Who Goes There?

Samantha Mills made her debut in 2012, although she didn’t start getting published regularly until 2018. As she says in an interview for (the sadly now-defunct) Fantasy Magazine, which you can read here:

Over the next few years, my attempts at novels improved rapidly, but short stories remained a mystery until 2017. I can’t fully describe what happened, but after a lot of reading it finally clicked, and I produced a few stories that worked, and I finally began submitting again.

By this point Mills had been out of college for about a decade, so if you’re at such-and-such an age and worried it might be too late to try your hand at getting published professionally, it probably isn’t.

I had said in my review forecast at the beginning of the month that Mills had probably written “Rabbit Test” prior to a certain infamous SCOTUS decision getting leaked in May 2022, but this turned out to be wrong. Mills, like any writer, had the idea of the real-life use of female rabbits for human pregnancy tests tumbling around in the back of her mind for years, but it took the catastrophic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision for her to think of a story to go with it. She wrote “Rabbit Test” in the summer of 2022 and it quickly got picked up by Uncanny Magazine, who published it just a few months later. Turnarounds for story submissions are usually not this quick, but then “Rabbit Test” is, if nothing else, a deeply timely story, and Mills’s gambit paid off. “Rabbit Test” is only the third story ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and it placed first in the Locus poll.

I remember when awards season was underway and there was a lot of very good word-of-mouth regarding “Rabbit Test” online, which no doubt contributed to it sweeping. It’s a story that spoke incisively of “the moment” (although “the moment” is now three years behind us) in American politics, that worked to get a reaction out of left-liberal readers, and so it did. But, again, that was three years ago. How does it hold as a story, some time after its own “moment” has passed?

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November-December 2022 issue of Uncanny Magazine, which you can read here. It’s since been reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (ed. R. F. Kuang) and Nebula Awards Showcase 58 (ed. Stephen Kotowych).

Enhancing Image

The year is 2091, and Grace, a normal girl about to turn 18, has a big problem in the form of an unwanted pregnancy. She had sex with her maybe-boyfriend before he goes away and now her rabbit test (not a test actually involving a rabbit) has come up positive. This would be bad enough on its own, but the America of 2091 is (at least in some ways) even worse off than today, with women’s menstrual cycles being tracked by an app, courtesy of Rabbit Test LMC. Of course, parents can watch over their underage daughters’ cycles like hawks, and this is all in the aftermath of a nationwide ban on abortion. Grace’s only real hope is to go to her friend Sal to mess with the app, causing a “blackout” long enough for Grace to procure some illicit abortion pills from “one of those old ladies who sells pill packs out of their closets, hoarded up from before the ban.” If she can get this thing taken care of without her Jesus-freak mom finding out then all will be well, more or less. Of course, things don’t go that way.

Grace’s story only takes up about half of “Rabbit Test,” with the other half being a mix of real facts, narratives, and fictionalized vignettes that feed into the greater narrative about reproductive rights. To give Mills credit in a couple ways, she evidently spent much of her time (about a month, by her estimates) on the story by doing research, taking a crash course in the history of abortion, forcing miscarriages, pregnancy tests, and so on. That this is all readable while also being crammed into just over 7,000 words is in itself an achievement, although it’s about one step away from simply copy-pasting passages from actual research papers into your SF short story. What makes this all more impressive is that Mills is taking an intersectional feminist approach, plus a somewhat Marx-inspired understanding of historical forces, to make connections you probably wouldn’t make on your own; indeed these sections, kept away from the Grace narrative, are the closest “Rabbit Test” comes to letting the reader think for themself. We get, in a surprisingly short number of words, a brief history of methods for testing pregnancy, going from mice and rabbits to frogs, of women across different cultures and time periods using at-home methods of testing for pregnancy and (if the desire be there) forcing a miscarriage. It becomes clear that the issue of women’s reproductive rights is one that connects race and class conflict, as well as misogyny, perhaps the oldest of mankind’s evils against itself. This sounds like a lot, because it is.

Meanwhile, Grace comes close to getting what she needs through a trans man named Ambrose (“Women aren’t the only people worried about their uteruses, and Ambrose saw the writing on the wall long before the 2084 ban passed.”), but it’s too late. Sal has ratted her out, apparently being unable to keep her mouth shut, and to say Grace’s mom is unhappy about all this would be an understatement. Grace is gonna have the baby, whether she wants to or not. I would feel more about this if we only barely got to know Grace as a person, and if Amelia, Grace’s mom, wasn’t a caricature of the sort you’d find in Stephen King’s writing.

