The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton
My rating: 4/5 cats
My eyes were her eyes. My lips were her lips and my shoulders, too, were hers, and so the world was geometrically composed, and everything I ever was or would become was threaded in me already, and manifest in her.
this is helicopter parenting with a SF edge; where cloning/parthenogenesis enables a mother’s micro-meddling with her daughter by way of her physicality; using her own body as a template to create new life, picking away at the unsatisfactory bits, building new ones, reshaping her daughter into an idealized version of herself, of the idea of a woman, extending the borders of human potential with this living proof of her genius, manipulating her daughter physically and emotionally all for the glory of societal and political recognition.
“You’re mine—and only mine. Nobody else knows how to make you.”
it’s also an alt-history story about the roman empire, ambition, narcissism, madness, and—as the title foreshadows, destruction. a very ambitious and well-executed tor short.
read it for yourself here: https://www.tor.com/2016/04/20/the-destroyer/
