Samantha Mills’ short story Rabbit Test swept award season back in 2022/3. It won the Nebula Award in 2022, the 2022 Locus Award for best short story, the 2023 Theodore Sturgeon Award and the 2023 Hugo Award (which she subsequently disavowed due to issues with the 2023 Hugo ballot). It is now the title story of a strong collection of Mills’ short works.
Rabbit Test is a diverse collection of speculative fiction short stories. There are stories that might be considered science fiction including Anchorage which involves spaceships and existential threats but which Mills describes as her ‘sweetest story’, and One Part Per Billion. There are stories about magic – Adrianna in Pomegranate quickly develops a very unusual magic system. Strange Waters is a time travel story and Kiki Henández Beats the Devil is a delightful rock’n’roll riff on the traditional demonic crossroads challenge. Rabbit Test itself is more of a future social history than anything else, charting the past and possible future for anti-abortion laws and written in the shadow of the challenge to Roe v Wade in the US Supreme Court.
While not all thematically linked, there is a strong thread in these stories of family ties. Mills explores the relationship between parents and their children (Strange Waters, Adrianna in Pomegranate, Spindle), relationships between siblings (Four of Seven, A Shadow is the Memory of a Ghost), partners (10 Visions of the Future) and found families (Anchorage). Mills herself reflects on this in the notes for each story found at the end of the book.
But what really links these stories is a strong sense of place, character and setting delivered sharply and economically. In 2024, Samantha Mills first novel The Wings Upon Her Back delivered a fascinating world and a unique science-fantasy setting but also explored a number of real-world issues of toxic relationships and control. In this collection readers can see where some of these ideas developed and where Mills condiers some even more interesting concepts.
Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills
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