The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed
Format: ebook
Source: supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: ebook
Genres: dystopian, science fiction
Pages: 35
Published by Reactor Magazine, Tor Books on April 2, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

My Review: 

Welcome to the first in what will be a series of reviews of this year’s Hugo Nominated short works.

I’ve been voting on the Hugos since Chicon V in the early 2000s. Which doesn’t seem nearly as long ago as it actually is. BUT I’m primarily a novel reader, and more recently also a novella reader. I don’t go looking for novelettes and short stories over the course of a year. And I felt really bad about that when I submitted my ballot. Not that one has to vote in every category, but I felt like an opportunity was being missed – only because it was.

(And I fully admit that reviewing the shorter stuff – generally as podcasts when I can get them – helps me ensure there’s a daily post on Reading Reality. This seems like a win/win, so here we are.)

This year, I’m making more of an effort not to review things before they get discussed in the 2026 Hugo Readalong on reddit  because it’s fun to see what other people thought after I’ve finished my own thoughts. Or am at least in the middle of my own thoughts.

I’m starting this year with the novelette category, meaning stories over 7,500 words and under 15,000 words. About an hour in audio, which I get when I can. I’ve already read one of this year’s novelettes, Martha Wells’ most recent Murderbot short, “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy”, originally published in Reactor on July 10, 2025 and reviewed last year.

“The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” is an intriguing story to begin this series with, as it’s a story that I ended up with mixed feelings about.

The thing about the shorter forms is that sometimes the story fits its length, and sometimes it feels like the story has been forced into a Procrustean bed, meaning that it’s been shoehorned into a shorter length than it really needed.

The background of this one had a LOT of interesting potential. From multiple axes. Or possibly with multiple axes being applied to make it fit.

From one perspective, it’s about a future dystopia of scarcity, where only the rich have enough of, well, anything and everyone else is underfed, underhoused and under the bootheels of the rich. (Unfortunately, it sounds like a future we could get to from here all too easily.)

We don’t get details of the how and the why, but because it’s already close to the possible, it’s easy to imagine. Which is where we get to the parts we can’t quite imagine.

Two megacorporations (lots of megacorps in SF right now, surprise, surprise) have chosen different formulas and origin stories to explain their own rises to the top. Formulas that involve cloning and literal and figurative programming of each successive CEO. It’s a cyberpunk world, with cyberpunk solutions.

The way that the CEO is created/raised, well, raises a whole bunch of questions about nature vs. nurture. OTOH each CEO is a clone of the previous. And very much OTOH, they’re raised through a vast scheme of lies and fabrications to replicate the experience of the original founder in ways that don’t logically work at all. From a certain perspective, the Founder’s origin story has been fetishized, and her successors are treating that precise origin story as the fount of all her genius even though the story takes place three generations later. While the facts of that biography can be replicated, the experience of it cannot.

And of course this story takes place when it all breaks down. So on top of all of the above we have the story of a very unreliable narrator trying to keep a toehold on survival as she’s being replaced AND what happens when the whole structure collapses and she and her wife are forced to flee and actually live the life they were supposedly replicating.

Which is where the story crashes into an abrupt thriller-type ending that leaves the future wide-open.

Escape Rating B: There’s a LOT of story going on, and it’s too big for its container. Because the above isn’t all of it – of course not – but it’s not even all the themes involved in it. One reviewer said that this would be great as the prologue to a longer story, and I think that’s close to right.

There are shortcuts in the setup that rely on the reader being familiar with cyberpunk and the current trend towards megacorporation conglomeration and control in SF. The situation in the story raises a whole bunch of nature/nurture questions AND manages to include stuff about the surveillance state while folding in a discussion about how embodiment and dysmorphia feel and work in a society where anyone (rich) can swap bodies – and everything that goes with that – whenever they want an upgrade for whatever upgrade means to them.

Those issues reminded me a LOT of These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein and especially Seth Haddon’s Volatile Memory Duology, Volatile Memory and and its upcoming conclusion, Null Entity. Especially Null Entity, which will be out in July.

But this story feels like a good place to start this year’s Hugo reviews. “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” raises a lot of interesting issues, gives the reader a lot to think about and leaves the future hanging.

This series continues next week with one of the short stories, either “In My Country” or “Six People to Revise You” depending on which one I get to first!