Big Mama Stories — Eleanor Arnason

One thing you can say for sure about Big Mamas and Big Poppas: their lives are never dull. The quirky, nearly omnipotent members of the colorful tribe of Big Mamas and Big Poppas rove the Universe, able to leap vast expanses of time and space in a single bound. Little can harm a Mama or Poppa, except large, mythological monsters and world-historical trends. And yet they do have their problems. In “Big Ugly Mama and the Zk,” for instance, Big Ugly Mama re-discovers why she dislikes time-travel, which she had hoped to use to put right the harm she has inadvertently inflicted on a zk. In “Big Green Mama Falls in Love,” Big Green Mama discovers just how life-threatening a Big-Mama-sized case of narcissistic love can be, even as the skwork learn that one cannot train a microbe to be patriotic. While in “Big Red Mama in Time and Morris, Minnesota,” Big Red Mama gets pissed off when she discovers the Cretaceous has been invaded by an obnoxious human who has stolen a time-machine -- and decides that some information probably shouldn't be free, particularly since as a group, humans underestimated the damage they did and rarely took responsibility for anything.