Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi

In a back cover blurb to Paolo Bacigalupi’s collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, Kelly Link refers to the stories within as cautionary tales. That is exactly the right framework to have in mind when reading these stories. They are extrapolative—some rigorously so and some more whimsical. They can be visceral and violent. Viewed toward questions of prose and storytelling, they are well-written. But most importantly, they refuse to flinch from addressing today’s issues. They take today’s scientific, technological, economic, and especially environmental trends and examine them for what they might mean today and into the future.

“Pocketful of Dharma” opens the collection with a bit of intrigue on the streets of a future city of towering skyscrapers and destitute poor. The beggar Wang Jun is given a datacube and told to deliver it to a certain person. Instead, he brings it to a friend who can hack into it and discovers that it holds the consciousness of the most recent Dalai Lama.

The dilemma of the cube is well presented—destroy the cube as he requests so he can be reincarnated? Turn it over to authorities who will simply hide it away so he can never return? To other authorities who might want to preserve it, but more respectfully? The story as a whole feels rather loose, though, its parts not as integrated as later stories here. It’s the culture, however, that forms the main focus, and that backdrop is fascinating enough to make this a strong opening story, even if lesser than those that follow.

The next four stories form, for me, the core of the collection, adding up to a very strong sequence.

In “The Fluted Girl,” technology has advanced to extremes of body manipulation while society has devolved into a pseudo-feudalism where fame equals wealth equals power, and most people live as serfs (without the agricultural connotation) under their famous patrons—no rights and completely reliant on them. Lidia is the fluted girl of the title, kept through drugs and hormones always at the verge of adolescence as her patron, Madame Belari, has Lidia’s bones made light and hollow. Lidia, unlike her twin sister who also undergoes the treatments, chafes at the control Belari has over them.

The story takes place on the night when Lidia and her sister are revealed to the public. They perform an eerie music, each blowing through a hole in the other’s neck, moving their own limbs to change the sound. It is a bizarre image, yet not one that feels told merely for the sake of its oddity. Rather, as the story plays out, it is a speculation on the rights people have and the way those in power treat others. The result is a strange but affecting story.

“The People of Sand and Slag” was recently reviewed in greater detail by The Fix as a part of the post-apocalyptic anthology, Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, edited by John Joseph Adams. It’s a strong story that takes on the idea that we don’t really have to worry about what we do to natural resources because science will come up with a way to overcome future problems. Maybe technology really would allow us to survive, the story suggests…but are the people who live in such a world even humans, as we understand them?

Initially, the central theme of “The Pasho” is the clash between holding to traditional ways and adapting with the changing times. In a post-apocalyptic world, pasho is a title for a group of people who combine a sort of eastern monasticism with preserving the scientific knowledge of the earlier age. Raphel returns as the first of his people to achieve this title. His people, however, are a warlike, more tribal community who distrust the pashos and still maintain ritualized quarantine rules that Raphel knows are no longer necessary.

As a pasho, he adamantly maintains the order’s neutrality while his grandfather insults him and tries to force him to reveal pasho secrets that might lend them success in war. The theme that develops and gives the story its power is that knowledge must be earned, that science and technology must come with the wisdom to use them properly. This is a masterpiece of a story, second in this collection only to the one that follows it

“The Calorie Man” is one of several stories here that I’d read in its initial publication, and it remained powerfully in my memory since then. After the collapse of oil-based energy, calories are what matter, and calories come from crops—turned into mechanical energy through the use of kinked springs. Crops, however, are vulnerable to pests, including engineered pests for which the only resistance is found in the genetically modified seeds of the company that created the pest.

Lalji is a calorie runner, a smalltime grain smuggler on the Mississippi. The country is some decades past the upheavals that followed from the pests, and vast fields of patented GM grains surround the river, though Lalji remembers those times of unrest from his youth in India. The story follows him on a run up the river for a wanted scientist who knows something of what’s behind the genetics of the plants. It paints a morbid picture of a future without dwelling on that morbidity, and that balance gives the story much of its strength. It also, better than any of the other cautionary tales here, manages to marry that future vision with a thrilling adventure and even a glimmer of hope.

That bit of hope stands out even more in retrospect after the stories that follow.

In “The Tamarisk Hunter,” the regulation of water in the southeastern United States is taken to extremes, and though Lolo lives near a flowing river, all of that water is claimed by urban California. Most people have left because of such scarcity, but Lolo and his wife survive on the bounty he earns finding and uprooting water-hungry tamarisk trees.

The story is much shorter than most of the others here, and its plot feels slight compared to them. As an environmental warning story, though, it does its job quickly and well, presenting its imagined future and then letting the readers take what they will from it.

“Pop Squad” is a brutal story. In a future where rejuvenation developments allow people to live forever, children can’t be allowed, because Earth would quickly run out of room. The narrator’s job on the pop squad is to hunt down women who have gone off their rejuvenation regimen to have children. The women are arrested and sent to prison camps while the children are casually killed.

The narrator’s casual murder of these children of various ages is sickening…which is the point of course, but some readers will likely have a difficult time getting past that. The narrator does come to question his work and achieves a sort of redemption, but it is that initial image that will stay with me from this bleak story.

Set in the same imagined future as “The Calorie Man,” “Yellow Card Man” tells of Tranh, a former corporate executive who failed to predict how his company would be destroyed amidst nationalist furor. Now he searches desperately for a job, but as a foreigner, his options are limited.

Where “The Calorie Man” focused on the environmental aspects of this future (including how corporations affect it), this story focuses more directly on business and economics, on the struggle for work and a decent life in the press of so many billions of people. Tranh is cold-blooded and not likeable, hardly even pitiable though he’s fallen so low, which makes it harder to love the story, but also adds to the underlying cold-bloodedness of the speculated society.

“Softer” is a very different story, taking place more or less today without any of the unflinching extrapolation into the future that characterizes the others in this collection. Written for the anthology Logorrhea, edited by John Klima, it takes as its inspiration the word “macerate,” which means to soak something so that it softens. Unfortunately, while the credit page lists the story’s original publication, there is no indication that macerate is the word Bacigalupi was given or any explanation of the anthology for anyone who might not be familiar with it. Stripped of that context, the story suffers. About a man who has killed his wife and left her body to soak in the tub, he goes through periods of lucidity and madness. Some of his ruminations and reactions are certainly interesting, but it never ends up feeling like much of a story.

The one previously unpublished piece in this collection is “Pump Six.” It takes as its point of caution the toxins that we ingest, inhale, and absorb in modern life. The narrator is in charge of monitoring the sewage pumps of the city, and when one pump goes out, it sends him on a journey that uncovers the disturbing truth of their lives in the 22nd century.

What makes “Pump Six” work well is the way it unfolds. It’s clear to the reader early on that the people in this future are not terribly intelligent. The narrator doesn’t consider himself smart either, but he’s more aware and clever than those around him, giving a good perspective on the situation. There’s also dark humor in the semi-human trogs who copulate on the streets and in the reckless partying at an exclusive club. While it doesn’t reach the heights of the best stories here, it’s a worthy title piece to this collection.

“Small Offerings” appears only in the limited edition. It is a brief story, almost an addendum to “Pump Six” as it again focuses on toxins. This time, it is the story of a health worker who deals firsthand with the countless nonviable pregnancies caused by the poisons in their mothers’ bodies. Its length means any more would tell too much, but it carries a definite punch. My only complaint is that its punch would have had more force if it hadn’t come immediately after “Pump Six” because of the similar theme.

Publisher: Night Shade Books (Feb. 2008)
Price: $16.47
Hardcover: 248 pages
ISBN: 159780133X