When Mothers Dream

by Brenda Cooper

Award-winning writer Brenda Cooper celebrates the strength of the female in many mother, daughter, engineer, biologist, and more. From a young dreamer who fights to protect the endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales to two older women whose grandchildren are being raised by AIs to a future scientist who tries to keep the world safe from bioengineered creatures, When Mothers Dream explores the edges of what can be possible if we celebrate the strength of women.

The collection mixes new and previously published speculative work. The bouquet of science fiction, fantasy, and poetry is tied together with a thread of hope and a colored with a touch of anger. It includes the voices of whales. It is a book for our times.

When Mother’s Dream is about fighting for our future. Women can save us all.

Genres: Fantasy

234 pages, Paperback

Published August 12, 2025

About the author

Brenda Cooper writes science fiction,fantasy, and poetry.

Brenda's most recent novels are EDGE of DARK and SPEAR OF LIGHT from Pyr and POST from ESpec Books. Edge of Dark won the 2016 Endeavour Award for a notable science fiction or fantasy novel by a Northwest author.

Other recent novels include the duology THE CREATIVE FIRE and THE DIAMOND DEEP, also from Pyr.

Brenda released two collections in 2015. Her all science fiction CRACKING THE SKY came out from Fairwood Press and her all-fantasy ebook collection BEYOND THE WATERFALL DOOR was created through a six-author Kickstarter project.

Brenda is the author of the Endeavor award winner for 2008: THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, and of two sequels, READING THE WIND and WINGS OF CREATION. She has written a novel with Larry Niven, called BUILDING HARLEQUIN's MOON, and a solo stand-alone novel, MAYAN DECEMBER. She has numerous stories that have published in a variety of magazines, from Nature to Asimov's. Many of her stories have been selected for Year's Best anthologies.

By day, Brenda is the City of Kirkland’s CIO, and at night and in early morning hours, she’s a futurist and writer. She lives in the pacific northwest o the United States of America.

Reviews

[Metaphorosis · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
A collection of motherhood and climate-oriented science fiction stories, often set in the Pacific Northwest and involving orcas.

Review
When I came across this collection, my only previous exposure to Brenda Cooper was Building Harlequin’s Moon, the novel she co-wrote with Larry Niven – which I didn’t like. So I was very surprised to find myself warming more and more to these stories as I read.

As Cooper herself notes in the foreword, these are stories with a focus – generally on the Pacific Northwest, on Orcas, and on human damage to the environment, generally as seen by mothers. They start off feeling fairly heavy-handed repetition, but gradually shift to pointed, a subtle but meaningful distinction that makes all the difference between being lectured and enlightened.

Frankly, the collection would have benefited from different sequencing. The initial stories are burdened by sameness while the later ones feel out of step with the rest. There’s a certain logic to it, but I fear it may mean that casual readers will give up early and never reach the subtle and beautiful stories that come later. The first stories are good too; they just need leavening. This is a collection that is probably best read occasionally rather than in big chunks.

I started the collection open-minded (I read Harlequin’s Moon a long time ago), shifted after a couple of stories to sceptical, and eventually, toward the end, was won over to fan. There’s definitely a message here that’s hard to miss (one I largely agree with), but Cooper’s deft touch and subtle handling of her characters means that there’s far more than polemic here. The stories are hard-edged but romantic and the writing sometimes lyrical. The endings are neither Hollywood-happy nor depressingly realistic; on the whole, they’re hopeful and idealistic – suggesting what could happen if only the human race would get off its ass and work at it. I’m not hopeful we ever will, but I’m fully in favor of stories that try to convince us we should.

All in all, despite unfortunate sequencing (and some careless typos), this ended up being a moving and beautiful collection of climate fiction stories that’s made me at least tentatively a Brenda Cooper fan. Certainly I disagree with her (characters) on some key elements of philosophy, but we’re at least on the same page, and she’s done a great job of writing beautiful fiction about it. I tend to be less of a fan of speculative poetry, but there were a few poems here that I liked as well.

Among my favorite stories:

Elephant Angels – remote volunteers try to protect distant elephant herds
Southern Residents – a hostile young influencer is exposed to the work of a marine conservatory
Tahlequah – a poem about a desolate orca mother
Annalee of the Orcas – a woman has a mysterious ability to communicate with orcas
Maybe the Monarchs – a woman and her dog near the end of their lives
Biology at the End of the World – what’s the best way to protect a ravaged world?

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am encouraged by the number of books that are coming out concerning our response to the inevitable change in the climate we are facing, and how we can respond in a way that, at least, doesn't make it worse and perhaps saves a few things. Like the whales.

Brenda Cooper focuses a number of stories on parts of the natural world that humans can do something about. There's no magical solution. There is a lifetime of work (many lifetimes), and we can't really undo what we've done, but we can be responsible to improve things rather than blithely make them worse.

For those who need a little encouragement about our current situation, I recommend this book. Interestingly enough, I read it right after Rebecca Campbell's new story collection 'The Other Shore', which also deals with how we can try to save what we can and find hope wherever we can.