Samantha Mills’s “Rabbit Test” is among the most acclaimed anglophone science fiction stories of recent years. First published in the prestigious Uncanny Magazine in 2022, it went on to win the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards (plus a Hugo, which Mills understandably disavowed); to be reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2023); to be translated into seven languages. Mills herself states in her afterword to this book that the story “launched the whirlwind of awards and translations that made this collection possible.” And yet, there is a devil’s bargain encoded in that title: “Rabbit Test” and Other Stories. There is a risk that, in collecting Mills’s short fiction under that banner, the rest of her oeuvre will be shown up as second-rate, with “Rabbit Test” a single crazy diamond in a bag of nondescript pebbles.
It is a risk of which the book itself seems aware. Meg Elison’s introduction compares the book to a comet, and describes sitting down to read it with a sense of trepidation: “what if none of the other stories were as good as the titular wonder? What if all the light of it was in the fireball, and the tail was simply ice and dust?” This being an introduction, Elison argues that Mills escapes the gravity of her title story, going on to write:
Mills has the ability to turn a concept rancid with overuse into something fresh, to populate the worlds of future and fantasy with people you’ve known all your life, and to light up the sky in a flash of an image so indelible, you’ll believe ink on paper could burn your retina.
Reader, I wish I could agree. Rabbit Test and Other Stories is a collection tragically caught in the orbit of its title story, a set of lesser antecedents to, and diminishing returns on, its one piece of visionary brilliance. While some of the other stories sparkle and smoke, their flames are a lot less bright than that of “Rabbit Test,” and there is plenty of ice and dust to go around.
“Rabbit Test” itself, of course, is as excellent as everyone remembers. An extended fugue on reproductive justice in the United States of America, the story interweaves a future dystopia of surveillance and forced birth with lyrically described episodes from the history of abortion care and the development of pregnancy tests. Consciously written in response to the US Supreme Court’s abhorrent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the story feels simultaneously timely and timeless, dizzying in its historical scope and laser-focused in its righteous fury at the misogyny and racism which underpin the events described. Mills herself calls the story “a whirlwind,” and by the time I reached its closing line, simultaneously rousing and bitter (“It is 2022 and it is never over”), I felt both buffeted by the rush of history and absolutely clear about the work that lies ahead.
The story’s politics and its literary ambition have been justly praised by many critics, including me. On this read, however, I was struck most by the subtlety of many of Mills’s craft choices. The story’s dystopia is so all-encompassing that it pervades even the analogies used by the narrator. Our future dystopian protagonist watches her menstrual cycle “like a surveillance drone over a labor march.” She experiences guilt “the size of a rich man’s space station.” When she is forced to carry her pregnancy to term, the nurse “holds up the infant, which is squalling in even more terror than its mother.” Every line feels pointed and urgent, conveying the tension and fear of the protagonists’ lives and making the reader feel the injustice of their artificially limited horizons. “Rabbit Test” is that rare thing in SFF: a story that earns the hype. It deserves to be remembered as a landmark of short science fiction in the 2020s.
Given the scale of this achievement, it is natural to look for precursors, and there are plenty of them here. Of the thirteen stories collected in this book, nine were published prior to “Rabbit Test.” Recognisable themes and motifs abound. When the narrator of “Laugh Lines” describes being dragged into the light by her adoptive mother at “anti-vat marches,” it is easy to think about the protagonist of “Rabbit Test” being held aloft as a “miracle child” at an anti-abortion protest. When the mother of the main character in “The Limits of Magic” confesses that “it would be such a relief to be done” having children, one is reminded of the moment in “Rabbit Test” when the narrative voice notes that “her doctor said she couldn’t get her tubes tied unless she had three children already, but where’s the logic in giving birth to three children for the permission to have none?”
Similarities even occur at the structural level. “Strange Waters” follows the life of a fisherwoman moving backwards and forwards in time in her attempts to return home to her family, which feels like an early iteration of the later story’s fleet-footed historical conceit. None of these similarities are marks against their respective stories, of course. All writers have recurring thematic interests and favourite images repeatedly returned to. But it is striking, having first been exposed to the most effective formulation of these images, to find them cropping up in decidedly weaker stories. The earlier pieces have some of the same trappings as “Rabbit Test,” but little of that story’s force, topicality, or sense of daring.
The stories published after “Rabbit Test” are also disappointing. The first of these chronologically, “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days,” transitions from cosmicomic horror into a meditation on life in the age of permacrisis. Again we have a sense of political urgency, but Mills’s polemicism feels less finely wrought. When the narrator opines that “[w]e are fighting and struggling and self-caring our way through the apocalypse, and every day there is something terrible but also something lovely,” it’s difficult to object, but it’s also difficult to imagine the story sticking with you as long as “Rabbit Test.” Another recent story, and the one which opens the book, is “The Death of the God-King.” A fantasy story about a reincarnated ruler who must give up his immortality (and his love affair with Death) for the greater good, the piece has a pleasingly anti-monarchical bent, yet much of its imagery feels stale. The grim reaper as lover is a motif done to death (pun intended) in anglophone fantasy, and the literal description of Death’s interludes with the God-King as “liminal” further highlights these tropes’ familiarity. The execution of those tropes is lively enough, but a lively enough execution of standard tropes feels like all the story really has to offer.
This overfamiliarity afflicts a number of the book’s entries. Loyal readers of contemporary short SFF will recognise some of the usual suspects: wry metafictional reflections on space exploration; sly rewrites of fairy tales; stories about the power of storytelling. One piece, “Adrianna in Pomegranate,” even includes a “magic system” based around “calligramancy,” i.e. writing magic. In fairness, the calligramantic mantra that “[w]riting shapes reality. Writing changes the world” is recast as tragedy by the end of the story, but the sentiment’s ubiquity in contemporary genre fiction blunts even this move’s impact somewhat. Many of these stories would read perfectly well if encountered in a random issue of a genre magazine; packaged up with a showstopper like “Rabbit Test,” though, they feel underwhelming.
All of which said, there are good stories here. “Anchorage” starts from an intriguing premise about spacefaring spirituality and builds to a pair of well-executed twists. “Four of Seven” is a heart-breaking story about growing up poor on a mining colony, the title of which refers to the protagonist’s status as the middle child of seven sisters. Her leaving home for the “Intercolony University” puts her at odds with her family, both socially and temporally. She reaches university via “a sub-FTL ship […] The drawback: for every day that slipped by aboard the good ship Education Prime, slightly more than a year passed on the quietly orbiting colonies it left behind.” It’s an elegant metaphor for the ambivalence of leaving behind a working-class upbringing for higher education, and Mills renders the narrator’s feelings about escaping the mines “in a boat only big enough for one” with empathy and wit. On a more upbeat note, “Kiki Hernández Beats the Devil” offers a charming, Classic Rock-fuelled take on the deal-with-the-devil story, starring a desert-dwelling outlaw and a cute hell hound/emotional support animal. Plus, a giant evil toad!
In her afterword to Rabbit Test and Other Stories, Mills describes her development as a writer of short fiction. “These thirteen stories represent Phase One of Sam Getting Serious,” she tells us. “[W]hen the short story bug strikes again, I’ll be back for Phase Two.” If much of this review has sounded disappointed in Mills’s work, it is only because the book demonstrates that there is so much potential still untapped. Mills is clearly a capable writer, with a versatility that goes beyond the horror-history of “Rabbit Test.” As brilliant as that story is, her best work may yet be ahead of her. Certainly I will be very happy to engage with Phase Two whenever it appears.