The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
- Автор: Рот Вероника, Адамс Джон Джозеф
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HMH Books : Mariner
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- Жанр: Малые литературные формы прозы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021». Краткое содержание книги:
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
LYLE BROWN, AGE 32, HISTORY TEACHER AT [REDACTED] HIGH: It wasn’t millions. But it was . . . a lot. Imagine my surprise when the principal calls me into his office and tells me how much money we’ve been given. And my immediate thought is, “Okay, I can finally afford to get enough pencils and pens and notebooks for my students!” To be honest, I was just glad I could make sure the hand sanitizer dispensers in the hallways stopped running out.
SMITH: You could see it in the kids, though. That’s true. It wasn’t like they was walkin’ around with Jordans or anything or like they was flashin’ money around and whatnot. Matter of fact, I started seeing them less. Turns out they was spendin’ more of they time at school.
BROWN: A visual arts program, a theater program. Hell, we pooled with another school and built an actual theater! Kids were using actual hand-held cameras to turn what would’ve been TikToks into Oscar-eligible short films.
SMITH: Those damn TikToks. If I’m keepin’ it real witchu, I miss those kids. I mean, good for them stayin’ out of trouble, but the neighborhood done changed when you ain’t see them around. It’s summer and ain’t no thirteen-year-olds chillin’ on they front stoop in the Fayetteville housing projects in quadruple-XL white tees and baggy jeans with they coco-mango-cherries and do-rags. A place loses its character when it ain’t got that anymore.
VOICE OF WENDY GUAN: One of the first things I was told upon joining the project was that we were to focus as much as possible on tangibles. Essentially, we would look at discernible racial disparities—in housing, in education outcomes, in the number and location of grocery stores—and work backward. Our goal was to find a number. What number did we need to generate that would render all material things equal? Focusing on the racial wealth gap seemed like the most concrete way of going about things, and we operated on the assumption that housing was the most appropriate vector of analysis. So, our “number” would essentially be coded to a dollar amount. The data was relatively easy to come by. Much of it was public already. The tax assessor’s office had home values, and then we could bucket them by ZIP code. But very quickly, we noticed something strange.
REDACTED: The tax assessor’s office had been overvaluing homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods and undervaluing homes in predominantly white neighborhoods. And the reason they were doing this was to fund police brutality settlements. How do they get their money? Raise the property tax. The city was literally making poor people pay for every time a cop shot a Black kid.
PERKINS: Your average American city doesn’t have the budget to pay $150 million or so in yearly settlements for officer misconduct. Yet another reason police are so expensive. What ends up happening is that the city issues a bond to a bank. Bank charges handling fees and interest that the city’s on the hook for. But in return, the city now has the cash on hand to pay the victims and/or their families for the officer’s misconduct. And the more money in the city budget that goes to that, the less there is for handling lead poisoning or funding schools.
In Stanley Quarter Park, children climb over a jungle gym while wearing surgical gloves and giggling behind single-use face masks.
DR. ATHENA DAVIS, AGE 74, ABOLITIONIST AND PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT _____ UNIVERSITY, MEMBER OF REPAIR PROJECT TEAM: Chicago is illustrative, and I think a more appropriate analogue than Professor Higgins’s Holocaust example. Between 1972 and 1991, some 125 Black Chicagoans—at least, that is the number of cases that are known—were tortured by police officers in a building on Chicago’s South Side. Beaten, electrocuted, sodomized. Chained to boiling radiators. And they were tortured into confessing to crimes that led to prison sentences, sometimes to death row. Discrete instances of a harm. A bracketed period of time. A reparations bill eventually did make its way through the legislature. It was revolutionary for a number of reasons, not just because it included an actual reparations fund. The amount was $5.5 million, a fraction of the $100 million that previous claims related to police torture had cost the city. But in the bill was an acknowledgment that torture had indeed taken place. There was to be a monument to the victims of police torture erected somewhere in the city. A psychological services center for survivors would be built. And there was to be a unit on police torture taught in eighth- and tenth-grade history classes throughout the city.
INTERVIEWER: You mentioned the racial wealth gap and housing earlier.
VOICE OF WENDY GUAN: Yes! In the aggregate sense, wealth is the value of your assets minus your debts. If we were going to focus on financial compensation, we needed something concrete as a . . . prism for our analysis, so to speak. Economic disadvantages can harm your ability to accumulate wealth. And in the United States, at least, the surest way to accumulate wealth is through homeownership. And that is how we came to focus on a location-based analysis for the algorithm.
REDACTED: We’d programmed the algo to produce a number per ZIP code based on the values we input. That output would correspond to a scale we cooked up of dollar amounts. A lot of numbers we had to figure out beforehand. Tax assessments and foreclosure rates. Not just the number of schools, but also the number of school closures. Then there’s the police part. It took forever, but through arrest records, we could trace the incarcerated back to where they had initially been arrested. We then took the settlement amounts from police brutality cases as well as the number of cases that went to trial but plaintiffs lost. Legal took care of that part. And together we extrapolated what the incarcerated might have lost in wages and married that to unemployment data. That was hell to disaggregate by ZIP code. But we had our inputs that we turned into superinputs, and then we could generate our output: the amount in dollars that would be apportioned to each ZIP code. It’s “If, Then” with a super-complicated “If.”
Other than that, we had no idea where the money would go. But that wasn’t up to us. All that decision-making was a bit above our pay grade. You gotta talk to the big guy about that, and I don’t think anybody knows where he is. After everything that went down, Mayor Gaetz—or, rather, former Mayor Gaetz—kinda just vanished. Which . . . I don’t blame him.
When we ran that algo for the first time for a single ZIP code, we thought there had to be a mistake. Double-checked the inputs, the superinputs, ran it again. And again. And again. We ran that algo maybe three hundred times. Figured we broke the scale. But, no. That first dollar amount . . . to make all things equal . . . was just that huge.
Former city councilman Richard Perkins and corporate lawyer Tommy DiSanto are finishing their lunch.
PERKINS: I put the team together to figure out if this reparations program was financially viable. Not just that, but whether these disbursements were something that we could keep going. This wasn’t going to be a one-time check to Black folk. The REPAIR Act was sustained investment. Funds disbursed to individual households, but also location-based budget allocations for school districts. More schools and better schools. Investment in diversion programs and mental health programs. Increased sanitation. Infrastructure repair. Parks. Printer paper for libraries. Job training programs across industries. And it all had to keep going. I knew there wasn’t gonna be enough money in the budget to suddenly make things right on the property end. So we co-opted the bond system. Instead of using it to finance police brutality settlements, we’d use it to fund our plan. It was gonna be impossible to get the mayor on board with this if we had to come up with a new system from whole cloth to base our funding on. But if we could use what was already there and flip it—we already had the data operation going from his campaign—then he could see where we were coming from and where we were going.