I spent some time playing around with ChatGPT, the interactive, stateful language model from OpenAI. I wanted to see how well it could read fiction for implication, especially speculative fiction. So I gave it excerpts from my novella “The New Mother,” and asked it comprehension questions about the speculative conceit and character interiority, as well as questions about where the story might be going. (Content note: the story, and the excerpts given to ChatGPT, involve mentions of violence done to children and sexual assault done to an adult.)
Read MoreTag: Story: The New Mother
I’ve had “The New Mother” up on Medium since 2015.
Today, I had to take it down.
In 2015, Medium was a fairly new platform, one that made it very easy to put lengthy things online in an attractive, easy-to-read format. It integrated nicely with Twitter, which I still used a lot back then. It had a comprehensive analytics page for tracking engagement. It seemed like a great place to put “The New Mother” to get it some more attention. And it was; hundreds of people who might never have otherwise read the story scrolled through that entire page over the next few months.
Eventually, attention dwindled, as I knew it would. But I figured I might as well leave the story up until some compelling reason came along to take it down.
Over the years there were changes to Medium’s platform (the establishment of a filtered paywall, subscriptions, the Medium Partner Program), but nothing I couldn’t opt out of. The licensing setting on the page remained “all rights reserved.” That was enough for me, as the Terms of Service always contained language roughly equivalent to:
You own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium.
By posting content to Medium, you give us a nonexclusive license to publish it on Medium Services, including anything reasonably related to publishing it (like storing, displaying, reformatting, and distributing it). In consideration for Medium granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Medium may enable advertising on the Services, including in connection with the display of your content or other information. We may also use your content to promote Medium, including its products and content. We will never sell your content to third parties without your explicit permission.
Medium.com Terms of service, march 2016 – August 2020
That language is going away at the end of the month. Effective September 1, 2020, Medium’s new Terms of Service will read:
You retain your rights to any content you submit, post or display on or through the Services.
Unless otherwise agreed in writing, by submitting, posting, or displaying content on or through the Services, you grant Medium a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, and sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your content in all media formats and distribution methods now known or later developed without compensation to you.
medium.com terms of service as of september 2020
That is a very different set of things Medium suddenly wants permission to do with my story.
I don’t know many fiction authors interested in giving away the right to publish their work royalty- and compensation-free, anywhere in the world. Not only does Medium want license to do that, they want it “sublicensable”—they want to be able to give other people the right to publish my story, too.
And what about “derivative works?” Does Medium want carte blanche to, say, hire someone to write sequels to my story? Because I don’t see anything in here that stops them from doing so. It’s a nonexclusive right, so they couldn’t sue me if I also wrote and published a sequel, but that would be a very small comfort if a global publishing platform started promoting alternate versions of my characters.
This looks like a huge rights grab. The minute I read the new ToS, “The New Mother” came down.
You can still read it, though. It’s right here on my website now, where the only one who decides what happens to it is me.
Nueva Madre, Arrate Hidalgo’s Spanish translation of “The New Mother,” is on the final ballot for the Premio Ignotus award, an honor voted on by members of the Asociación Española de Fantasía, Ciencia Ficción y Terror, its partner organizations, fans who opted into an open enrollment period for participation, and members of the Hispacón convention. I’m in the category for Best Foreign Story, which as I understand it is for any translated work shorter than novel length that was first published in Spain in the past year. The other nominees for the category include familiar names Rachel Swirsky and Aliette de Bodard, an author named Michael Wehunt with whom I wasn’t previously familiar as he seems to write mostly horror, and one other. The fifth nominee, to my astonishment, is Louisa May Alcott, for the Spanish translation of “The Abbot’s Ghost.”
Never in my life did I expect to be able to say I was in competition with Louisa May Alcott for a literary award (though Nueva Madre certainly offers a new take on the notion of little women). So for that novelty, as well as the nomination itself, I’m grateful for all the Premios Ignotus voters.
