Mother of Invention - with new storylines

BREAKING NEWS! Jungle Red Writers win the Anthony Award for Best Online Content! Announced last night at Bouchercon 2018.

For a blast from the past, have a look at our very first Jungle Red Writers blog entry, March 22, 2007(!!) entitled, appropriately enough, "On First Efforts." It was Hank and Hallie and other early Reds, Rosemary Harris and Jan Brogan.

HALLIE EPHRON: Something a little different today... science fiction. I grew up as a huge fan, starting with A Wrinkle in Time, going on to The Day of the Triffids, Stranger in a Strange Land, Slaughterhouse Five, Sarah Canary, The Martian Chronicle… And of course television shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek and  I Robot. (I also have a soft spot for The Tick.)

Today we’re hosting some of the authors of a new anthology of sci-fi short stories that explode gender stereotypes. Mother of Invention editor Tansy Rayner Roberts puts it this way:  

"We hope readers of Mother of Invention are inspired to explore new and innovative Artificial Intelligence storylines that go beyond the old-fashioned trope of ‘straight white cis-man as lone genius, creates woman as robot body or computer voice." 

The collection is published by Australian publishing house, Twelfth Planet Press, and funded by a Kickstarter campaign. A quote on the book cover says the stories it take the “familiar tropes of mad science and the creation of artificial life get turned on their heads in the most gloriously feminist way.”

I asked the authors to talk about their short story, what inspired it, and whether there’s a a mystery in it? 

CAT SPARKS 

“Fata Morgana”

An old woman walks out of the desert encased in a mighty war machine.

There’s a mystery in my story, alright. Having saved Bethany, its creator, from the flaming ruins of a corporation’s bunker laboratory, Mach, a battered, autonomous Legionnaire-350, tramps across miles of burnt and blistered desert to bring her to Fata Morgana, a tiny outback settlement in the middle of nowhere. Is it trying to protect her, or something else?

“The Legionnaire-350s were not noted conversationalists, but Mach had mellowed over time. She was proud of the way it had deduced for itself that words had power, sometimes more than firepower itself. But nothing she could say would stop it walking. Not this time. Not until the machine believed them safe.”

I write a lot of science fiction set in climate change-ravaged near futures where technology is running rampant, largely because I don’t think any of it is science fiction. I think this is exactly where we’re headed. My story explores collaboration despite diversity: three disparate characters doing what they can to make a difference in the world: an aged, disallusioned scientist, an evolving robot and a young woman surrounded by violent, stupid men. Between these three, the future might just stand a chance. 

Seanan McGuire 

“Mother, Mother, will you play with me?”

My room is bright and all my toys are here, even the ones Mother thinks I’ve outgrown.

I am a toy collector, and I can track my childhood back through well-loved things, charting the way I played with and loved them through the patterns of ware.  When approaching "Mother, Mother, Will You Play With Me?" I looked to the toys, and the way they kept a record no one else could see.  

There's a mystery in the story, absolutely, but it's not central; it informs the shape of the story, rather than directing it completely. 

Rosaleen Love

“Bright Shores”

This is the story of how Mei lived her life and met her death, and the story of what came after. She was our mother of re-invention. On this day, the day of the spring equinox, we meet to honour her life on earth, and her brave passing to brighter shores.

  

The idea came from a random item on the news. It was reported, in a straightforward manner, that two robots sent into a nuclear disaster zone had ‘died’. They ‘lived’ long enough to beam out images of the destruction, before being destroyed by radiation. If the robots have died, how then, might they have lived, in their previous lives? And as for the life to come, what might that be? 

The mystery at the heart of the story is the cosmic mystery of existence.

HALLIE: Are you a sci-fi fan? What are you reading and watching today?

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