Science Fiction Friday: Paolo Bacigalupi - Part II

by Damon Gambuto     Department: Correlations

In this, the second installment of my conversation with Paolo Bacigalupi, we turn to the substance of his stories and the origins of his various muses.  Paolo discusses his environmentalist tendencies, why it's good to believe in the project of science fiction, and why it's not always so good to believe in our technology.


Continued from Part I

Damon Gambuto:  When I was reading the book, I started to notice some patterns in your storytelling.  One was the lively and realized descriptions of the international settings.  So I Now know that's informed by all the travel that you've done.  Another was a thread of environmental disaster.  Science fiction is the genre, but there are sub genres to science fiction--space opera, what have you.  I feel like PUMP SIX could be characterized as eco-SF, where a lot of the near future, or future landscapes were vividly described in terms environmental disaster.  Can you talk about that a little bit?  Am I falling victim to the sampling bias of the collection with respect to your interests?

Paolo Bacigalupi: No, you're dead on.  I've always leaned towards being an environmentalist.  The last work that I had was working for High Country News, which is an environmental journal here that covers the western United States.  We spent a lot of time focusing on environmental issues--environmental land use issues, things like that.  That's sort of my background--my home territory in a lot of ways.  

It's interesting, I think when I first started writing science fiction, I was really was just trying to master the idea of what's a story.  What's a character do, what's a story do?  So you see that in those first couple of stories - "Pocket Full of Dharma," The Fluted Girl." Then I got to "The People of Sand and Slag" and I actually had a bone to pick with some people.  It was the first time that I used science fiction to talk about ideas instead of just about story and adventure really.

DG: Talk about that notion of using SF to talk about larger ideas versus simply being a landscape through which characters walk.  Don't you feel as if the project of science fiction is more difficult than, what I'll term 'MFA in writing literature?  In SF one has to create environments that don't actually exist, but of course follow internally consistent rules. The reward of that task is an ability to more incisively comment on what's happening in our world right now by virtue of the fact that you are extrapolating.   The question being asked is: what are the implications of what we are doing now to our future? Generally speaking literature concerns itself with the question: what are the implications of a character's actions to his or her self?  Of course I'm betraying a bias here.

PB:  I think what I sort of see in general... I've got a bunch of stuff here and I'll just sort of unload it at you.  I mean there's always different versions of science fiction, and everybody thinks about it as being that adventure thing with the space ships and the ray guns and I think that's informed partly from media science fiction where you see stuff like Star Wars.  It's big screen, it's really exciting and stuff like that.  It's got an eye-popping appeal, but it's not really about anything in terms of idea.  

When I think about science fiction in terms of the 'idea version' of science fiction, I tend to look at things like the old utopias or the dystopias.  If you look at something like the dystopias that George Orwell provides or that Yevgeny Zamyatin provides where these are clearly science fictional stories and yet what they are essentially doing is this thing that science fiction does a lot which is the 'if this goes on' story.  If we keep going down a certain path and we keep doing a certain set of things, what do we get?  The far out, extrapolated end point.  

What's turning out to me to be one of the most interesting parts of science fiction, and the most interesting aspects of writing, is writing these extrapolated idea stories where you say here we are today in a certain situation.  We have a little bit of an inkling that something is going on.  We have an inkling that endocrine disruptors are of concern, that this Bisphenol A in our polycarbonate plastic water bottles could be a problem, but we don't really know how much of a problem it is and it's really hard to get a handle on that.  It's like: Bisphenol A, what the fuck is it?  Who can tell which plastic water bottle is which anyway?  Is this a polycarbonate?  Is that a polycarbonate?  It's all very abstracted.  

