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.