Editorial Cerbero’s Spanish edition of “The New Mother” (translated by Arrate Hidalgo) has been out for a few months now, and Nueva Madre‘s reception by its Spanish readership has been supremely heartening. The Goodreads responses—which I’ve never felt a desire to read for my publications in English, but discover I’m fascinated by now that I’m in translation—have been consistently positive. My most common reason for signing into Twitter lately has been to see if Arrate has flagged a new review for my attention.
The first one I can recall seeing was David Pierre’s review on his personal site. Machine translation informs me that he recommends the book, and says, “Nueva madre is a short science fiction novel that, in a masterly way, poses a future that seems odd to us, but that could destroy us as a society.”
Miriam Beizana at A Librería is not a frequent reader of SF, and seems skeptical of novella-length fiction, but seems to have enjoyed Nueva Madre despite those reservations. She says something that Google thinks means:
I have read many precious short novels that I will recommend ad nauseam. Virginia Woolf is an expert in this format, I could also quote The Hours of Michael Cunningham; or in a more indie look There are no fair men left in Sodoma by J. Font and the wonder of O derradeiro book by Emma Olsen by Berta Dávila. I can not avoid making a comparison between these titles and Yabarí , Mud or Chlorophilia . While the first ones remain as a reminiscence in my head, the seconds have a more fleeting life in my memories.
I have to say that with New Mother , maybe, maybe, I have found in this little book what I hope to find in a novel of these characteristics. Noting, that yes, that the 187 pages indicated in the technical sheet would be about 100 in a more common A5 size, which the achievement is even greater.
Ester Barroso Jaime wrote a review that I actually have a human translation of, thanks to my mother posting it on Facebook and getting a reply from a bilingual friend. They write:
Not all writers are so brave when it comes to writing, but Fischer is in The New Mother. With mastery, the author puts the finger on the sore spot, he makes the reader wonder and question things; he leads him, page after page, to think about the possibility that he has created. To what we give for granted and normal, he gives it a whole turn demonstrating that the meaning of “normal”, in any field, is arbitrary. And what is worse: the things that humans are capable of doing in order to maintain that structure called “normal”. Who are the monsters then? The “normal” ones who prefer to walk on the safe side or those who suffer from this pathology? Survival in its pure state is served.
It’s lovely to see a new group of readers engage with my story. Gracias a todos ustedes que compartieron sus reacciones a Nueva Madre.
There’s a new, long interview with me up at Conflict of Interest, a magazine covering the visual art and literary communities in Austin, Texas. Rebecca Marino talked with me about “The New Mother,” writing process, influences, translation, and gave me room to ramble about lots of other things. This interview is, I think, the first time I’ve publicly articulated what my priorities would be were we faced with the spread of a condition like GDS.
I personally think our sexual dimorphism is nothing more than a happenstance of evolution, not invested with any kind of fundamental ethical importance. There are many in the story who believe that GDS heralds the extinction of men, and while the validity of that fear is left up to the reader, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing for people in the story to worry about. If GDS were to occur in the real world, I would have sentimental and aesthetic reasons to want preserve the human male phenotype if possible but not at the expense of individual human rights, which are ethically charged in a way that supersedes aesthetics and sentimentality. I’d rather see my own morphology disappear into history than persist via the subjugation of other people.
It’s out! You can now buy a copy of Nueva Madre of your very own to enjoy en español, translated by the inimitable Arrate Hidalgo. It’s listed as a novela corta, or “short novel,” which I suppose makes me a short novelist. Seems accurate.
I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these beauties. The publisher describes the work thusly:
Partenogénesis Humana Contagiosa. Síndrome del Gameto Diploide. Lleva, al menos, cinco años sucediendo, sea cual sea el nombre que se le dé. Mujeres en edad fértil que corren el riesgo de quedar embarazadas de manera espontánea cada vez que ovulan. Mujeres que tienen hijas que, técnicamente, son clones de sí mismas. Algunos lo llaman epidemia, otros milagro, y hay quien se lleva las manos a la cabeza arguyendo que significará la extinción de los hombres. Tess Mendoza, periodista independiente, lleva mucho tiempo siguiendo la noticia, entrevistando a todos los que parecen tener algo que decir al respecto. ¿Es una enfermedad? ¿Es lícito considerar seres humanos a estas mujeres y a sus hijas? ¿Existe algún riesgo para su propio embarazo, fruto de un donante anónimo?
