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A review by kblincoln
Murder in the Generative Kitchen by Meg Pontecorvo
4.0
3.5 stars, actually
This novelette takes two pretty interesting concepts and expounds on them through the POV of a kind of jerk male juror.
What if we sent jurors to resort destinations all expense paid but required them to watch testimony during that time?
What if we had "smart" kitchens that not only knew our basic nutritional requirements and could adjust according to our state of health but could also read our mood or "affect" and put in mood-altering serotonins?
As a thought experiment, this story kept me reading as our juror, sent to Acapulco, struggled with the restrictions based on jurors while he watched a murder trial where a woman is accused of poisoning her husband through food she cooked in a generative kitchen--food that the defense says was altered by the kitchen itself!
Very cool. On the other hand, the first thing I did not enjoy the male juror. At all. I cringed because he was a self-centered jerk, and I cringed because he kept getting himself into trouble by obviously misreading a woman's interest in him. Double cringe. (I also thought to myself....there are lots of trials, why put jurors on the same case in the same resort anyway? Why not put them in multiple locations? Of course that would take away the tension for this story but seemed an obvious fix.)
As thought experiment, very cool story. As a narrative story, didn't enjoy the main POV very much and felt the ending was too loose for my own tastes.
This novelette takes two pretty interesting concepts and expounds on them through the POV of a kind of jerk male juror.
What if we sent jurors to resort destinations all expense paid but required them to watch testimony during that time?
What if we had "smart" kitchens that not only knew our basic nutritional requirements and could adjust according to our state of health but could also read our mood or "affect" and put in mood-altering serotonins?
As a thought experiment, this story kept me reading as our juror, sent to Acapulco, struggled with the restrictions based on jurors while he watched a murder trial where a woman is accused of poisoning her husband through food she cooked in a generative kitchen--food that the defense says was altered by the kitchen itself!
Very cool. On the other hand, the first thing I did not enjoy the male juror. At all. I cringed because he was a self-centered jerk, and I cringed because he kept getting himself into trouble by obviously misreading a woman's interest in him. Double cringe. (I also thought to myself....there are lots of trials, why put jurors on the same case in the same resort anyway? Why not put them in multiple locations? Of course that would take away the tension for this story but seemed an obvious fix.)
As thought experiment, very cool story. As a narrative story, didn't enjoy the main POV very much and felt the ending was too loose for my own tastes.