Maternity and Motherlessness

Abstract

Maternity and Motherlessness Anna McFarlane (bio) Wendy C. Nielsen. Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650–1890. Routledge, 2022. 262 pp, 13 b/w illus. $170 hc, $48.95 ebk. Renae L. Mitchell. Maternity in the Post-Apocalypse: Novelistic Re-Visions of Dystopian Motherhood. Lexington, 2022. 162 pp. $95 hc, $45 ebk. There has been growing interest in the figure of the child in recent engagements with sf and the possibility of a future, especially in the age of the climate crisis and particularly influenced by Lee Edelman’s polemical contribution to queer theory, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Rebekah Sheldon’s The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (2016), for example, works from Edelman’s arguments to claim that the figure of the child is used to shut down the possibilities for political change in conservative ways that amount to an emergency in the face of a climate crisis that remains unaddressed by our contemporary political inertia. Sheldon mobilizes science fiction to make her point, as does Heather Latimer, whose 2021 reading of the film Arrival (Villeneuve 2016) as a text that queers pregnancy and maternity makes a valuable contribution to these discussions. Maggie Nelson’s queering of her own pregnancy in her memoir The Argonauts (2015) also contributes to contemporary discussions about maternity and how its heteronormative and restrictive connotations might be read and overturned in literature and in public life. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that the figure of the mother and the life stages of pregnancy and maternity continue to be analyzed from new perspectives in sf studies. Two new monographs—Wendy C. Nielsen’s Motherless Creations and Renae L. Mitchell’s Maternity in the Post-Apocalypse—tackle these issues from the perspectives of posthumanism and psychoanalysis respectively. Nielsen’s book starts with a story and a question. The story goes that René Descartes once set sail accompanied by a figure whom he claimed to be his daughter Francine, but who looked wrong in the light of day; this caused fellow passengers to cross themselves and blame the poor weather on the supposed automaton until it was tossed overboard, to follow in the ship’s wake like a bad omen. Nielsen tells us that the story was a fabrication (1), but this did not stand in the way of its longevity: the desire to frame Descartes as the father of artificial intelligence meant that the tale was repeated, and the truth—that the story had been concocted to hide the fact that Descartes fathered an illegitimate child—was lost in the process. Nielsen sees this story as emblematic of a common narrative of artificial intelligence as the being that [End Page 105] is produced by a man, thereby eliding the role of the mother and the role of women more generally. She asks, “Why does early speculative fiction eliminate women’s roles as mothers?” (1), and her book is a series of examples and attempts at explanation. She also asks, “In what ways do beings created without mothers sustain or challenge traditional concepts of gendered or racial identity; what it means to be a mother, father, or creator, and the nature of birth, imagination, and creation?” (1–2). Nielsen takes her examples from English, American, French, and German literature. She differentiates the (potentially) bodiless programs of Artificial Intelligence from the embodied, anthropomorphic Artificial Life—or ALife—that “has emerged as a discipline in robotics and as an area of critical inquiry of the posthuman in philosophy, literature, and gender studies” (2; emphasis in original). Nielsen’s rationale for the historical sweep of her subject is that she dates 1650 as a time when automata, and therefore ALife, became the subject of science rather than magic, as androids with the potential ability to mimic humans entered the market for the first time (2). Nielsen argues that “in Western literature before 1890, the recurring figure of the motherless creation represents a desire to create the perfect child and sustains pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body” (3)—for example, that a man’s production of new life will be a safer and more rational process than the chaotic danger of old-fashioned...