Science Fiction Review: The Mother Code | Carole Stivers

Science fiction is not my normal genre but I like to read standalone books from the genre sometimes because I can usually keep up to an extent with the world building required (not even sure that is the right term, but you know what I mean, I hope!). In The Mother Code by Carole Stivers, scientists race to preserve human life on earth after a bioweapon causes an epidemic (are we ready to use the term epidemic, yet?).

About the Book | The Mother Code

What it means to be human—and a mother—is put to the test in Carole Stivers’ debut novel set in a world that is more chilling and precarious than ever.

The year is 2049. When a deadly non-viral agent intended for biowarfare spreads out of control, scientists must scramble to ensure the survival of the human race. They turn to their last resort, a plan to place genetically engineered children inside the cocoons of large-scale robots—to be incubated, birthed, and raised by machines. But there is yet one hope of preserving the human order—an intelligence programmed into these machines that renders each unique in its own right—the Mother Code. 



Kai is born in America’s desert southwest, his only companion his robot Mother, Rho-Z. Equipped with the knowledge and motivations of a human mother, Rho-Z raises Kai and teaches him how to survive. But as children like Kai come of age, their Mothers transform too—in ways that were never predicted. When government survivors decide that the Mothers must be destroyed, Kai must make a choice. Will he break the bond he shares with Rho-Z? Or will he fight to save the only parent he has ever known?

In a future that could be our own, The Mother Code explores what truly makes us human—and the tenuous nature of the boundaries between us and the machines we create. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

My Review | The Mother Code

Broken into two parts, The Mother Code is a surprisingly emotional book that fed into my fear of artificial intelligence taking over life, to an extent. In the first part of the book, the story moves back and forth in time, and later ties the stories together in the second part.

A boy named Kai is born to Rho-Z, a robot who is able to incubate and give birth to human babies. Though Rho-Z is a machine, her instinct is still to protect her child. Fifteen years earlier, there was a failed biowarfare experiment by the United States that cause a global epidemic. Experts from a variety of science and technology fields come together in a covert operation to alter human DNA enough to make humans immune from the disease.

The team is unable to produce enough antidote for everyone, and so they focus on these robotic Mothers giving birth to a new generation with built-in immunity who will hopefully survive and repopulate the human race. Meanwhile Kai meets a girl named Misha who was also born to a robot Mother, but has been saved by humans after her mother is damaged.

As Kai, Misha, and other children born to this new generation through Mothers come of age, the Mothers are also transforming. As the humans of this generation are pushing to destroy the Mothers, Kai is faced with the difficult decision of his bond with his own Mother, Rho-Z. How far will he go to save her?

The book has an obvious post-apocalyptic setting that works well for this story. The human race is largely this new generation who were birthed by the Mothers and are able to be immune to the virus that took the lives of the generations before them. The story also focuses quite a bit on the team of scientists and researchers who are working to tackle the problem of immunity and create the Mothers that will later save the human race, if they don’t also destroy them. I actually found their story more compelling in some ways, perhaps because it felt more tied to something I could relate to experiencing than that of Kai and the other children.

A clear theme of this book is to what extent machines can think or feel independently. Machines can learn, but that is a separate question from whether they can think. The Mother Code from the title is the code that represents each of the Mothers that were created. It was designed to preserve the essence of the true biological mothers (humans) to the children. In other words, each Mother has unique AI just as each human has unique DNA.

Giving each Mother the characteristics of the biological mother was intended to offer the connection in raising a child that a human mother would offer. The Mothers have heritage, history, and experiences built in that are designed to represent what the biological mother would have. Overtime, it becomes clear that the Mothers also learn from the children. They aren’t simply a robot built on someone’s past, and at a certain point they are evolving independent of the scientists who created their code.

There are some surviving humans, in addition to the new generation of children birthed by the Mothers. These humans are searching for their children, but the Mothers are trying to prevent them from getting close. They are designed to want to protect their children, but this also causes other unintended effects.

This book surprised me. The concept seemed too far fetched at first, but later I grew to become very invested. This is largely credit to Stivers, who explained complicated technology and concepts in a way that I was able to understand and appreciate.

Thought-provoking and gripping!

About the Author | Carole Stivers

Carole Stivers is a Silicon Valley biochemist whose “home genre” is science fiction. Her near-future science fiction novel The Mother Code is on track for publication by Berkley Books (Penguin Random House) in May 2020. It has already been sold in countries around the world, including the UK, Germany, France, Holland, Spain, and Brazil. And, it was recently optioned for film by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.

In addition to her passion for science fiction, Carole has been a life-long fan of mystery—starting as a child reading Nancy Drew, graduating to Agatha Christie and “Ellery Queen,” and later to John Grisham and Scott Turow. “A good mystery is not too far a cry from a good work of science fiction. Both deal with intricate human relationships, strained by extraordinary circumstances,” Stivers says. “And if the mystery includes a twist of science, all the better!”

Yearly visits to the California coast’s many monarch butterfly refuges, coupled with multiple trips to New Orleans before and after Katrina, suggested the perfect plot and setting for her mystery story The Butterfly Garden, a tale of clashing social values and long-simmering animosities, stirred in the wake of a devastating storm.