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The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For
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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
35 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 2, 2025
About the author
Cameron Reed
3 books35 followersAuthor previously writing under the name Raphael Carter.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews
August 23, 2026
Nice covers bamboozle me, and I let them. I thought I was promised a look into nepotism pro max, but what I received is a struggle. For me, and that's not nice.
There was something stilted about the narrative that immediately took away from the reading experience. It felt like trudging through muddled waters which is never nice, and now my jeans are all soggy and that's never ever nice.
What we needed was some line-editing, and we would've also benefitted from refusing to take a nose-dive from the dystopic horror to melodrama to romance to action-adventure pipeline, all under 9k words, speedrunning from one genre to another without ever executing any of them with finesse.
There's no room to breathe, nowhere to settle and connect with what's being narrated, and yet, it instills no urgency to find out what happens next either. Whether this unfortunate double-whammy is distilled from the inchoate narrative, flat characters, or the breakneck genre-hop, perhaps even a lethal muddled water concoction of all three, I was soaked, and not in a nice way.
All of this ultimately made the story a little boring and very forgettable. Which, again, not nice. At least the cover is nice.
There was something stilted about the narrative that immediately took away from the reading experience. It felt like trudging through muddled waters which is never nice, and now my jeans are all soggy and that's never ever nice.
What we needed was some line-editing, and we would've also benefitted from refusing to take a nose-dive from the dystopic horror to melodrama to romance to action-adventure pipeline, all under 9k words, speedrunning from one genre to another without ever executing any of them with finesse.
There's no room to breathe, nowhere to settle and connect with what's being narrated, and yet, it instills no urgency to find out what happens next either. Whether this unfortunate double-whammy is distilled from the inchoate narrative, flat characters, or the breakneck genre-hop, perhaps even a lethal muddled water concoction of all three, I was soaked, and not in a nice way.
All of this ultimately made the story a little boring and very forgettable. Which, again, not nice. At least the cover is nice.
April 17, 2026
In a futuristic, dystopian world, a corporation has an unusual succession plan. Each CEO adopts a young woman, and has her gestate and raise a clone of the CEO, who will then take the CEO’s place. The main character of the book is one of these young women. The fact that she’s trans is not a problem, but the fact that she’s been unable to make the plan work even with futuristic technology is. So her CEO “mother” has found a replacement. The new daughter is lovely in every way, and the old one must live with her until she formally takes her place.
This is unusual for me to say as someone who doesn’t read much sci-fi, but I REALLY liked the world building of this book and I wish we’d had more of it. I lost some interest once the plot started feeling more like an action film. There was a romantic arc that I really liked, and overall this was a good time, just not a favourite. It’s very short, not even really novella length, so if this book sounds at all appealing to you, I recommend giving it a try.
This is unusual for me to say as someone who doesn’t read much sci-fi, but I REALLY liked the world building of this book and I wish we’d had more of it. I lost some interest once the plot started feeling more like an action film. There was a romantic arc that I really liked, and overall this was a good time, just not a favourite. It’s very short, not even really novella length, so if this book sounds at all appealing to you, I recommend giving it a try.
April 3, 2025
the end made me laugh and idk if that was the goal but it was still very good
Read
October 16, 2025I liked the pacing & the tension. The very end was kind of cheesy - killed the mood a little.
June 29, 2026
Dystopian love story
The finalists for the 2026 Best Novelette Hugo Award are:
★★★★☆ Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
★★★☆☆ Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak
★★★★☆ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
★★★☆☆ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed
☆☆☆☆☆ The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker
★★★★☆ When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente
The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For is a love story. It takes place in a future dystopia, in which corporations rule the world (more overtly than they now do). There is cloning in this Brave New World, and custom bodies, and mind transfer from body to body. Of course, things go wrong and it turns into an adventure.
I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. Three stars seems fair.
Blog review.
The finalists for the 2026 Best Novelette Hugo Award are:
★★★★☆ Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
★★★☆☆ Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak
★★★★☆ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
★★★☆☆ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed
☆☆☆☆☆ The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker
★★★★☆ When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente
The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For is a love story. It takes place in a future dystopia, in which corporations rule the world (more overtly than they now do). There is cloning in this Brave New World, and custom bodies, and mind transfer from body to body. Of course, things go wrong and it turns into an adventure.