Which I think translates to something like:
Contagious Human Parthenogenesis. Diploid Gamete Syndrome. Whatever you call it, it’s been happening for at least five years.Women of childbearing age who run the risk of becoming pregnant spontaneously each time they ovulate. Women who have daughters who, technically, are clones of themselves. Some call it an epidemic, others a miracle, and some people put their hands to their heads, arguing that it means the extinction of men. Tess Mendoza, an independent journalist, has been following the story for a long time, interviewing all those who seem to have something to say about it. It is a disease? Is it permissible to consider these women and their daughters as human beings? Is there any risk to her own pregnancy, the result of an anonymous donor?
Here’s what the Spanish edition of “The New Mother” is going to look like. It’s the work of Cecilia García, and I adore it. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen an image of Tess, and she looks so much like she did in my head. I love the press badge, and the little picture of identical GDS siblings on her phone, and her wavy hair, and I especially love the uncertain look on her face. The bustle and blur of the city rising behind her is perfect, suggestive of the complex interplay of social forces Tess tries to navigate as she moves through the story. And that bright, full moon dominating the human skyline and framing the main character is symbolic of the themes in ways I’m sure don’t require elaboration. I’m also very pleased to see not just my name on there, but also Arrate Hidalgo’s, without whom Nueva Madre would not exist.
This beautiful thing will be available from Editorial Cerbero in November.
The contracts are signed and tweeted, so now it can be revealed that the Spanish press Cerbero will be publishing Nueva Madre, the Spanish edition of “The New Mother.” It will be available in November, in paperback and as an e-book. More details on that soon.
This never would have happened without the phenomenal Arrate Hidalgo, who translated the story and championed its publication. In addition to working as a professional translator and as an associate editor for Aqueduct Press, Arrate writes journalism about the Spanish SF scene, such as this article published just yesterday on women’s voices in ciencia ficción, “La Invasión de las Mujeres Invisibles.”
“The New Mother” was translated and published back in September by China’s (and the world’s) largest circulation science fiction magazine, Science Fiction World. In fact, given the circulation, it’s entirely possible that more people will have read this version of “The New Mother” than the one I originally wrote.
Now the contributor’s copies have made their way across the ocean to me. Looking through it, though I can’t read the text, I notice a lot of interesting things.
- My name, when translated into Chinese, is 尤金 费雪. I’m told this contains characters for both “gold” and “snow.”
- There are many translation footnotes, most commonly for elements of the story dealing with acronyms and initials. All acronyms and initials are rendered in English characters in the text, then contextualized below. There is one footnote that, from context, is clearly explaining why, in English, a group with a condition called HCP might name their news magazine “The Hiccup.” More common acronyms, like DNA, are still printed in English, but not footnoted.
- In the English version of the story, the journalistic passages that made up every other section were distinguished from the narrative passages by italics. In the Chinese version there is clearly a typeface distinction going on, but I don’t know how to characterize it. I want to say that the parts that were italicized in English are here rendered in sketchier, less blocky looking characters. I don’t know if that’s just same typeface’s equivalent of italics, or something more like a different font.
- There’s a fantastic, manga-style illustration to open the story; a double page splash of angry people shouting across a hospital as young girls are pulled away from their mother, while in the center a religious figure with hooded eyes reads from a book while standing beneath a sign that says “KEEP QUIET.” Here’s the best scan I was able to get:
I’m quite please to say that “The New Mother” has been selected for inclusion in Lethe Press’s Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, edited by A. M. Dellamonica and Steve Berman. This will be the first time my work appears in a reprint anthology. It looks to be a gorgeous book, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it and learn who I’m sharing the TOC with. “Heiress of Russ” is an appellation I never would have claimed for myself, but couldn’t be happier to receive. You can buy the book from Lethe’s site here.