The Mother Code

3 stars. This book will challenge your definition of motherhood (May 2020).

The Mother Code by Carole Stivers sits at the corner of science fiction, dystopia, and philosophy. Set in 2049, it tells the tale of a government-led bioweapon experiment gone wild; a deadly archaebacterium is released into a foreign country, causing an unprecedented and deadly pandemic. It follows the stories of government official Rick Blevins and scientist James Said as they work to fight the pandemic and jumps forward in time to tell the story of children raised in the future by robotic mothers. As the story progresses, you realize that the robotic mothers are part of a contingency plan to keep some part of the human population alive. And after the robotic mother’s programming becomes violent, the children and surviving adults must make decisions about whether or not the mothers need to be destroyed.

I really enjoyed reading about the characters in the past; the adults who were combating the archaebacterium had complex personalities and motivations. Stivers’s dialogue was natural and polished, and I found the perspectives of James and Rick very engaging. There were well-developed dramatic, romantic, and tragic moments (these characters did make me cry, which speaks to Stivers's strong characterization).

Stivers's development of characters in the past sections also strengthened an already interesting plot. The race to stop a deadly infection from spreading around the entire world keeps the reader on their toes, and is incredibly relevant in 2020. Stivers's writing style was powerful in evoking pressure and tension, which definitely made The Mother Code a page-turner.

Stivers’s writing in the past sections does incorporate a lot of biology jargon (I found out that she actually has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, which makes a lot of sense in retrospect), which is something you will either love or hate. Personally, I loved it—although the storyline isn’t the most realistic (but what sci-fi is?), it felt much more authentic than most science fiction premises. However, as I myself am passionate about biology and have devoted a lot of time to studying it, I recognize that enjoying this aspect of The Mother Code might be less feasible for others. Stiver often uses phrases such as, “their only recourse would be to somehow insert a new caspase gene, with a different promoter that wasn’t susceptible to modification by it,” where you really need to have prior knowledge to understand what’s being referred to.

However, I am disappointed to say that many of the things I loved about the first two-thirds of the book basically disappeared in the last third. The final third shifted toward the present day and the perspectives of the robot-reared children. As I said before, Stiver is skilled at developing adult characters, yet when it comes to writing children, in my opinion, she falls short. There were too many kids to keep track of, and I found that almost all of them seemed unidimensional. While I felt invested enough in the adult characters to cry over them, similar supposedly “tear-jerking” moments in the last third of the book evoked little to no emotion in me. I do have to mention that developing the children’s characters would be a very difficult task—they had minimal to no human contact for most of their lives—yet I still wish the children had more multifaceted personalities.

In the end, I loved reading the first two-thirds of the Mother Code—it was heart wrenching, suspenseful, and scientific. However, the last third let me down in terms of plot quality and character complexity. It got to the point where I essentially didn’t care how the book ended, and I closed the back cover feeling unsatisfied. Although I did take major issue with this downturn in quality, I do think that the Mother Code has a very unique and interesting premise. It also raises poignant questions about what it means to be a mother and what it means to be alive. I believe that Stivers has a lot of talent as a writer, and if she writes another book—about adults, not children—I would be very interested to read it.