This is a tough one for me to score and review. As with the previous tales in the collection, the quality of the writing and construction show that these stories are indeed Some of the best. Here we have have a story told from the POV of the daughter of a scientist - born from self-cloning, and then pressured into being constantly enhanced into something more than human. Her mother is clearly brilliant, driven and insane and this leads to my issue with the piece; I loathe mad-scientist stories. I grew up on pulp and b-movie narrative where the world was destroyed by over-reaching, over-ambitious, arrogant or just plain evil and see the erosion in expertise this, in part, has lead to. It is a theme that has become part of our culture, repeated endlessly in lazy articles and online arguments. In reality, it is not science and scientists that cause the problems, nor even war and generals, but politics and politicians misusing the tools provided to them.
Now, I know that many of the great "destruction by science" tales are not about arrogant scientists at all, or barely so - the progenitor of the genre, Frankenstein, is misread as such, and is a deeper story about a search for meaning and a creator - but just reading that trope tends to set my teeth on edge.
However, that is my reaction to that aspect of the story and is, perhaps, rather unfair. Because this is a fabulous piece of writing. Burton suggests the world as a backdrop - it is in Rome, including the great structures such as the Colosseum and the Senate on the Capitoline Hill, ruled over by Caesar. Is this scientist a witch or an alchemist? But we get reference to other cities that were not contemporaries of classical Rome, and dropped references to technology that is distinctly modern. That fact that this left as no more than hints and never explained makes the backdrop tantalising and somehow mythical.
The first-person narration from the daughter, in the past tense further enhances the mythic quality, and a sense of doom; the story opens "Long before my mother destroyed the world, her experiments were quieter, more contained." So we know where this is going. The backbone of this story, like The Art of Space Travel, the previous one in the collection, is this mother/daughter relationship, although this is obviously far darker and more negative than that of Emily and Moolie, as mother pressures daughter (neither is given a name) through the promise of a fake love to become what the mother wants, despite her own wishes, but ultimately is saved by this and becomes greater than her parent.
You know, I think I've talked myself around.
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