WHEN MOTHERS DREAM: STORIES
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BRENDA COOPER
Award-winning writer Brenda Cooper celebrates the strength of the female in many guises: mother, daughter, engineer, biologist, and more. From a young dreamer who fights to protect the endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales to two older women whose grandchildren are being raised by AIs to a future scientist who tries to keep the world safe from bioengineered creatures, When Mothers Dream explores the edges of what can be possible if we celebrate the strength of women.
The collection mixes new and previously published speculative work. The bouquet of science fiction, fantasy, and poetry is tied together with a thread of hope and colored with a touch of anger. It includes the voices of whales. It is a book for our times.
When Mothers Dream is about fighting for our future. Women can save us all.
Also available by Brenda Cooper:
Cracking the Sky
- August, 2025 978-1-958880-35-7
- trade paperback, 5.5 x 8.5
- Order copies below; or order ebook and print copies from these dealers.
- Artwork by Rachel Byler
Award-winning writer Brenda Cooper celebrates the strength of the female in many guises: mother, daughter, engineer, biologist, and more. From a young dreamer who fights to protect the endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales to two older women whose grandchildren are being raised by AIs to a future scientist who tries to keep the world safe from bioengineered creatures, When Mothers Dream explores the edges of what can be possible if we celebrate the strength of women.
The collection mixes new and previously published speculative work. The bouquet of science fiction, fantasy, and poetry is tied together with a thread of hope and colored with a touch of anger. It includes the voices of whales. It is a book for our times.
When Mothers Dream is about fighting for our future. Women can save us all.
Also available by Brenda Cooper:
Cracking the Sky
5 available
"To read Brenda Cooper’s work is to experience the natural world in your bones: sea, sky, river, forest, and the miraculous creatures that inhabit our land and waters. Despite the beauty of the surroundings, Cooper respects her readers enough not to serve up easy answers to the ecological perils we humans have created. Her stories grapple with the consequences through various lenses—personal to political to technical to magical—as her characters come to terms with our impact on the planet."
— Tara Campbell, author of 2025 Philip K Dick Award finalist City of Dancing Gargoyles
"The intensity of climate grief is alive in these stories, along with a passionate yearning for better futures and the urge to realize them through action. A timely reminder that our way out of our current crises is through relationships, not just between mothers and daughters but, crucially, also between humans and nonhumans."
— Vandana Singh, author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories and Teaching Climate Change
"When Mothers Dream is a beautiful, colorful, exhilarating, and terrifying collection. These stories and poems are infused with the energy of the divine feminine, and solidly based on its wisdom. Cooper is one of our best short story writers, and it's a rare treat to see hard science fiction handled with such an artistic touch."
— Louisa Morgan, author of A Secret History of Witches and The Witch's Kind
"Brenda Cooper's When Mother's Dream is a must read book. This often poetic, compassionately prophetic collection of stories shows us our possible futures measured by the breadth and depth of a mother's love. It haunts me like the best of our genre’s work."
— Ken Scholes, author of the Psalms of Isaak series
"Brenda Cooper describes herself as a futurist, a technologist, and a poet. Her collection, When Mothers Dream, bears this out with tales of near and distant futures in which scientific and technological advances are employed to solve devilish problems, ranging from child rearing done by robots, to eradicating invasive species, to relocating those whose homes have succumbed to rising sea levels, to powering cities without resorting to fossil fuels. Cooper proves adept at exploring the intergenerational gulfs between mothers, daughters, and grandmothers as everyone struggles to find meaningful work in an age of growing solastalgia, which is the sorrow and grief wrought by deteriorating global climate conditions. Some of her stories are heartbreaking, others are filled with rage, still others strike hopeful notes, and Cooper is talented enough to combine all of these in a single story . . . each work in this collection recognizes that technology is but one part of what’s needed to get us beyond the current environmental mess. Our world could use more of her intelligent, generous characters, even with their flaws. Cooper interweaves ecological concerns with explorations of ways we might rethink our relationships with family members and others in our communities, and with the natural world around us. When Mothers Dream makes the case for reevaluating our individual and collective actions if we are to stave off the disasters of anthropogenic climate change, instead of allowing ourselves to sink into solastalgia. Her principal characters tend to be women who work hard to discern what must be done and just as hard to convince others, including those quite close to them . . . As the illustration on the book cover indicates, Cooper’s recent stories and poetry are very much concerned with the fate of the orcas, which grows more dire every year. Even now, several pods of whales living off the coast of the Pacific northwest struggle to survive as their polluted ocean verges on becoming unlivable . . . Throughout the collection, Cooper’s gracefully incisive writing style is on full display in her poetry and her prose."
