Mothers and other monsters - overall review of the collection
Small review: Mother's and other monsters by Maureen McHugh is a collection of deceptively small stories, across a wide range of conventional sub-genres, that satisfied me in their non-sentimental descriptions of the work of loss and caring.

Maureen McHugh is the author of China Mountain Zhang, in my opinion one of the best SF novels of the nineties. She lived in China for some time and like Ursula Le Guin her work is influenced by Daoism: the title of her novel ‘Half the Day is Night’, like ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’, is almost a Daoist code-phrase.

Daoism values the small and humble life. The Dao De Jing says ‘Merge with the dust’. Most SF stories celebrate big lives, but some celebrate small lives. Like yin and yang this division is not really a gender divide, but it sometimes seems like one. I read a scathing review of Ursula Le Guin by M John Harrison: an author whose writing I admire. He seemed personally affronted and oppressed by the smallness of the lives she inflicted on him. Perhaps he would be equally disgusted by ‘Mothers and other monsters’, though he would understand the menace in the title.

Let me illustrate what I mean by big and small lives. My friend R used to be a well-off man. He travelled the world and did extreme sports like deep diving. Then one day he fell in love with a destitute woman, who had been abandoned with three children. R gave up his big life for a small life – nowadays he supports a big family on a salary that used to support a big lifestyle. Five other human beings depend on him for their existence. R’s story could have fitted in very well in this collection, which is about the job of caring, and the struggle of small lives. If McHugh had told the story then we would see that R struggled with his loss of a big life, but kept going anyway, and we might feel that keeping on going was more heroic than deep diving.

The second theme of the book is coping with loss. Loss in death and from Alzheimer’s, loss of a person who gets lost, and the loss of the old self as we change.

The stories in this book have this tightness of theme, and this focus on small lives, but range over many genres. They don’t take any formal structural risks, in fact they are straight-down the middle genre conventional, but they portray the inner rebellions and suffering of people who are ignored by big stories. I found them moving.