What I find is that if you can sit down with some of the concepts though of what endocrine disrupters mean-- how hormone mimics can affect our bodies and how over time we might see those results... then when you start having a story that you can say, 'hey, if this goes on, let's see what we can do with this.'  Let's see if we can experience this in a visceral way or explain this in a visceral way rather than just in a: 'Well, we have some concerns that Bisphenol A is an estrogen mimic and that it could over time dot, dot, dot.  Instead, you say: 'Here, let me just take you to this world.  Let me take you to a place where hormone mimics are rife and where people are experiencing the consequences of it.'  You can't do that with any other literature.  

I think about the separation between science fiction and general fiction-- general fiction can only concern itself with the present and the past in the same way that say science journalism can only concern itself with the here and now.  It can only say: 'This is here.  This is our world as it is.'  It can't really say: 'Yeah, but where are we going?'  You can't say those things in a way that make it real.  You can't make the future real with any of those things.  

I've got a friend who is a science journalist and she writes this incredible stuff and it's scary because you can read her stories and you see, oh my goodness, there are all of these little details going on.  But what she can't do is she can't say where we're going.  She can only report on the details as they are.  So there's a conservatism in science and there's a conservatism in journalism that says: 'We can report on these things, but we can't actually drive forward and say where are we going with this.'  With science fiction I can do that.  I can actually drag somebody down a road and say: Here's what a real drought looks like.  Not just a one day drought or a two day drought or a ten year drought or whatever.  I'm going to take you out and really push you into drought.  I think that that's the power of science fiction and I that's where I've ended up writing mostly, is in that 'if this goes on' scenario where I take an idea that's of some concern to me and then take the reader down a path that they probably didn't want to go and try to give them a feel for those questions marks that are out here.

DG:  Jumping off from that idea, and again perhaps it's a sampling bias, but from what I've read it seems like your notions about where we're going are pretty disastrous places.

PB:  I mean you live in Los Angeles right?

DG:  I do.

PB:  So if you look at Los Angeles and say: 'Wow, there are a lot of really nice people here and they all seem to have good intentions and then you also register...'

DG: I'm sorry, Paolo, I live in Los Angeles...not so full of good intentions.

PB:  The people you work with though personally...

DG:  Sorry, I'm kidding.  I get your point, please go ahead.

PB:  We can go on to just how much of a misanthrope I am in while... Okay, if you look at a big city like Los Angeles, it's really hard to see where the sustainable line on this city is.  Everybody drives everywhere.  Even the liberals drive everywhere.  Even the environmentalists drive everywhere. It's like you just look at this thing and you say: Wow, we've got a systemic habit towards the quick and dirty solution.  You know, I may have values, but I'm definitely not going to ride sixty miles on a bike to get somewhere.  I'm going to get in my car and I'm going to drive there because it's fast and quick and easy.  

When I think about out future, one of the assumptions that I have is that human beings like to take the fast, quick and easy solution and that we are enamored of profits and comfort over complexity and difficulty.  Right now, I'm seeing this trend towards 'Let's buy a Prius and save the world.'  

When you think about that in terms of sustainability it just makes no sense at all.  It essentially says that you are going to buy into exactly the same sprawled out, misconfigured cities that we have now.  It just means that essentially it's an acceptance of the status quo and it also assumes that, essentially, through more manufacturing and more techno-fix-know-how we're going to magically render ourselves less damaging to the overall ecosystem and it just isn't true.  

DG: This is interesting to me because, while I would have guessed that you had some real issues with the way in which our society is organizing itself vis-à-vis the environment, I also would have guessed you to be somebody who would champion the notion that good science and good technology were actually the path away from disaster.  That those would be our life preservers if you will, but it seems to me that you're arguing something else?

PB: Well, good science and good technology... the devil is in the details. What is a 'good technology?' In my mind, a good technology is a bicycle.  Bicycles are brilliant--incredibly efficient.

When I used to work in Beijing back in the early '90's and live there, and down in Kunming as well, everybody was getting around on a bike in these relatively dense cities.  You're talking about, at the time, I think it was ten or twelve million people in the central Beijing area and yet you could ride across Beijing and in fact I did commute across Beijing everyday on a bike.  

