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Galactic Kitchen Confidential: The Sol Majestic by Ferrett Steinmetz
Located on a space station that is more relay stop than destination, the titular restaurant in Ferret Steinmetz’s The Sol Majestic is the kind of dining destination with a years-long waiting list. People will travel for lightyears through relativistic space—which means when they return home, decades will have passed—just to be able to say they’ve tried the food there. Aside from the waiting list, the only other way to win a table at the restaurant is to answer one question posed by the brilliant and unstable head chef, Paulius: why do you love food? When Kenna, a young man starving to death due to parental neglect, provides his answer, the meal he’s given in return saves his live, and changes it irrevocably.
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Kenna’s parents are adherents of a religion six generations from its genesis and two from its heyday. They follow what they call Inevitable Philosophies: vague, aspirational organizing principles such as, “I will lead my people out of darkness.” How these aphorisms become accomplishments is also vague; Inevitable Philosophers eschew all labor as menial. Kenna has lived his life on transport ships and far flung stations, left as prey to bullies as his parents lobby the rich and powerful on behalf of their inevitable ideas and try to reconvert lost adherents. His parents tell stories of grand banquets at their own parents’ tables, but Kenna has never tasted anything that didn’t come out of a package, and not enough of that.
Kenna’s food-poor upbringing horrifies head chef Paulius. Food for Paulius is an anchor; it reconnects us with our pasts. Kenna’s past is a long line of vending machines. (Paulius once asks what Kenna’s favorite sweet is. When he then asks why, the heartbreaking answer is that it’s the one that had the most calories.) This paucity strikes the head chef with inspiration: he will build a new menu based on the traditions of the Inevitable Philosophers. Kenna has never experienced cooked food, real food; Paulius will cook for him, nourish him. He will bring the banquets from Kenna’s family stories to life, and give him a past of something other than plastic packages. Kenna responds to Paulius’ bounty by breaking down in tears. Food is love, and he’s been starved of both. To enact this grand plan, Paulius and Kenna are given six weeks of menu development time by the Sol Majestic’s hard-nosed business manager, Scrimshaw.
Food is, of course, a major organizing concept in The Sol Majestic. Like song, dance, and storytelling, it is at once one of the most basic components of all human society and an incredibly complex artifact that binds together culture, family, religion, and the individual. The people Kenna meets in his six week sojourn in the kitchens all have their different takes on what food means to them: Paulius strives towards a shimmering perfection; food as art and anchor. Montgomery, who is something like an adrenaline junky called a Sensate, doesn’t quite work for the restaurant; instead, they pay her in novelty that feeds her sensation-seeking. Food for her is sensual, and innovation is her drug. For Kenna’s parents, food is a reminder of their lost standing in the world, and not nearly as important as their lofty ideals.
But food isn’t just a cultural object or personal expression: it is also something that is produced by human labor, and subject to the economic inequities that anything is. Scrimshaw, who acts as a much needed balance to Paulius’ capricious genius, shows Kenna the economic dangers of Paulius’ careless genius: Paulius buys a thousand silk robes in bulk so he can fête Kenna as the Inevitable Prince for an outrageously high price, but he must have what he wants now. Even in a restaurant as vaunted as the Sol Majestic, the margins are razor thin: if the new menu—based on a waning religion for a boy who has never eaten real food—is a bust, eating the cost of the robes, the menu-development, and related costs might sink the business. Kenna befriends a kitchen worker named Benzo (a relationship that also holds the tremulous hope of something more) and learns he is indentured, one of many sold in lots to staff the kitchens. For Scrimshaw, food is a commodity; for Benzo, it’s a chain.
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There’s a room-sized device in the kitchen of the Sol Majestic called an Escargone that speeds up time. Weeks may pass within while only hours tick by without. The device is a good metaphor for the compressed matriculation Kenna experiences in the Sol Majestic—the orchestrated chaos of the kitchen that accelerating his coming of age. Paulius, whose kindness is occasionally cruel, expects to put on a Wisdom Ceremony—a sort of confirmation during which a person announces their Inevitable Philosophy—for Kenna at the end of six weeks. Kenna’s faith in his parents’ religion was already shaky, and the Sol Majestic becomes a proving ground for both his beliefs and his relationship with them. The pressure to perform to expectations—Paulius’, his parents’, his faith’s—forces him to grow up, and grow up fast.
In his fantastic contemporary fantasy trilogy that began with Flex, Ferret Steinmetz managed to deliver real heart around the edges of a wacky, hard to encapsulate premise—what if a hyper-intense interest in a job or fandom turned into magic? He does it again here: following the shenanigans in the kitchen of the universe’s greatest restaurant is a catchy idea for a book, but in execution, The Sol Majestic is more than just clever. The final act is at turns terrifying and rousing. We are introduced to a villain who always been lurking behind the scenes, and who embodies a kind of evil that is all too familiar. In the end, when Kenna stands before the assembled diners to deliver his Philosophy, it feels anything but inevitable. It is hard-won and personal, perfect in its imperfections.