Get this:

Amelia is marching because she fears being outnumbered. She’s marching because she believes it’s her duty to save babies and place them in homes with good Christian values, because the scientific establishment is out of control, a cabal of demons on Earth locking an entire generation out of salvation.

On the one hand yes, there are people like Amelia in America today—at least several million, going by polls. This doesn’t make her any less of a cartoon character. Then again, nobody is allowed much development or interiority in “Rabbit Test,” since this isn’t that kind of story and goddamnit, we only have 7,000 words and change to get through everything. It’s effective shorthand on Mills’s part for letting us know Grace’s mom is a raving lunatic and that we should be worried about Grace’s safety, but it’s just that. Maybe the biggest message take from all this is that so many people, especially queer people (hey, at least Grace is straight and cis, as far as we know), would be better off if they moved out of their parents’ house as soon as possible. I’m being serious here, as someone whose mental health improved exponentially (putting the bouts of depression I still get aside) once I got a place of my own. Unfortunately, Grace don’t got the means.

When I criticize Mills, just know that a part of me does feel bad, for at least two reasons: the first is that I can respect her rather far-left interpretation of history, as it’s one I more or less agree with. Then again, you might say I’m biased for that reason, and for my part I honestly can’t imagine any “pro-life” person reading “Rabbit Chest” and being convinced by Mills’s argument. The second reason is that if I wanted a story with this message to be more to my liking, I would basically be demanding a different kind of story almost altogether, one that leans much more into a show-don’t-tell approach. This is clearly not what Mills had in mind. So, I can take “Rabbit Test” for what it is or I can sit back and think about a quite different story it could’ve been, one which would’ve met my own specific tastes. Which is more fair? But obviously, even if I were to try to be fair all the way, I don’t see myself ever rereading “Rabbit Test” from start to finish. I consider a great short story to be one that the reader can go back to again and again over a span of years, and I’m not sure if Mills intended “Rabbit Test” to be read more than once. Despite the amount of research and talking points, and admittedly some good lines in there, there’s not much reason to go back to it. That’s not what I think of as being a top-tier story.

There Be Spoilers Here

Grace gives birth to a daughter, named Olivia, and eventually the two move out from under Amelia’s scornful gaze and get an apartment of their own. Despite having been desperate to abort her years earlier, Grace has come to love and care for her daughter, despite the two of them living on meager means. Unfortunately, almost as if like clockwork, disaster strikes again. It’s strongly implied that the teenaged Olivia got drugged and raped at a party, and while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does tend to rhyme. So it goes. The two are able to force a miscarriage, but it comes at a terrible price, as Grace is charged with murder and spends a couple decades in prison—for killing what would’ve been almost indistinguishable from a cat fetus. Finally, the year is 2119, and congress is close to reversing the nationwide abortion ban. We’re told that in the intervening years gay marriage had been banned nationwide, only for that decision to later be reversed. Presumably the same thing will happen with the abortion ban. Hopefully.

The idea is that history works in cycles. Rights that were given at one time can just as easily be taken away in another, and also the other way around. For about half a century we in the US had the nationwide right to abortion, thanks to Roe v. Wade, but now we live in a post-Roe v. Wade world. As Mills says at the end, “it is never over.” Patriarchy and the subjugation of women is such an old human evil that it’s in the Bible, predating capitalism by centuries. Mills ultimately argues that women’s liberation is the omni-cause of human rights, and has been for a long time; but like any good intersectional feminist she knows the fight for women’s liberation ties into capitalism, racism, colonialism, and a few other -isms I’m not mentioning at the moment.

A Step Farther Out

I had read this story a couple days ago, and took some time to sit on it. I feel rather conflicted, because Mills succeeded in writing the kind of story she wanted to write; it’s just that I had wished “Rabbit Test” would be something other than what it is, which I understand is unfair. When I heard all these things about “Rabbit Test” I got the hunch it would be a didactic treatise on abortion rights, and it is indeed that. If anything it’s even more in-your-face than I was expecting. I agree with every point Mills makes here, so I feel like I’m at liberty to say this kind of story-as-treatise method doesn’t work for me. I could be wrong, but I don’t think “Rabbit Test” will be read and enjoyed thirty years from now in the way of, say, Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire” or even Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”—the latter also being on the didactic side and seemingly made in a lab to be forced on English students, but still enjoyable. Even Le Guin, when she’s trying to make a point, leaves enough room for the reader to think on it, so that they feel like they’re collaborating with the author.

See you next time.