A review by sammaygibs
Mother of Invention by Rivqa Rafael, Tansy Rayner Roberts

4.0

Fantastic short story collection that focuses on stories featuring people other than cis white men in the role of the genius/inventor. This is a refreshing and much awaited change to the genre, and many of the stories execute it extremely well. There is certainly some variation in the quality of the stories, but all are worth reading at least once. Personally I particularly enjoyed Bright Shores from Rosaleen Love for its beautiful prose and play on stories from folklore, The Revivalist from Kaaron Warren for the haunting concept and well rendered imagery and Tidefall from Meryl Stenhouse, for a story that uses the perspective of AI to examine life across centuries in space, and potentially the birth of a new creation myth that ties in well with the title of the book, in the way that it can be seen as relative to the concept of motherhood. I also found the essay Reflecting On Indigenous Worlds, Indigenous Futurisms and Artificial Intelligence by Ambelin Kwaymullina to be eye opening, highly recommended reading for anyone involved in fiction as a creator or consumer.