I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. Three stars seems fair.
Blog review.
May 29, 2026
This is a competently written novelette that isn't for me.
A story about gender, gender and body dysmorphia, corporate malfeasance, and love, it doesn't trust itself enough to feel its way toward its own conclusion. Instead, it ends with an escape that makes the whole enterprise read like the tutorial level of an RPG.
It's a Hugo Nominee for Best Novelette, so it must resonate with someone. Someone else.
A story about gender, gender and body dysmorphia, corporate malfeasance, and love, it doesn't trust itself enough to feel its way toward its own conclusion. Instead, it ends with an escape that makes the whole enterprise read like the tutorial level of an RPG.
It's a Hugo Nominee for Best Novelette, so it must resonate with someone. Someone else.
March 22, 2026
I finished this almost two months ago (which shows how my mental capacity has been, lol), but I really liked the vibe and worldbuilding of this and while the ending appears to be simple & kinda cheesy, there's something sad about it, too. An adaptation and a choice.
November 13, 2025
the world was so interesting and there was so little of it. everything just kind of happened and then it ended. but i did like the sentiment so there is that
July 11, 2026
2026 Hugo Award finalist - Best Novelette
In a corporate-controlled dystopia where cloning, custom bodies, and mind transfer are possible, a trans girl chosen to give birth to a clone of a corporate CEO meets the girl meant to replace her—sparking a love story that becomes an adventure about identity, bodily autonomy, exploitation, and survival. This story would have been cutting-edge in Asimov’s ten or fifteen years ago; now it just seems like a (well-written) rehash of a bunch of recent SF movies.
In a corporate-controlled dystopia where cloning, custom bodies, and mind transfer are possible, a trans girl chosen to give birth to a clone of a corporate CEO meets the girl meant to replace her—sparking a love story that becomes an adventure about identity, bodily autonomy, exploitation, and survival. This story would have been cutting-edge in Asimov’s ten or fifteen years ago; now it just seems like a (well-written) rehash of a bunch of recent SF movies.
February 13, 2026
A short dystopian sci-fi story exploring motherhood, how to love under constant surveilance as well as autonomy and how much it can be sold for. It follows a trans woman, picked from poverty and adopted to bear and raise the clone of a rich CEO. After one miscarriage too many, she meets her replacement.
I would recommend this story for people who enjoy their sci-fi fast-paced and somewhat action-heavy, but also with plenty of heart.
I would recommend this story for people who enjoy their sci-fi fast-paced and somewhat action-heavy, but also with plenty of heart.
February 8, 2026
(4.5)
The title alone of “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” should prompt you to read this short story.
In a near future dystopia, our narrator was hired to bear the clone of a corporate leader. But after one too many miscarriages, she is going to be replaced by a younger women who is now pregnant. Still the adopted daughter of the CEO until the new woman officially takes her place, she is not sure what will happen to her afterward.
A great tale that I could see making the shortlist for sci-fi awards this year.
The title alone of “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” should prompt you to read this short story.
In a near future dystopia, our narrator was hired to bear the clone of a corporate leader. But after one too many miscarriages, she is going to be replaced by a younger women who is now pregnant. Still the adopted daughter of the CEO until the new woman officially takes her place, she is not sure what will happen to her afterward.
A great tale that I could see making the shortlist for sci-fi awards this year.
July 24, 2026
I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would from the title.
July 1, 2025
I see what the author was getting at, but I think the execution/plot fell flat and rushed.
December 30, 2025
4.5
I loved this weird little clone story! The idea of being "adopted" to play out poverty with a rich woman's infant clone- commodifying your body as well as taking away your individual choices- is so powerful, and yet is painted in a resigned, grounded way where it feels realistic. I wish this were a novella, both because I would've liked to get to know the characters better, but also because the ending lends itself to a really intriguing, compelling story (not that this short story version wasn't both of those thing already).
I loved this weird little clone story! The idea of being "adopted" to play out poverty with a rich woman's infant clone- commodifying your body as well as taking away your individual choices- is so powerful, and yet is painted in a resigned, grounded way where it feels realistic. I wish this were a novella, both because I would've liked to get to know the characters better, but also because the ending lends itself to a really intriguing, compelling story (not that this short story version wasn't both of those thing already).
