"This wasn’t on any of the city maps."

October 7, 2024 10:57 AM

"Shruti’s mind swarmed with ecosystem inputs and outputs, and her anxiety curdled into wrath." "The Almond Pirates" is a short science fiction story by Annalee Newitz, in which the successful search for a lost cat leads to a discovery of water theft and a proceeding in accordance with the Restorative Justice Act of 2165. Anthropocene Magazine published "The Almond Pirates" in 2022 in its Climate Parables speculative fiction series.
posted by brainwane (6 comments total)

Thanks for another story!
posted by librosegretti at 11:37 AM on October 7, 2024 [1 favorite]

I like Newitz. Stories like this always raise so many world building questions for me:
- is it really efficient to substitute labor credits for money ( and won't that discriminate against disabled people)? Also food.
-if you have one feral cat there are likely more
-it' s hard to be mad at someone for missing almonds/ seems like someone should be working on making them less resource-intensive to grow
-is there a way to imagine a stable and resource -managed future society that doesn't feel like "get used to scarcity"?
posted by emjaybee at 1:10 PM on October 7, 2024 [1 favorite]

Pet cats are not compatible with delicately maintained homeostasis.
posted by Dr. Curare at 8:36 AM on October 8, 2024

eep, 20 minutes of labor for a bus day pass?
4 days for avocado add-on on a sandwich?

this is too close to real.
posted by wym at 5:47 PM on October 9, 2024

Thanks for the post brainewane. I read A Hidden Savior Finds The Lyme Light first. Was pleased to see Kim Stanley Robinson's Glacial Elevation Operations - that may happen irl before long I think. Then I read Newitz and was pleasantly surprised - likewise a very ecological tale and with circularity (more than reciprocity) embedded in a justice system.

and thanks again as now I feel like I could write two stories after reading these - like I feel that the message I'd bring would be more widely disemminated, and with much greater uptake than stating facts (which don't act fast or widely enough ime). One would be illegal as fact (and very hard to operationalize conventionally) but a novel is just a novel (and uptake more .. organic), the other would be an industrial ecology (as is The Almond Pirates).

Ecological story tools are urgently needed everywhere. My country is under assault by the edgelords of Seven Mountains Dominionism (many are also 'former' Atlas Network that only appear secular) who want to destroy the beauty that brings people to Aotearoa / NZ (and gives our exported products Hedonic Value) - they do this as they have a gleeful deathdrive - they are the same as MAGA and Vance. There are 149 projects in mind to do this [why yes, that is the NZ government official website]. Most projects have been called in by previous governments as being destructive of our nationhood and society. Their first will be seabed mining of the NZ West Coast.
posted by unearthed at 3:29 PM on October 12, 2024

I enjoyed this. I like Shruti, and of course I like Irving. And I kind of liked that it was just a small transgression that got out of hand ... but I kind of think, in a society steeped in an understanding of how all the parts of the ecosystem work together, and how critical they all are, people would have some second thoughts before it got so out of hand.

I especially appreciated the links to the technologies mentioned in the story. Science fiction often seems completely fictional, and it's so encouraging to know that some of that future is here now.

Thanks so much for posting this, brainwane! I'm looking forward to exploring the rest of the series.
posted by kristi at 4:49 PM on October 15, 2024 [1 favorite]