Is There a Cookbook Involved?

In Paul J. McAuley’s “Crimes and Glory” after Earth has been devastated by wars, economic collapse, and radical climate events, an alien race named the Jackaroo have come to help mankind. The Jackaroo have transported many humans from Earth to colony worlds. People win a lottery to move from Earth to a dystopian New World, grim but filled with opportunity. People dream of escaping from troubles on Earth by starting over on a new planet. The colony worlds once housed other races collectively called the Elder Culture. These long vanished races also received the Jackaroo’s aid. The Elder Culture left behind abandoned space ships and other pieces of their technology. 

The story has a hardboiled tone. Emma, the main character, works as a detective for the U.N. Technology Control Unit. Among humans there is both legal and illegal traffic in Elder Culture technology. Some Elder Culture technology is helpful. Some is both helpful and dangerous. Some “is simply dangerous. Stuff that could give an individual the power to hold worlds to ransom. Stuff that could change the human race so radically that it would either die out or become something other than human.” ( The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection 94) Coders working at code farms study, decipher, and learn the code that makes the technology run. Consider this passage about the ships left behind by the Elder Culture called the Ghajar: 

“In any case, whether dead or alive or smashed to flinders, all the ships were to some degree or another infested with code. It was quantum stuff, hardware and software embedded in the spin properties of fundamental particles in the molecular matrices of the ship’s hulls, raw and fragmented, and crusty with errors and necrotic patches that had accumulated during millennia of disuse and exposure to cosmic radiation.

“Coders working in farms like Meyer Lansky’s analysed and catalogued this junk and stitched together viable fragments and spent hours and days trying to get them to run in virtual partitions on the farm’s hypercomputer cloud. Code approved by the licensing board was bought by software developers who used it to patch controls ships reclaimed from the vast Sargassos, manipulate exotic matter, refine front ends of quantum technology, and so on and so forth. There were theoretical applications, too - four of the so-called hard mathematical problems had been solved using code reclaimed from the farms.” (YBSF 94-95)

For some people, coding is like a recreational drug which sometimes proves fatal. Emma’s husband suffered this fate. It’s suggested that his death fuels Emma’s obsession as she pursues a criminal named Niles Sarkka much like Ahab pursued a certain white whale. “Crimes and Glory” starts with Emma in pursuit of Sarkka and then backtracks to the murder mystery which led to the pursuit. Her investigation takes us on a trek through the vicious underworld of the city of Port of Plenty (featuring that Meyer Lansky fellow mentioned above).  

Sarkka is a rogue expert on the Elder Cultures. He once was a University Chair. Handsome and charismatic, Sarkka also hosted a popular TV show in which he and his team went on various expeditions to recover Elder Culture technology while expounding what Emma calls crackpot theories. Sounds like a nice fit for the Discovery Channel. Sarkka argued that the Jackaroo were manipulating human history long before their appearance and that they created the crisis from which they saved us. He believes the colony worlds aren’t a refuge. They’re a trap. Sarkka was discredited and became a criminal after one of his exploits resulted in disaster. “My boss had been one of the team who had prosecuted Niles Sarkka after most of his crew had become infected with nanotech viroids while excavating the remains of ancient machinery in a remote part of the Great Central Desert. Marc had seen the bodies, all of them horribly transformed, some still partly alive. His boss, who’d later shot himself, had ordered cauterisation of the site with a low-yield nuclear weapon.” (YBSF 102)

Is Sarkka a greedy egomaniac? Is he a nutty conspiracy theorist? Or is he right? The story prompts the reader and the narrator herself to wonder who’s the hero and who’s the villain.

Bruce Sterling’s “Black Swan” has nothing to do with Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis engaging in girl on girl  action. (And, I’d completely forgotten about that movie until I started reviewing this story.) Unlike the 2010 film of the same name, Sterling’s story, published in 2009, isn’t about ballerinas. Instead it’s about a technology journalist named Luca and one of his source, Massimo Montaldo. Luca thinks Montaldo may be an industrial spy. However, Montaldo’s true nature is far more fantastic. Montaldo is an Italian über patriot, and he’s a rival for a certain world leader’s wife. 

The title refers to the black swan theory rather than the black swan problem. The term black swan came from Juvenal. Ancient and medieval Europeans didn’t think black swans existed, hence the term symbolized things which don’t exist. This proved to be wrong when black swans were found in Western Australia. So black swans went from symbolizing things that don’t exist to symbolizing discoveries that undermine a set of beliefs. The black swan theory as explained by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is that most major historical events, technological advances, and artistic accomplishments are unexpected, unpredictable, surprises.

Luca, Sterling’s narrator, sees the black swan this way: “A stroke of genius is a black swan, beyond prediction, beyond expectation. If a black swan never arrives, how on Earth could its absence be guessed?