December 20, 2025
I see a new frontier emerging in the Western canon, and this story belongs to that expanding horizon. I'm pretty sure that the author alluded to Dolly Parton's "Jolene" throughout the story to establish an initial unease towards the "Other Woman", but then artfully and deliciously subverted this trope when the narrator and the woman (with ivory skin, emerald green eyes, and auburn hair) fall in love. The way it centers feminism, trans identity, and queerness felt sincere and emotionally real to me. Very satisfying story!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 29, 2026
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!
Originally published at Reading Reality
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!
Originally published at Reading Reality
July 26, 2026
In a dystopian cyberpunk future, the Griffith Corporation is run by immortal clones of the Foundress. To grow another copy, she finds a poor transgender girl (her name is never mentioned once throughout the narrative — and it feels like Cameron Reed has poured much of her own trans experience into this), who must give birth to the clone and raise her for eighteen years in an artificially created "poverty," simulating the Foundress's childhood. After that, the "mother" fakes her own death and vanishes, receiving a lifetime allowance, while the Foundress's consciousness is transferred into the clone. The corporation pays for her long-awaited surgery, but after three miscarriages, the protagonist becomes "defective goods," and a replacement is found for her — another girl, Mira. Gradually, romantic feelings develop between the protagonist and Mira, and in the finale, they escape, deciding to live life on their own terms.
And this would be the moment to give it a low score and forget about it, but I slept on the story and, to my own surprise, uncovered a second layer, which ultimately made me give it a nine. It's reminiscent of Gene Wolfe's prose, where beneath an outwardly simple story lies a second layer that makes it far more complex, and at the same time, more sinister.
And it all started when I began asking the story questions and answering them myself.
...
And the story's final words ("It's okay," she whispers to the baby. "It's over. This time will be different."), instead of filling one with optimism, begin to sound like a cruel mockery. It's been a long time since I've encountered a text that is perceived so differently depending on the depth of engagement.
It's heartening that there are authors who leave room for reflection in their texts and reward the attentive reader. This is a risky endeavor in our times — I've read a ton of reviews of this story and haven't seen a single one that explicitly mentions the presence of a second layer, with many limiting themselves to "the story's just a story, nothing special."
And this would be the moment to give it a low score and forget about it, but I slept on the story and, to my own surprise, uncovered a second layer, which ultimately made me give it a nine. It's reminiscent of Gene Wolfe's prose, where beneath an outwardly simple story lies a second layer that makes it far more complex, and at the same time, more sinister.
And it all started when I began asking the story questions and answering them myself.
...
And the story's final words ("It's okay," she whispers to the baby. "It's over. This time will be different."), instead of filling one with optimism, begin to sound like a cruel mockery. It's been a long time since I've encountered a text that is perceived so differently depending on the depth of engagement.
It's heartening that there are authors who leave room for reflection in their texts and reward the attentive reader. This is a risky endeavor in our times — I've read a ton of reviews of this story and haven't seen a single one that explicitly mentions the presence of a second layer, with many limiting themselves to "the story's just a story, nothing special."
August 16, 2026
(2026 Hugo novellette nominee #2)
This is a bitter tale of a future of corporate warfare, and seemingly impotent (or nonexistent) goverment. It is also one of those stories that I suspect will make the former Puppies scream with rage (except that I doubt they'll read it; they seem to have happily disappeared into their own little echo chamber, having declared the main body of SFF irrelevant).
Our narrator is a trans woman who has been adopted by the third-generation CEO of the Griffiths corporation, to birth and raise her cloned successor. Every Griffiths CEO recapitulates the early life of the original, including poverty and the loss of her mothers.
But after a miscarriage, the deal is off. A new daughter/mother is chosen, and our narrator is going to be out on the streets ... except that the new daughter falls in love with her.
Things, of course, get more complicated after that, but let's not spoil the soup.
This story would have been revolutionary in the cyberpunk 1980s; in the 2020s, I'm afraid it's just a pretty good story.
Six out of ten warrior bodies.
