A Son of the Rock

Hodder, 2021, 349 p, £8.99. Reviewed for ParSec 1.

Presumably since for a large part of its history it has been written mainly – though never exclusively – by men, there has not been much of an examination of motherhood in Science Fiction. In The Mother Code Stivers may be trying to redress that a little but if so it is an odd sort of attempt at it. Yes, her mothers are artificial wombs, programmed not only to give birth, but to nurture and teach the resulting children as they grow – yet they are also effectively battle robots, formidably armed and fiercely protective of their charges.

The robot mothers’ deployment has been necessitated as a consequence of the deliberate use by the US military of a supposedly quickly degradable bioagent called IC-NAN to eliminate groups opposed to the presence of US troops in Kandahar. IC-NAN causes lung cells to carry on well past their normal replacement date, growing like a cancer, overpowering good tissue and later invading the body, leading to a slow but certain death. The agent, however, spreads to an archaebacterium and remakes itself to replicate inside that organism’s cells and so begins to diffuse around the world. While the only antidote, C343, is not 100% effective all those working on the project have been supplied with it and the embryos the mothers will carry have been gene-engineered to be resistant to IC-NAN.

The narrative is shared between several viewpoints, one of whom is Kai, a child born inside one of the artificial mothers, and in Part One also jumps in time from when the IC-NAN plague manifests itself in the US and the robots are released, to a period when the children are around eleven years old. This latter reduces any tension around the development of the mothers as we know the initial stages of that project must have worked. In Part Two both strands occur in the same time frame.

James Said is a biologist of Pakistani origin hired to work on the antidote, Rose McBride invents the mother code of the title, computer code meant to embody the very essence of motherhood. To succeed as mothers the bots needed personalities, programmed in from a few human examples (Rose herself being among them as is a Hopi woman, Susquetewa.) Rick Blevins is an army man injured in action whose mistrust of Said’s involvement after a Russian computer hack leads to the mothers being released somewhat prematurely.

In the future sections each child is able to communicate telepathically with his or her mother machine but they have been kept apart by the mothers’ instructions and the limits placed on their wanderings. Interactions with other mothers and children are sought out but they were initially spread out and climate-change induced dust storms are reducing the mothers’ flying capabilities. Over-riding of a source code brings all the mothers together at a base called the Presidio. The mothers’ protective attitudes against the outside world have infected the children who are on constant alert against attack, making the attempts of surviving humans of the project (the Hopi have a natural immunity to IC-NAN) to contact them difficult.

Stivers may have thought her approach is what I believe is now known as woke, but the novel’s stance on prejudice is troubling. OK, she makes one of her viewpoint characters a Muslim by descent but we don’t see it in his daily life, he is effectively irreligious. And what are we to make of, “the London Intifada of 2030 and the suicide bombings at Reagan Airport in 2041 kept alive a healthy suspicion of anyone resembling a Muslim in the West”? Leaving aside the transatlantic misconception of British reality in that London Intifada comment, ponder the use of the word ‘healthy’ in this context. Add in the fact that a black person is considered to be lucky to be employed on the project and the narrative begins to leave a sour taste. Moreover, prejudice becomes a plot point when Blevins authorises release of the mother robots as a direct result of his unwarranted suspicions of James Said.

The Mother Code as a whole is an uneasy mix of techno-thriller and examination of the effects of new technology on human development but has many of the defects of the former, to which it is heavily skewed, and few of the merits of the latter. While it is partly less true of the children the adult characters tend to have attributes rather than rounded personalities. The early pages are also unfortunately crammed with info-dumping. It’s a satisfactory enough read on its own terms but lacks real depth.

Pedant’s corner:- “enormity of the task” (it wasn’t reprehensible, it was big – ‘immensity of the task’,) a capital letter on the first word following a colon.)