Literature / The State of the Art

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• "Road of Skulls": A drifter is napping a cart towards a faraway city on a road made of the skulls of The Empire's enemies.
• "A Gift from the Culture": An exile from the culture is forced to perform a terrorist act since the weapon required will only work with a Culture citizen.
• "Odd Attachment": A shepherd of a species of plant people plays a darkly humorous game of "loves me, loves me not".
• "Descendant": A soldier and his sentient suit walk through an inhospitable desert after crash landing.
• "Cleaning Up": Strange artifacts start inexplicably appearing around the world, which seem to be a technological gift to the receivers.
• "Piece": A professor relates some encounters where he discusses science and science fiction in contraposition to faith.
• "The State of the Art": By far the longest piece, it's an account of Diziet Sma's time as a Contact agent visiting Earth, and her relationship with another agent, who is deeply affected by our species.
• "Scratch OR: The Present and Future of Species HS (sic) Considered as The Contents of a Contemporary Popular Record (qv). Report Abstract/Extract Version 4.2 Begins (after this break)": May or may not be related to "The State of the Art". A stream-of-consciousness narrative depicting various moments in Earth's future. It ends abruptly with a nuclear holocaust.

The short stories contain examples of the following tropes:

• An Offer You Can't Refuse: In "A Gift from the Culture", the main character is given the option of committing a terrorist act for a couple of mobsters in exchange for a complete forgiveness of his debts plus a hefty sum or be killed as an example for others.
• Black Comedy:
  • A hilarious moment in "Cleaning Up" is a general plummeting to his death.
  • "Odd Attachment" is about a Plant Person innocently tearing off a human's toes and fingers. The punchline at the end is him finding out one last "petal": the penis.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The narrator of "The State of the Art" speaks in Marain, but for our benefit, her drone provides the English translation published. She quotes one character as saying "...I have an aircraft, a launch, the choice of mount from a large stable of aphores, even the use of what would be called a spaceship...". The translator adds a footnote saying "I thought the phonetic equivalent was better than something strained like "horsoid."
• Cruel Twist Ending: "Piece" ends with the reveal that the text is a fragment found among the wreckage following the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
• Discount Lesbians: The sexuality of the protagonist in "A Gift from the Culture" is complex: he was born a heterosexual cisgender female, with no problem whatsoever about her identity as a woman. Since citizens of The Culture are able to switch genders at will, she tried being male expecting to be attracted to females, but the sexual orientation didn't change. While male, he decided to turn his back on The Culture and refuses to switch back to female not because he is happier as a male but because he refuses to put to use nearly every advantage his enhance biology provides, up to and including his ability to transition. While outside of The Culture he enters a relationship with a local male.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes:
  • In "Odd Attachment" the alien just barely recognizes the astronaut as alive.
  • One of the main themes in "The State of the Art" is how humans look to people from The Culture.
• I Have Your Wife: Used to coerce the main character of "A Gift from the Culture" into a hit.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: "Cleaning Up" is a humorous subversion of the trope. At the height of the Cold War, bits of Imported Alien Phlebotinum start materializing all around the world, seemingly at random. The U.S. military scrambles to understand and find some use for the devices before the Soviets do, but before too long it turns out the whole thing was caused by a hilariously malfunctioning alien garbage disposal system. Features an Anti-Gravity Hover Tank built out of the equivalent of a stained water-bed from an alien No-Tell Motel.
• Ironic Name: The ship in "The State of the Art" is called Arbitrary. When confronted with a hard choice, it decides to stick to The Culture's principle of freedom instead of forcing a human to do what it believes would be best.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: The narrator of "Piece" dies in a plane bombing midway through a thought.
• Loves Me Not: "Odd Attachment" has a plant-alien doing this with a human astronaut he just found.
• Man-Eating Plant: "Odd Attachment", while not necessarily about a man-eating plant, is written from the perspective of a lovesick intelligent alien vine who catches a human planetary explorer, that he thinks has fallen from a lucky star, and then plays "she loves me, she loves me not" (usually done by pulling petals from a daisy or other flower) by dreamily and thoughtlessly removing the (male) astronaut's various appendages — including the "odd attachment". The vine does try to eat part of the astronaut's spacesuit, thinking it's peel, but doesn't like it.
• Mobile City: "The Road of Skulls" features a pair of pilgrims trying to reach a city. The city is actually on huge wheels and is perpetually moving away from them, laying the road they're traveling on.
• Motor Mouth: The unnamed companion in "Road of Skulls".
• No Ending: "A Gift from the Culture" ends right after the main character shoots down the ship. We never find out the consequences of this.
• Sanity Slippage: In "Descendant", the human starts going mad as the days and weeks go by. Funnily enough, a sign of this is that he stops hearing voices, specifically the voice of his sentient suit, who is his only companion.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Played with in "Descendant". The human dies, but the suit, who is sentient and therefore arguably alive as well, is rescued.
• Shout-Out: "Piece" contains one to The Satanic Verses — the protagonist gets into a heated argument with a Muslim colleague about whether the work is blasphemous. It's also Foreshadowing: The work famously features the two main characters surviving a fall from a plane after it is blown up over the English Channel. The protagonist, who is on board Pan Am Flight 103, which was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing everyone on board and eleven people on the ground, is not so lucky.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Explored in "Descendant". Since the suit is sentient, it could ditch the human to save himself. The human ponders if he would do the same if their roles were reversed.
• When Trees Attack: The Plant Person protagonist of "Odd Attachment" does not take well to being shot.