This is a bitter tale of a future of corporate warfare, and seemingly impotent (or nonexistent) goverment. It is also one of those stories that I suspect will make the former Puppies scream with rage (except that I doubt they'll read it; they seem to have happily disappeared into their own little echo chamber, having declared the main body of SFF irrelevant).
Our narrator is a trans woman who has been adopted by the third-generation CEO of the Griffiths corporation, to birth and raise her cloned successor. Every Griffiths CEO recapitulates the early life of the original, including poverty and the loss of her mothers.
But after a miscarriage, the deal is off. A new daughter/mother is chosen, and our narrator is going to be out on the streets ... except that the new daughter falls in love with her.
Things, of course, get more complicated after that, but let's not spoil the soup.
This story would have been revolutionary in the cyberpunk 1980s; in the 2020s, I'm afraid it's just a pretty good story.
Six out of ten warrior bodies.
November 24, 2025
There was a slight tone-shift and pacing change in this. The first half of the story is slow and reflective. I expected this to be a more meditative story about the protagonist’s relationship with their body, the need for her “Mother’s” love and acceptance and trying to survive destitution. After Mira - the new girl and the protagonist’s replacement surrogate - comes in the picture there is no tension between them. Mira chooses the protagonist to be her bride over the company-chosen Colleen, to which the protagonist does not believe is love because of her own self-loathing. I thought it would stay there - the story more about the drilled-down internal conflicts. The second half becomes a fight to escape with your life. Either way, the world building was cool and the concept of CEO oligarchs cloning themselves for a sense of immortality and so that the only person that an unseat them of their position is themselves is really interesting.
September 6, 2025
The Girl My Mother is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed is Tor original short. You can read this story for free on the Tor.com site https://reactormag.com/the-girl-that-...
In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.
My ongoing quest to get current with the Tor short stories.
In a corporate-controlled future, a trans girl is taken from poverty and forced into a program to bear a clone. When she miscarries, her replacement—a quiet, compliant girl named Mira—arrives. What begins as resentment shifts into a fragile, unexpected bond, as the two navigate love and survival in a world that treats them as disposable.
It had a nice twist I didn't expect.
4 Stars
In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.
My ongoing quest to get current with the Tor short stories.
In a corporate-controlled future, a trans girl is taken from poverty and forced into a program to bear a clone. When she miscarries, her replacement—a quiet, compliant girl named Mira—arrives. What begins as resentment shifts into a fragile, unexpected bond, as the two navigate love and survival in a world that treats them as disposable.
It had a nice twist I didn't expect.
4 Stars
July 9, 2026
Notes taken from my review column of all the nominees for Hugo Awards 2026: Best Novelette.
I also really liked the themes of this novelette. The narrator's lived experience as a trans woman makes her choices in the dystopian future feel all the more compelling, as she struggles to survive in the wake of being cast aside as the parent of her "mother's" genetic clone. The only reason that this story didn't rate higher on this list is that the ending was essentially just a wall of text, as the story abruptly switched to tell instead of show mode. It was an odd choice, and one I'm hoping is rectified in future iterations, as this novelette definitely feels more like a launchpad to a novel rather a complete story.
I also really liked the themes of this novelette. The narrator's lived experience as a trans woman makes her choices in the dystopian future feel all the more compelling, as she struggles to survive in the wake of being cast aside as the parent of her "mother's" genetic clone. The only reason that this story didn't rate higher on this list is that the ending was essentially just a wall of text, as the story abruptly switched to tell instead of show mode. It was an odd choice, and one I'm hoping is rectified in future iterations, as this novelette definitely feels more like a launchpad to a novel rather a complete story.
May 17, 2025
In a future dystopia, the head of a one corporation ensures her legacy by growing clones of herself and raising them as she was raised. The story is told from the viewpoint of a person who was chosen as the clone's host, but miscarries, causing another person to be chosen to host the clone. Both live together, and as the clone's birth approaches, the person is resigned to being discarded after the birth. But external events intrude, and now both are forced to run away from a hostile takeover and to plan a different future for the clone.
