Paolo Bacigalupi: Science Fiction’s New Prophet

John Joseph Adams | March 10th 2008 at 8:35 am

Paul Goat Allen recently interviewed Pump Six author Paolo Bacigalupi for Publishers Weekly. The original interview was edited down, but PW graciously allowed us to publish the entire unedited version here.

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Science Fiction’s New Prophet:
An interview with Paolo Bacigalupi by Paul Goat Allen

Where many writers steer clear of weighty issues like the future of humankind, science fiction powerhouse Paolo Bacigalupi embraces them. His insights are on full display in his debut collection, Pump Six and Other Stories.

PW: Short-form SF has seen a renaissance of sorts in the last few years, specifically with the increase of strong anthologies like Fast Forward 1, which featured your story "Small Offerings." Editor Lou Anders described SF as "enlightenment packaged in narrative" in that collection’s introduction. It seems like enlightenment is a primary motivation behind many of your stories… (Why do you write what you write?)

PB: Enlightenment. I like that. Mostly, I write because I’ve got an axe to grind. I write because I’m worried about trendlines, articles I see in the science press, or telling events in my own life. I’ll see something, and think, huh, where are we going with that?  With "Small Offerings" I was interested in endocrine disruptors and I wanted to explore what synthetic chemicals might mean for our most vulnerable populations–pregnant women and fetuses.  The story was personal — an outgrowth of my concerns during my wife’s pregnancy — but I wanted to give readers a visceral experience of something that is otherwise pretty abstract.  SF has tools for writing about the world around us that just aren’t available in other genres, that’s what Lou was getting at, and it’s why I write in the genre.  Reading good speculative fiction is like wearing fun-house eyeglasses. It shifts the light spectrum and reveals other versions of the world, mapped right on top of the one you thought you knew.

PW: "The Tamarisk Hunter" is a chilling environmental cautionary tale. In your estimation, why haven’t there been more SF stories written on these obviously significant environmental issues (like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy)?

PB: I’ve got a two-part answer. First, when you say the word  "environmental" and attach it to anything, it’s a red-flag. No one likes the idea of being force-fed brown rice and granola when they pick up a book, and that’s a legitimate concern when you pick up fiction that focuses on the environment. The preach-factor destroys the joy of story.  This isn’t unique to environmental writing, it shows up in any literature where sincerely-held values are in play: Christian literature, women’s literature, what have you. The danger is always the same: that the writer’s values will show through so strongly that a reader tosses the book in the trash, saying "yeah, yeah, stop already, I know the answer." If the ideas are too pat, the story won’t take a reader on a real journey — and it’s boring.  With my stories, I spend a lot of time trying to muddy the waters and avoid obvious solutions and value judgments.  Story and characters have to be the primary concern; the politics always have to come second.  Of course I want to have both, but the story has to swim successfully as a story before I drag it down to play in the deep end of the pool.

I think the second part of the issue is that environmental questions are inherently uncomfortable. They’re the fart at the party. We live in a consumer society, surrounded by marketing and products that are designed to make us feel more cool, more smart, more sexy, more active, more successful, more, more, more! If you go to the magazine stand, there are almost no stories telling us how our behaviors are destructive or short-sighted. Those are downer messages, and make for a very small market niche.  Even now that global warming is on the cover of every magazine and newspaper, you see that the stories are almost all caste as "What you can do to save the planet!" or how "Ten cool new technologies will make you green!"   These are optimistic messages, sales messages that make you feel better, and also help sell the magazines.  This works on me, too. I hate bad news stories. I avoid them as much as I can. It’s human nature. But the real environmental stories — the ones we need to know about — are the ones that are about to bite us, whether it’s hormone mimics or ecosystem collapse or massive drought, and in all those cases we face hard, muddy, complex choices, rather than shopping solutions. So I think the other reason we don’t see many environmental fiction stories is that they’re a hard sell, because they won’t
necessarily make readers feel good or comfortable in their own skins.

PW: A few years back, astrophysicist Martin Rees postulated in his book Our Final Century that humankind only had a 50/50 chance of surviving into the 22nd century. Where do you see us in 100 years?

PB: I don’t think we’ll be wiped out. We’ll survive. I don’t have any question about that. The devil is in the details, though. Will we be living happy lives that guarantee better futures for our offspring? Or will we be living ugly desperate ones? Will there be a lot of us, or only a few?  Who will hold power in the future? Who will control basic things we take for granted like food and water? How healthy will we be? How pleasant will our environment be? At this point, we’ve still got choices. We’re building versions of our future every day. But my gut tells me that we should be worried. We’re very good at having fun now, and putting off hard choices until later, and that doesn’t work to our advantage with environmental issues.

PW: On a tangential note, I thought I saw a group of trogs a few days ago hanging out in a local shopping mall. (Those lazy, sex-obsessed monkey people that inhabited the future New York City of "Pump Six.") They were dueling with beef jerky strips.

PB: My working theory is that we’re all trogs and we just haven’t realized it. When I duel though, I prefer to use bacon.

PW: Ideally, how do you hope this collection will affect its readers?

PB: Bottom line, I hope they’re entertained. Beyond that, I hope the stories will provide interesting lenses for viewing the present. I’m hoping that
after someone reads "The Calorie Man" that the next time a GMO news story comes across their plate that they’ll think to themselves, "Does this news story mean we’re going toward that weird future Bacigalupi described, or does it mean we’re avoiding it?" (Of course, they’ll have no idea how to pronounce my name, so that part is obviously fantasy, but you get the idea) Ultimately, I’d like it if these stories got people thinking about where we’re headed next, and imagining the different future possibles that lie in wait.  I’d like to see people extrapolating like mad, all the time. They’ll have different opinions and ideas than I have, but at least we’d be looking forward. I’d like that a lot. At least there would be a conversation.

PW: What’s on your writing agenda for 2008? (More short-form speculative fiction?)

PB: Short stories are my playground, where I work out new ideas, so I’m doing more of them. But I’m also finishing up a novel set in the same world as "The Calorie Man" and "Yellow Card Man." It focuses on the political machinations of four characters in a future Bangkok, and plays with ideas of international trade, peak oil, global warming, bio-engineering, and the nature of ecological niches and how human actions affect them. You know, simple and to-the-point.

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