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.
DISANTO: I’ve never done so much math in my whole entire life.
VOICE OF WENDY GUAN: We were already thinking to the distant future. A city changes. The algorithm needed to be able to change with it.
I was watching a little girl ride her bike the other day, and I think this provides the best example for what I’m trying to explain. I don’t have to explain that a bicycle has two wheels or even that you ride the thing by pushing your feet to the pedals in a circular motion. The girl just knows these things. But figuring how to ride a bicycle—how to balance without falling off, how to deal with ruts in the road—that’s a different kind of knowledge. Skill-based. You’re learning. This little girl kept trying to get up this tiny, tiny hill. She would stall at the steepest part, then fall backward. Then, at one point, as she’s trying to make her way up, she leans forward. Just a little bit, then a little more. Finally, after she crested the hill, she goes back to how she was sitting before. No one told her to do that.
Before, algorithms had been operating toward the knowing of a specific thing. “Knowing that,” so to speak. But machine learning is focused on knowing how. A basic algorithm recognizes the thing in front of it as a bicycle. But machine learning is what gets you up the hill. We had the algorithm for the initial disbursement, but we needed it to recognize that a city changes. Would our algorithm know what to do with a new refugee population moving into a targeted neighborhood? When the districts are inevitably redrawn, will it still operate with the same sophistication? If half of a ZIP code is replaced with luxury condominiums, what would the algorithm decide to do?
We didn’t have the time or resources to program the AI to do that, so we took those decisions on ourselves. How much of the dollar amount would go to schools? What to do with home valuations? Maybe . . . maybe if we could’ve got the algorithm to handle all of that, things would have turned out differently. Maybe the algorithm could’ve decided better than us.
The REPAIR Act was signed into law in February of 20___ and disbursement of funds began on June 19 of that year, traditionally the holiday known as Juneteenth.
SANDRA EWING, 37, FORMER RESIDENT OF _____: That first check come, I called my sister. She lives on the other side of town, and I asked her where this came from. She ain’t heard nothin’ ’bout a check, but pretty soon, I found out everyone on my block got one. Same amount, too. It wasn’t unemployment. Wasn’t a tax refund or nothin’ either. You had a job or you didn’t, you got a check. Found out just about everyone in my neighborhood got a check. There were a couple other neighborhoods like that too, but not everyone in the city got one. There was some letter in there about a new law got passed, but I just wanted to see what the catch was, you know what I mean? It was a blessing, though.
First chance I got, stocked up on food and fixed the microwave. Still had money left over, so I got to have someone come through and deep-clean the apartment. Was supposed to be regular, because of city health regulations, but can’t nobody in that building afford to completely sanitize their homes once every week. I figured the check was a one-off, so I was just focused on keeping my son, Jeremy, fed and safe.
But the checks kept coming, several months in a row. So I started socking some away, and suddenly, you turn around and look at your bank account just [blinks dramatically and laughs]. You know what I’m sayin’? I’m still countin’ every penny I spend on this family, but I ain’t gotta worry about eviction if suddenly the toaster break or there’s a leak in the apartment that needs to be fixed or this or that or whatever thing. Your thinking changes. Before, I’m just trying to make it to the first or fifteenth without my boy starving. But then you get to thinking about things like moving, like Jeremy being in a better school. The schools here seemed to be gettin’ some money, but it’s nothing like what they got just outside the city. So I’m finally able to take some time off from work, after not having missed a day in twenty-one years. And I go looking at apartments. Condos. That sort of thing. Imagine that! Me! Shoppin’ for condos!
The neighborhood was starting to change too. I think we figured out pretty quickly that the checks were comin’ to specific neighborhoods. And, yeah, money was goin’ to the community, but fixin’ up a school building, making sure there are enough soap dispensers in the halls, improving the curriculum, the school lunch program, all that takes time. That’s time a lot of us don’t have. So I got out. Couldn’t get out quick enough. Landlord saw the market and started jackin’ up the price soon as he could. So we moved. Me and my Jeremy picked up and set out. He loves his new school, but the checks stopped coming. I’m working two jobs instead of three now, but it’s getting harder to keep Jeremy in that school. We ain’t even talking about college.
They’re saying the checks back home stopped coming too. Money was comin’ for about a year, then stopped. By then, everybody done up and moved, and now the rent’s too high to move back. So we’re stuck.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS: You need to understand that reparations are a national redemption project. A government can print money, as much as it wants. Don’t listen to economists. They’re wrong. But a place built on the backs of others needs all of its decision-makers to acknowledge the totality of the wrong. It goes beyond money. That’s why the project ended the way it did. Were reparations a simple game of numbers, all you’d need is the magic number, and you’d be fine. But everyone on that team was so besotted with the whole thing that they failed to see just what they were truly up against. For such a redemption project to work, you need this country to admit that it was wrong. And someone will always come along and see Black Americans being given their due and want nothing more than to destroy it. They can’t countenance any other reality. I tried to tell this to Councilman Perkins’s team. But no one wanted to acknowledge just how deep the problem went.
Asking an algorithm to do what they wanted it to do would be to assume racism is logical. “If, then.” Now, racism has its own internal logic, sure, but it is the logic of nightmares. You can’t automate its reasoning.
Councilman Perkins and his team thought others would see what this city did and want to follow suit. But I knew that others would see what this city did and want to turn it to dust.
Nine months after the REPAIR Act was signed into law, following a series of protests at the state capitol led by prominent conservative activists, the governor released a statement disavowing the legislation. A recall effort against Mayor Gaetz was initiated, and, six months before the end of his term as mayor, Frank Gaetz was removed from office on the grounds of misallocation of government funds.
The city council selected Councilmember Robert Caine to finish Gaetz’s term. Caine was subsequently reelected.
In a modest backyard, a white man in rolled-up shirtsleeves packs the soil behind a fence from which light green sprigs poke. He does this with care for several silent minutes, rises, then dusts his hands off and walks up his back porch. The body scanner framing the back entrance beeps as he passes through, then announces his temperature in red analog numbers.
The inside of the sitting room is just as modest. Sunlight shines through the west-facing windows to bounce off the glass covering a table designed to look like a hollowed-out tree trunk, gilding half of the man sitting in the chair facing the camera in profile. He’s still wearing the dirty overalls and the shirtsleeves from earlier. His gloves lie on his lap. The pose looks practiced.