Cyberpunk, affection, green silk, wariness, soup, danger, and escape
April 15, 2025 4:12 AM Subscribe
"She’s holding up a fabric sample, deep green embroidered with gold. I wore green at my adoption too. I’ll wear black to be abandoned." The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For is a science fiction novelette by Cameron Reed, published this month in Reactor, described as: "In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement." Interview with the author. This is Reed's first new published science fiction since the 1990s (she wrote The Fortunate Fall and "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation").
From the interview:
From the interview:
“The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” is the first story you’ve published since 1998. What do you hope readers take away from it?
When I wrote the story I wasn’t thinking at all about conveying a message, or what readers should take away. Of course, things I believe come through in it. For instance, that trans bodies are worth cherishing. Also, that trans women can be disaster lesbians too. That’s an important fact that everyone should know.
....
The characters in the story have signed up to have their lives, their reproductive capacities, and their ability to form romantic and familial bonds controlled and exploited by a corporation, because their world hasn’t given them any better options. But even in the shell of a life they’ve been offered, they’re able to make their own meaning.
This reads like I Saw the TV Glow watches. The medium is stretched and squashed around ridiculous angles that reference the worst and most hackneyed of the form, but it picks up a rhythm that can't be denied. And it perfectly expresses what it is to be alive in this fucking time. Thanks for sharing. We need to invent a word for the genre: "trans scifi kisses Vonnegut on the mouth."
posted by es_de_bah at 5:00 AM on April 15 [4 favorites]
posted by es_de_bah at 5:00 AM on April 15 [4 favorites]
Flight Hardware, do not touch: Thanks for the suggestion. I have just done that.
In case anyone is flabbergasted that I had included Reed's deadname in "she published [previous fiction] as [deadname]", I was basing that choice on Reed's Mastodon post that I linked: "Please go ahead and refer to these works as" [by her previous name] ". It's the only name they've ever been published under, so anything else would just be confusing. And I'm not bothered by seeing my deadname in that context."
But, she said that three years ago, and last year Tor published a new edition of The Fortunate Fall under her new name, so I'm going to also contact her to check whether her 2022 statement still reflects her preference.
posted by brainwane at 5:27 AM on April 15 [10 favorites]
In case anyone is flabbergasted that I had included Reed's deadname in "she published [previous fiction] as [deadname]", I was basing that choice on Reed's Mastodon post that I linked: "Please go ahead and refer to these works as" [by her previous name] ". It's the only name they've ever been published under, so anything else would just be confusing. And I'm not bothered by seeing my deadname in that context."
But, she said that three years ago, and last year Tor published a new edition of The Fortunate Fall under her new name, so I'm going to also contact her to check whether her 2022 statement still reflects her preference.
posted by brainwane at 5:27 AM on April 15 [10 favorites]
Oh man Cameron Reed. Her Androgyny RAQ was an absolute epiphany for me in the 90s, and also flawed in some ways that were extremely of-its-time. It might, despite its flaws, still be the single website I think back on most often, mostly these days for the bit about renaming bathrooms and the lovely-but-unused word "salmacian."
I was shocked, when I went and looked at it just now, at how extremely short it was. I guess that's how little information on gender, and especially nonbinary gender, we had access to at the time. I remember rereading it over and over again, looking for clues I'd missed.
posted by Birds, snakes, and aeroplanes at 5:54 AM on April 15 [3 favorites]
I was shocked, when I went and looked at it just now, at how extremely short it was. I guess that's how little information on gender, and especially nonbinary gender, we had access to at the time. I remember rereading it over and over again, looking for clues I'd missed.
posted by Birds, snakes, and aeroplanes at 5:54 AM on April 15 [3 favorites]
One reason I decided to post this to MeFi today is that The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For has an unreliable narrator who exhibits incredulity and disbelief that someone loves her, and I was just rereading Martha Wells's All Systems Red (the first Murderbot novella), and appreciating similar dynamics in that story, because of the upcoming TV show. And that gets me thinking about similarities with Breq in Ann Leckie's Ancillaryverse trilogy, in her Imperial Radch series, and about what cyberpunk can do vis-a-vis expectations of gender and care.
posted by brainwane at 5:54 AM on April 15 [3 favorites]
posted by brainwane at 5:54 AM on April 15 [3 favorites]
Oh, wow, I definitely came across the renaming the bathrooms page (or some copy?) when I was younger, but I never looked at the rest of her site. Which is a shame because reading it now, I think some of that would have really resonated with me back then. Like the term "radaring".
posted by eruonna at 8:33 AM on April 15
posted by eruonna at 8:33 AM on April 15
I'm still amused at "disaster lesbian," whatever that is. (Fleeing from CEO police?)
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:39 PM on April 15 [1 favorite]
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:39 PM on April 15 [1 favorite]
Reminds me of the webnovel Pith (now unavailable as a publisher has taken it on; it'll supposedly be published next year in an edited form as Queen of Faces). Both involve poor transwomen in a crapsack world with body swapping. I guess it makes sense that body swapping would be a common theme for trans folks.
I expected this one to end with the revelation that the escape was in fact engineered as part of the whole clone plot. Maybe that's just so implicit that we didn't have to be told?
posted by novalis_dt at 4:15 PM on April 15
I expected this one to end with the revelation that the escape was in fact engineered as part of the whole clone plot. Maybe that's just so implicit that we didn't have to be told?
posted by novalis_dt at 4:15 PM on April 15
jenfullmoon, as I understand it, "disaster bi", "disaster gay", and similar rueful self-deprecating descriptions are common among a particular subset of queer English speakers, as Fanlore describes:
...who is some combination of messy, impulsive, unsuccessful in life, full of chaotic energy, and/or socially inept or inappropriate.... The phrase "disaster bi" has its origins in a variant of the popular 3x3 D&D alignment chart meme. This variant, first posted to Tumblr as a blank template by user mechanicalriddle in November 2017, has axes labelled "gay/bi/lesbian" and "distinguished/functional/disaster."posted by brainwane at 7:56 PM on April 15 [1 favorite]
another incredible short story FPP! thank you @brainwane :)
posted by tamarack at 10:23 AM on April 16 [1 favorite]
posted by tamarack at 10:23 AM on April 16 [1 favorite]
The MetaFilter moderators responded to my Contact form request and removed Reed's deadname from the post; thanks, mods!
Reed replied to my question on Bluesky:
Reed replied to my question on Bluesky:
Now that I have publications under Cameron Reed, that should be the primary name, but mentioning the deadname is still fine and good. I want people who remember The Fortunate Fall to be able to figure out that it's the same book.posted by brainwane at 7:37 AM on April 17 [1 favorite]
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Back to the subject at hand: Seeing Cameron posting just two years after transition is, I think, testament to the creativity many of us feel afterwards. And I love 'disaster lesbians' as a term.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 4:56 AM on April 15 [6 favorites]