Strongly recommended: "The New Mother," novella by Eugene Fischer, in the current issue of Asimov's.

— Joseph Tomaras (@epateur) March 15, 2015

Other Twitter commenters included Bill Tyrell:

Recommended: "The New Mother" by @glorioushubris in this month's Asimov's. Intense.

— Bill Tyrell (@billytyrell) March 19, 2015

and this from user @shigeruhiko, who responded to me directly:

@glorioushubris I just read your story in Asimov's this week! Amazing! I loved it a lot. Thank you for an awesome story!

— SailorStar Aphrodite (@shigeruhiko) March 20, 2015

An overwhelmingly positive reception was Amal El-Mohtar’s review for her column Rich and Strange, where she writes

I’m astounded by this story, by its elegant, thoughtful thoroughness: every character Tess encounters is fully formed, complex, no one of them limited to their narrative function. In a way reading this story is a master class in observing the manipulation of rhetoric: who, in this story, considers women with GDS to be human and who does not beautifully inflects their arguments to varying degrees—and seeing that rhetoric clash with arguments about fetus-personhood is completely fascinating.

But perhaps even more complimentary is the link from her personal site, where she says “I literally cannot think of a single way to improve this story.”

Jeanne Griggs, whom I met when we were seat neighbors at the ICFA banquet, later wrote about it at her site, saying “I never got the chance to embarrass myself in person with Eugene Fischer, although if I’d read his novella, The New Mother, I totally would have.”

Bob Blough, about whom I know nothing, had very nice things to say in his review at Tangent Online:

This is a particularly effective story with a SFnal idea embedded right in its beating heart. Each character is excellently rendered – some in but a few strokes – but all seem real and alive. I was – and still am – impressed.

Finally, I got a brief write up at sfrevu.com by Sam Tomaino–another stranger to me–which concludes that my novella is an “Interesting idea with possible implications well-handled.”

Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to read and talk about “The New Mother.” I really appreciate it.