Over the course of about a decade you really saw that change where people got out of their bikes and into their gridlock,  It was like: 'Gee, you know, there was a technology solution here that moved people very efficiently all over the city and they threw it away and went for something else.'

Sure, that something else is something with a radio and some air-conditioning and heating and stuff like that, which is certainly nice in a Beijing winter when you're riding across the city, but it wasn't necessary.  The good technology was replaced by the... what?  The better technology?  The more convenient technology?  The more comfortable technology?   Maybe, maybe not.  It's the technology that has all of these other implications.  

Then, as soon as you say: 'Let's replace it with a Prius.'  If all Chinese are driving Priuses, it still doesn't really get back to the elegance of the bicycle before where you have less gridlock, you could get across the city and people were healthier.  At the end of the day, you have this huge amount of research going into building a Prius and then you've still got a fair amount of research to move that Prius around.  You're talking about a couple of thousand pounds worth of stuff to move a body as opposed to twelve to twenty pounds of stuff to move a body, and so what's the good technology?  That's the point where you have to start looking at... there are just a lot of questions there as to what good technology really is.  

I don't want to come across as a Luddite.  I get really excited when I see things like the idea of the hand cranked computer.  That's really interesting to me.  You know the one computer per child thing-- the Nicholas Negroponte idea which had a crank on it--and I was like: 'Huh, that's interesting.'  So you weren't talking about having a coal burning computer anymore.  That's sort of a pleasing idea.  I'm endlessly seduced by the ideas of what good technology might look like, but I'm not convinced that a lot of the things that we hold up right now as being good technologies aren't actually good luxuries, which is somewhat different.

DG: This is interesting because I feel like we're not necessarily on opposite sides of the issue, but we come at it from a little bit of different angle.  You're talking about the XO Laptop, and I guess maybe I feel like one could  say: lots of children all over the world had lived perfectly satisfactory lives with using you know, an abacus or any number of computing technologies that didn't need any kind of energy other than the calories that your body was burning.  So why give them these laptops?  But I do think they should have laptops.  Up with progress!  Up with 'The Culture!'  But maybe my answer to the dilemma generally would be: 'let's make the easier and more convenient solution also the good technology."  A technology that affords us our human frailty of being convenience and luxury seekers and doesn't mean choking ourselves on smog, or what have you.  That is to say, maybe we shouldn't be thinking in terms of asking people to subjugate their impulse toward choosing convenience and comfort over a thoughtful, sustainable, collective-minded alternative.  Rather, let's build that sustainability and collective-mindedness into that luxurious, convenient choice.  I guess what I'm positing is that 'good technology' is technology that both gives people what they want and gives us all what we need.  

PB:  Right, that's the elegant, the truly elegant solution where you have your cake and eat it too.  It provides benefits to the individual and it doesn't have any cost to the society.

DG:  Or they're manageable costs is maybe what I would say.  

PB:  So here's an interesting question too.  When you say it has a minimal cost or a manageable cost, one of the things that I'm really interested in right now is the idea of scale.  It doesn't really matter if one guy is driving around in a Hummer or something like that right?  It doesn't matter if he gets eight miles to gallon, as long as it's just one guy.  But if it's ten million guys then it matters more and if it's many, many cities it matters even more.  

We're cruising in on seven billion people now.   Every step of the way, what we think of as being a small, incremental cost, it seems like we lose track of the multiplier effect.  I think that's one of the things that's weird about the Prius, when you say: OK, the Prius is a good idea in some ways, and yet in other ways, it's like, wait, the multiplier effect is still there, we haven't gotten rid of that.  

So really, when you start to think about what minimal cost is, how a cost is evaluated, you have to look at not just that individual cost, but also what that multiplier is, and I feel like that's not really addressed.  If you just say minimal cost, it says minimal cost times how many, and that's how you define whether minimal is acceptable or not.

to be continued...

Tags: Paolo Bacigalupi, Prius, science fiction, Science Fiction Friday, sustainabilty

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