— Rosemary Claire Smith, Analog Magazine
"I have found over the years that writers tend to produce most of their best efforts at a particular length . . . One on that list is Brenda Cooper, whose novels I have enjoyed without exception and whose short stories still often manage to waken my jaded sense of wonder. So I was delighted to see a new collection and even more delighted to discover that I had read relatively few of the entries before. There is a kind of loose theme to the collection — women refusing to be pigeonholed and taking positive steps to improve their environments. It's hard to pick favorites, but I'll mention "In the Garden," "Southern Residents," and "Biology at the End of the World" as the stories that resonated most with me. There are a few stories and a handful of poems that are all original to this collection, and about half the stories appeared originally in comparatively obscure publications. There are so many relatively obscure publications lost in the mass of new published material that I could probably say this about any new collection. Well worth the price for such intelligent and stimulating fiction."
— Critical Mass
"There’s definitely a message here that’s hard to miss (one I largely agree with), but Cooper’s deft touch and subtle handling of her characters means that there’s far more than polemic here. The stories are hard-edged but romantic and the writing sometimes lyrical. The endings are neither Hollywood-happy nor depressingly realistic; on the whole, they’re hopeful and idealistic — suggesting what could happen if only the human race would get off its ass and work at it. I’m not hopeful we ever will, but I’m fully in favor of stories that try to convince us we should. . . . A moving and beautiful collection of climate fiction stories that’s made me at least tentatively a Brenda Cooper fan. Certainly I disagree with her (characters) on some key elements of philosophy, but we’re at least on the same page, and she’s done a great job of writing beautiful fiction about it. I tend to be less of a fan of speculative poetry, but there were a few poems here that I liked as well."
— Metamorphosis Reviews
"Distinctive characterizations, well-limned interrelationships, and the vividly realized Fremont contribute to an exciting coming-of-age story with a strong message about the evils of prejudice."
— Booklist on The Silver Ship and the Sea
"Brenda Cooper gives [the multigenerational starship] scenario a thorough, intelligent shaking and reworking, hewing to lots of the glorious old props while infusing a new strain of social justice and semi-YA, Hunger Games vitality into the milieu."
— Locus on The Creative Fire
"Playing God is dangerous . . . an intelligent, thoughtful look at what it might mean to coexist with superior AIs that we ourselves have created. Brenda Cooper’s universe is detailed, inventive, and ultimately dazzling."
— Nancy Kress on Edge of Dark
— Tara Campbell, author of 2025 Philip K Dick Award finalist City of Dancing Gargoyles
"The intensity of climate grief is alive in these stories, along with a passionate yearning for better futures and the urge to realize them through action. A timely reminder that our way out of our current crises is through relationships, not just between mothers and daughters but, crucially, also between humans and nonhumans."
— Vandana Singh, author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories and Teaching Climate Change
"When Mothers Dream is a beautiful, colorful, exhilarating, and terrifying collection. These stories and poems are infused with the energy of the divine feminine, and solidly based on its wisdom. Cooper is one of our best short story writers, and it's a rare treat to see hard science fiction handled with such an artistic touch."
— Louisa Morgan, author of A Secret History of Witches and The Witch's Kind
"Brenda Cooper's When Mother's Dream is a must read book. This often poetic, compassionately prophetic collection of stories shows us our possible futures measured by the breadth and depth of a mother's love. It haunts me like the best of our genre’s work."
