An Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi is a quickly rising star in the firmament of science fiction. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as various “Year’s Best” collections. He has been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best SF short story of the year.

Born in Colorado Springs, he has traveled extensively, including such places as China and India. He now makes his home in rural western Colorado with his wife and young son. Finding himself in a whirlwind of career activity with the release of his short story collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, from Night Shade Books, I am pleased that he was able to answer my questions on this and other topics.

Tell us a bit about your background and how it led you to becoming a fiction writer.

Writing is the only thing I really enjoy. That’s it. I like the work. It pays less than serving up Big Macs at McDonalds but still, I like the process. I like the craft. Also, for some reason or another I’ve always been able to see the cloud in every silver lining, so writing is a chance for me to share my jaundiced inner soul. I’m big on sharing.

Environmental issues seem to be an important concern for you. Do you find yourself using science fiction as a means to explore these issues?

More and more, I think that environmentalism and science fiction are almost the same thing. They’re both concerned with looking forward, trying to interpret the future based on data points that we have today. Despite the fact that environmentalists can be cast as Luddites, I think that the environmental movement is one of the few arenas where we’re actively trying to extrapolate and predict our futures. In some ways, I suppose the question in my mind is why more SF isn’t exploring environmental issues more. For me, I use SF as a way to talk about budding environmental problems. With the tools of SF, I can extrapolate about where we might be headed and create a visceral experience of that. With something like endocrine distruptors or GM foods, the policy debates that surround these issues are so dry and so abstract that it’s almost impossible to engage with the issues, or even grasp what might be at stake. With SF, I can grab a reader and drag them down the rabbit hole into places they weren’t expecting, whether it’s a world where everyone is throwing away babies because they’re so loaded with toxics that they aren’t viable, or whether it’s a world where agricultural companies rule the earth through the use of their patented genetically engineered grains.

What do you see as the future and the dangers of energy extraction on our planet?

Honestly, I see our future being powered by coal. The town I live in is a big coal producing town, we’ve got three coal mines just up the road from us, and I watch 100-car coal trains run past my house every day, listen to them roar past every night. Our house actually shakes when they go past. The nice thing about coal is that we’ve got a lot of it, it’s cheap and it’s accessible. It can be turned into diesel and dumped into cars or burned for electricity. The downside, of course is that it produces greenhouse gasses, which is a pity, because it’s so much fun to burn. One of the things that interests me right now in sci-fi is the question of where we will get our energy.

In “The Calorie Man” I posited a post-oil world where people would return to calories and kinetic energy as their main sources of power. It’s not realistic in the predictive sense because there’s just too much coal lying around and humanity has never been good at keeping its hands out of a cheap fun cookie jar like that, but still it’s interesting to think about our energy sources, and it’s something we don’t spend a lot of time doing in science fiction. I’m guessing that’s actually a reflection of our present culture where our daily lives are so removed from our power sources— whether we’re talking about electricity or food or heat, all the magic of production happens behind the curtains. We don’t worry about it much in our daily lives and we don’t worry about it in our fiction.

There has been much concern recently about global warming. What do you think our world will be like thirty years from now with regard to climate?

We won’t have any glaciers in Glacier National Park, certain species will have died out or be near dead because they can’t move with the shifting climate zones…but I think the thing that scares me most is that climate change might throw larger biological systems out of whack. One of the things I’m reading about now is how certain flowers are blooming earlier and earlier, but their pollinators haven’t shifted schedules to match. Two species that were in sync with one another are falling out of sync, which means that it’s possible that we’re not just going to have a warmer world, but also one where whole food webs unravel.

Who are a few of your favorite writers or other influences?

Different writers for different things. I’d say the ones who have most influenced me in terms of craft are probably Cormac McCarthy. J.G. Ballard. William Gibson. Michael Swanwick. They’re the ones I read and studied with awe as I was getting started with my own writing and trying to find a voice. They were craft touchstones for me. In terms of content, I’d say Ursula K. Le Guin and Aldous Huxley. I remember reading The Dispossesed and realizing how powerful SF could be when its lens was turned on questions of values and politics. Ditto Brave New World. They were using SF’s tools to really say something, kicking around big ideas, and that was a huge influence on me. In terms of writers who actually inspire my writing today, I’d say that it’s people like David Quammen and Michelle Nijhuis. Science writers and journalists who are going out into the world and trying to peel back what’s happening right here right now on the planet. They’re the close observers who provide fodder for me when I’m trying to figure out how to tell a story. They’re the ones who reveal the data points that I then use in my fiction.

You’ve specialized in short fiction so far. What is it about the short form that appeals to you?

Its clarity. With short fiction, you don’t have room for muddy thinking and you don’t have room for digression. It’s a hammer blow. If you do it right, people never forget it. With long form writing, you immerse in it, but somehow it just doesn’t have the same grip. The best example for me is Stephen King. I read a lot of his books when I was younger, but it’s his short stories that still stick in my head.

Of the stories in Pump Six and Other Stories, do you have a favorite?

Probably the new original, “Pump Six,” mostly because I tried to inject a layer of humor into the story that I haven’t tried before. That said, one of the things I discovered about the collection as I was reading over the copyedits was how my work has changed over time. I can see where my interests changed, and where I started working with different aspects of the writing craft. In the beginning, I’m just trying to tell an enjoyable story, which is what you see in “Pocketful of Dharma.” With a story like “The People of Sand and Slag,” I was out to make a very specific point and I was using fiction to make my argument—the first time I’d done that. In something like “The Calorie Man” I’m working with a kitchen sink’s worth of ideas and technology extrapolation, everything from energy collapse to GM foods to intellectual property, just a huge tangle of different technologies and extrapolations all piled together. And then in something like “Yellow Card Man,” it’s all character study and detailed worldbuilding. So when I look at it from that perspective, I like them all pretty much equally, but for very different qualities.

Tell us about the novel you’re working on. Is it set in the same world as any of your short fiction?

Tentatively, it’s titled The Windup Girl and it’s set in the same kink-spring universe as “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man.” The action all takes place in a future Bangkok besieged by rising sea-levels, genetically engineered plagues, and rapacious calorie companies. I just finished a rough draft of it and now I’m working on cutting and rewrites. Hoping to have it done in the not-too-distant future.

Where do you see (or hope to see) science fiction heading?

You know, this is a funny question, because at root, writers write about what interests them. There’s not much point in wishing otherwise. I sometimes have people email me and tell me how I should have written a story differently, or how I missed some important point that they would have liked addressed, or how they think I should write about some issue or another… But bottom line, I write about the things that fascinate me, and that’s about all I can do. It’s so difficult to write anything at all that it seems foolish to urge a genre in any particular direction. That said, if I had one thing that I’d hope to see, I’d like to see the genre return to relevance. I feel like SF has tools that no other genre has, and yet it sometimes feels like we’re wasting the potential. There are a lot of open questions about where we’re going and what our future is going to look like, and I don’t see a lot of SF tackling those issues. I’d like to see more.

What are your future goals?

To take over the world, one piece of dystopic fiction at a time. Barring that, to buy studded snow tires for my mountain bike, so I can ride on ice.