June 17, 2026
I think genre fiction has had a huge influx of trans and non-binary characters, which is a good thing don't get me wrong, but a lot of them I feel are written into genre worlds that are much less colored in than the characters themselves. This novelette really manages to create a great character in an interesting setting, speaking to the trans experience but also managing a lot of world building with a minimal page count. The concept maybe required a little suspended disbelief around clone raising, but I liked the writing enough to still give it four stars.
July 6, 2026
A trans woman was supposed to bear the clone of a huge corporate CEO but has three miscarriages. Coleen, the CEO, finds Mira, another orphan, and tries again. The trans woman is now in limbo. She takes care of Mira and they eventually fall in love, possibly destroying the CEO succession of the corporation. I thought this story was okay. I didn’t find the story terribly engaging.
Come visit my blog for reviews of all the novelette nominees…
It Started With The Hugos
Come visit my blog for reviews of all the novelette nominees…
It Started With The Hugos
December 6, 2025
4*
The narrator was chosen by the current CEO of Griffin to bear and raise her clone/successor, but after 3 miscarriages, she is about to be replaced with Mira, who is already pregnant with the clone baby. They become friends and Mira asks her to be her wife. A few days before the due date, the Griffin tower is invaded by a rival company Vega, they flee together. The narrator changed body and wants to become a thief to support the baby.
The narrator was chosen by the current CEO of Griffin to bear and raise her clone/successor, but after 3 miscarriages, she is about to be replaced with Mira, who is already pregnant with the clone baby. They become friends and Mira asks her to be her wife. A few days before the due date, the Griffin tower is invaded by a rival company Vega, they flee together. The narrator changed body and wants to become a thief to support the baby.
March 28, 2026
Reminded me strangely of "Make Room, Make Room!"
A future dystopia with depressing disparities of wealth and poverty. Some poverty stricken women are given the opportunity to bear a child who will be raised just right to run a corporation that treats people as things. At least they'll get enough to eat for the time it takes to raise the child and then, allegedly, have their deaths faked and be pensioned off.
A meditation on awful choices.
A future dystopia with depressing disparities of wealth and poverty. Some poverty stricken women are given the opportunity to bear a child who will be raised just right to run a corporation that treats people as things. At least they'll get enough to eat for the time it takes to raise the child and then, allegedly, have their deaths faked and be pensioned off.
A meditation on awful choices.
May 7, 2026
Storia molto dolce dove tutti gli elementi canonici della fantascienza (clonazione, super evil corporations, trasmissione di coscienza da un corpo all'altro) vengono messi al servizio della relazione tra le due protagoniste, figlie adottive della stessa madre, che le ha selezionate per ospitare la gravidanza della sua stessa clone (è... complicato, ok?).
Avrebbe avuto bisogno di più tempo per svilupparsi, soprattutto nel finale, ma anche così resta una lettura consigliata.
Avrebbe avuto bisogno di più tempo per svilupparsi, soprattutto nel finale, ma anche così resta una lettura consigliata.
April 6, 2025
I probably approached this with the wrong expectations because The Fortunate Fall is one of my favorite books ever. Of course I was excited to read some new writing by the same author.
The story was good, mostly. It's mostly the ending that feels out of place, almost absurd. It's such a hard pivot its almost comical.
The story was good, mostly. It's mostly the ending that feels out of place, almost absurd. It's such a hard pivot its almost comical.
September 30, 2025
In a dystopic, corporate-run world, a trans girl is raised up by the CEO for a single purpose, only to find she is being replaced.
I really enjoyed this and was a bit miffed when it ended, because only then did I realise it was a short story. Great one, though. Excellent world-building and a compelling read. Will be reading more Cameron Reed as soon as possible.
I really enjoyed this and was a bit miffed when it ended, because only then did I realise it was a short story. Great one, though. Excellent world-building and a compelling read. Will be reading more Cameron Reed as soon as possible.
March 26, 2026
Queering cloning, capitalism, fate, transness, bodyhopping - so many things.
Now that was, weirdly, kind of a romp. I think I could use the narrator being less naive in the beginning and the ending being a little less tied down, but the whole thing was much more fun than the subject matter would seem to suggest.
Now that was, weirdly, kind of a romp. I think I could use the narrator being less naive in the beginning and the ending being a little less tied down, but the whole thing was much more fun than the subject matter would seem to suggest.
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