— Ken Scholes, author of the Psalms of Isaak series
"Brenda Cooper describes herself as a futurist, a technologist, and a poet. Her collection, When Mothers Dream, bears this out with tales of near and distant futures in which scientific and technological advances are employed to solve devilish problems, ranging from child rearing done by robots, to eradicating invasive species, to relocating those whose homes have succumbed to rising sea levels, to powering cities without resorting to fossil fuels. Cooper proves adept at exploring the intergenerational gulfs between mothers, daughters, and grandmothers as everyone struggles to find meaningful work in an age of growing solastalgia, which is the sorrow and grief wrought by deteriorating global climate conditions. Some of her stories are heartbreaking, others are filled with rage, still others strike hopeful notes, and Cooper is talented enough to combine all of these in a single story . . . each work in this collection recognizes that technology is but one part of what’s needed to get us beyond the current environmental mess. Our world could use more of her intelligent, generous characters, even with their flaws. Cooper interweaves ecological concerns with explorations of ways we might rethink our relationships with family members and others in our communities, and with the natural world around us. When Mothers Dream makes the case for reevaluating our individual and collective actions if we are to stave off the disasters of anthropogenic climate change, instead of allowing ourselves to sink into solastalgia. Her principal characters tend to be women who work hard to discern what must be done and just as hard to convince others, including those quite close to them . . . As the illustration on the book cover indicates, Cooper’s recent stories and poetry are very much concerned with the fate of the orcas, which grows more dire every year. Even now, several pods of whales living off the coast of the Pacific northwest struggle to survive as their polluted ocean verges on becoming unlivable . . . Throughout the collection, Cooper’s gracefully incisive writing style is on full display in her poetry and her prose."
— Rosemary Claire Smith, Analog Magazine
"I have found over the years that writers tend to produce most of their best efforts at a particular length . . . One on that list is Brenda Cooper, whose novels I have enjoyed without exception and whose short stories still often manage to waken my jaded sense of wonder. So I was delighted to see a new collection and even more delighted to discover that I had read relatively few of the entries before. There is a kind of loose theme to the collection — women refusing to be pigeonholed and taking positive steps to improve their environments. It's hard to pick favorites, but I'll mention "In the Garden," "Southern Residents," and "Biology at the End of the World" as the stories that resonated most with me. There are a few stories and a handful of poems that are all original to this collection, and about half the stories appeared originally in comparatively obscure publications. There are so many relatively obscure publications lost in the mass of new published material that I could probably say this about any new collection. Well worth the price for such intelligent and stimulating fiction."
— Critical Mass
"There’s definitely a message here that’s hard to miss (one I largely agree with), but Cooper’s deft touch and subtle handling of her characters means that there’s far more than polemic here. The stories are hard-edged but romantic and the writing sometimes lyrical. The endings are neither Hollywood-happy nor depressingly realistic; on the whole, they’re hopeful and idealistic — suggesting what could happen if only the human race would get off its ass and work at it. I’m not hopeful we ever will, but I’m fully in favor of stories that try to convince us we should. . . . A moving and beautiful collection of climate fiction stories that’s made me at least tentatively a Brenda Cooper fan. Certainly I disagree with her (characters) on some key elements of philosophy, but we’re at least on the same page, and she’s done a great job of writing beautiful fiction about it. I tend to be less of a fan of speculative poetry, but there were a few poems here that I liked as well."
— Metamorphosis Reviews
"Distinctive characterizations, well-limned interrelationships, and the vividly realized Fremont contribute to an exciting coming-of-age story with a strong message about the evils of prejudice."
— Booklist on The Silver Ship and the Sea
"Brenda Cooper gives [the multigenerational starship] scenario a thorough, intelligent shaking and reworking, hewing to lots of the glorious old props while infusing a new strain of social justice and semi-YA, Hunger Games vitality into the milieu."
— Locus on The Creative Fire
"Playing God is dangerous . . . an intelligent, thoughtful look at what it might mean to coexist with superior AIs that we ourselves have created. Brenda Cooper’s universe is detailed, inventive, and ultimately dazzling."
— Nancy Kress on Edge of Dark
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR