“Pocketful of Dharma”
A young street orphan in a new city in provincial China comes across a “data cube” that it seems everyone and his mother has set their greedy little desires upon attaining. Why? What’s so special about this cube? Well, the data within is pretty special: the consciousness of the Dalai Lama. The narrative track centers around what will happen if the cube is destroyed and why what will happen then has massive implications for the entire geographical region of the world. The setting and mood of the story is likely to make many readers have thoughts of Blade Runner while reading. At nearly 10,000 words, it is a “short story” almost as long as Blade Runner as well.
“The Fluted Girl”
Fiefdoms are back in style. So is aristocratic separation of classes. The fiefdoms are under the control of the truly idle rich: “job-creators” but not workers themselves. Mere profiteers these people and you know what happens when some people have so much money they can buy anything in the world twice over, right? They start finding brand new ways to enjoy their idleness. Hence the title, which may possibly wind up being less metaphorical than one expects.
“The People of Sand and Slag”
A description of the plot of this story is doomed to make it sound like either the work of a child or a work written for children: A group of people stumble upon a dog living in a toxic environment where dogs just shouldn’t be living and, despite their best efforts under very difficult conditions, the dog dies. The people go on living. That actually is the bare bones of the plot. What makes the story much more interesting, mature and meaningful is the meat on those bones. Turns out that these people are humans like the reader nor even creatures of the world we know like the dog. Finding a 20th century dog to them would be like humans today coming across a small dinosaur and trying to take care of it. The sand of the title refers to what the humans eat, by the way.
“The Pasho”
“The Pasho” is moderately long, but rather complicated as it plays out, primarily because the reader is expected to keep track of unfamiliar terms: the Jai and the Keli are waging war with each other, an apocalyptic event called “The Cleansing” is responsible for a second Stone Age, there is a hugely significant ritual called Quaran, a distillation of a poisonous source into a narcotic liquid called mez and, of, the Pasho itself. All of which is fitted together to construct a tale examining themes of cultural assimilation and self-defeating xenophobia.
“The Calorie Man”
In a dark future where the most powerful entities in the world are multinational agribusiness conglomerates, the most priceless thing in the world is neither oil nor gold, but agricultural patents on genetic research. There is also a character who is the lone person in the world capable of saving and a quest to find him by trekking up the Mississippi River.
“The Tamarisk Hunter”
It is water instead of genetic patents, oil or gold which is priceless in this story set in the Southwest. Why hunt for tamarisks? Because, “a big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year.” And what, exactly, are tamarisks? In the rest of the world they are known as a type of deciduous shrub or tree. Americans known them better as weeds. The story follows the hunter through a future perhaps not too distant in which anything that stems the flow of water is bounty-rich in an America where California reaps the benefits of almost all free-flowing water in the region.
“Pump Six”
Manhattan in the future has become one huge mess; so polluted that it affects everyone’s ability to think coherently. It is kind of like if the film satire Idiocracy were limited to just one city. The title refers to sewage pumps in the city which are basically the only thing holding utter devastation back because they were constructed perfectly to keep the sewage from overrunning the streets. Unfortunately, due to the widespread idiocy caused by the pollution, nobody knows how to build or construct or repair anything. Which is bad news when a certain pump finally does break down.