“The chasm between Massimo’s version of Italy and my Italy was invisible-yet all encompassing. It was exactly like the stark difference between the man I was now, and the man I’d been one short hour ago.

“A black swan can never be predicted, expected, or categorized. A black swan, when it arrives, cannot even be recognized as a black swan. When the black swan assaults us, with the wingbeats of some rapist Jupiter, then we must rewrite history.” (The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection 83)

It turns out that Montaldo travels between dimensions. In his native dimension, Italy is a technological power, and, of course, the secret of traveling between dimensions has been discovered. However, as Montaldo explains it, he actually creates each alternate dimension before he travels to it. He declares, “without me as the observer, this universe doesn’t even exist.” (Ibid) By the end, Luca will find out if Montaldo’s statement is true.

Portrait of an Artist in Dire Straits

At first, Maureen F. McHugh’s “Useless Things” seems to offer little more than a plaint that life is horrible, and, by the way, let me hit you over the head with politics. “Useless Things” takes place in 2022, a near future in which it looks like the current economy just kept getting worse. However, McHugh never actually blames any set of policies for the disaster. Complaints about heat are only natural in the American southwest (Yes, the southwest again - a favorite punching bag of the writers included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Seventh Annual Edition) especially for someone who can’t afford air conditioning. There are water shortages which could also be the result of a breakdown in water supply to a desert area whose population growth in recent decades far outstrips its natural supply. Then again, maybe it’s all caused by global warming. There are hints that water, something taken for granted by us, is a concern in other parts of the story’s America. McHugh leaves it for her readers to wonder about or assume. It’s interesting that the hoboes of “Useless Things” charge up their smart phones and use websites in place of the signs that hoboes of the 1930s used to alert each other of danger and to identify generous homeowners.

The story’s narrator is a sculptor. Like a writer who sinks to submitting “hot letters” to porn magazines and earning ten dollars a piece, McHugh’s narrator also sinks to less reputable work. A former art major, the narrator once worked for a toy company where she made action figures from a popular movie series called Kinetics. As she says, “A whole generation of boys grew up imprinting on toys I had sculpted.” (The Year’s Best Science Fiction 27, 57) After losing her job, she began to freelance, making reborns, dolls who look like newborn infants. Now she has sunk to also producing custom made dildos. The narrator takes pride in and puts a lot of artistry into her work. She starts off being generous and offering food to migrant workers, but becomes less generous after she returns home to find she’s been robbed, perhaps by someone she helped. One of the narrator’s beloved dogs also goes missing apparently as a result of the break-in. After the robbery, she overcomes her objection to owning guns. In short, “Useless Things” follows the narrator’s evolution from an idealist to a pragmatist.

Reviewing the Helvetican Renaissance

Imagine if there was only one copy of a book as vital as the Bible or the Koran or the Torah are to their cultures. In “Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance” by John Kessel, The Abandonment is the Caslonian Empire’s Bible. The Abandonment is a series of plays documenting mankind’s rebirth after a temporary extinction. And yes, there is only one copy. There are no recordings of The Abandonment’s performances and actors prepare for the play through special methods which cause them to forget the parts they played after the performance ends.

The Pujmanian Order on the enslaved world of Helvetica sends the monk Adlan on a mission to Caslonian home world where The Abandonment’s only copy resides in the Imperial Archives. Adlan believes that he hears the gods’ voices in his head. Often the voices prove right, but even when their advice seems doubtful, there is room to believe they might have been right after all. For instance, as Adlan attempts to slip off the Caslonian home world, the voices tell him to run through the Imperial City, which draws attention. Then they tell him to dawdle at the city’s space port. Yet that advice gets Adlan to a weapon and a hostage. Adlan is highly trained in martial arts and infiltration. He uses these abilities to break into the Imperial Archives. Further special training allows Adlan to memorize The Abandonment. After doing so, he destroys the written copy. Thus Adlan becomes the only copy of the Caslonian Empire’s sacred text.

If Adlan can reach the Pujmanian monastery on Helvetica, the Order would have him (and The Abandonment) as a hostage, giving them the leverage to demand Helvetica’s freedom. However, someone close to Adlan questions the mission’s purpose. They tell Adlan that even if it causes the Caslonians to destroy Helvetica in retaliation, mankind would be better off if it were freed from the gods. This freedom could result from the permanent loss of The Abandonment. Adlan must make a quick decision which he’ll wonder about years later. “If I have done wrong, it is not for me to judge.” (The Year's Best Science Fiction 27, 54)

On final note: During Adlan’s flight, there are scenes in an underground city which reminds me of an underground city which appeared in one of Harry Harrison and Dan Barry’s stories for the Flash Gordon newspaper strip. If I manage to unearth the story one day, I’ll either edit this post or add further information in the comments section.