Science Fiction Friday: Paolo Bacigalupi Part III

by Damon Gambuto     Department: Correlations

In this final installment of my conversation with Paolo Bacigalupi, I find out some of the methods and motivations behind the author's stories in his new book PUMP SIX.  Whether it's over-consumptive Southern Californians sucking the Western water supply dry, or neo-feudalists bioengineering their impoverished subjects into living musical instruments like a next-generation  "American Idol", Paolo manages to fashion truly terrifying and dystopic landscapes into strangely credible visions of our future.  

For my psychic comfort I credit his prowess as a writer for making these futures seem so plausible, rather than the possibility Simon Cowell might actually be funding a bioengineering project, similar to "The Fluted Girl," on the side.

Damon Gambuto: I feel like you're at your best as a writer when you're writing stories that deal with the environmental disaster landscapes.  One of them particularly that I liked was "The Calorie Man."  Can you talk to me about how the story came to life?

Paolo Bacigalupi: Many of my stories come about by accident essentially.  I start thinking that I'm going to be writing one story and then part of the way in I discover: Oh no, this is all bullshit, this is the interesting story over here, and I throw everything away and write another story.

So "The Calorie Man" was born from an entire future society that I'd created.   Actually, it's the one that you see in "Yellow Card Man" later in the book.  I was essentially trying to pad in a science fictional future to a story that was kind of going nowhere.  At the point where I was trying to pad in the science fictional future, the thing that I'd been reading a lot about was peak oil.  So I'd been thinking about  peak oil and about energy collapse and stuff.   One of the things that I started to think was: 'Well, gee so what is the replacement technology? Where do we get our energy?'  We go back to calories.  You know crops and muscle power were our original energy sources and there's no reason why crops and muscle power couldn't be energy sources again.

Then I started thinking about what a society that's collapsed in energy - that hasn't necessarily collapsed in technology - does with the idea of being a calorie driven society.  That's where I started thinking about maybe we'd bioengineer more efficient animals.  Maybe we'd figure out ways to move... you know... do kinetic storage where we could store our energy just like a battery but we'd be dealing with kinetics instead of worrying about the transfer of energy from one form to another...kinetic to electric to chemical and store it in a battery or something like that or broken into hydrogen or something.  

So I started thinking about all of these different kinds of ideas and at the same time I think I'd been reading a lot about Monsanto.  I'd actually gotten a hold of lot of ConAgra stock reports and those are all very, very interesting.  So while I was reading all of these different things this other idea came to center on this idea of a calorie constraint.  Who would the bad guys be?  The bad guys would be the people who control the calories.  There's stuff about the terminator gene that was really interesting to me.  I have a bunch of friends who are organic farmers and so they're really interested in whatever they think Big Ag is up to and the idea of the terminator gene - where you have a seed that's sterile so it can't be replanted a second time - is a really interesting control technology for an agricultural company.  

So I started putting lots of pieces together in this weird amalgamation...in some ways it's actually a fairly clumsy amalgamation... but in the middle of all of all of that obsession, I sort of figured out: OK, this is a calorie story.  This is story about GMO's, and ancillarily it's also about peak oil but we're going to keep that off on the side and we're going to stay here in this calories/GMO/foods question.  Who controls food?  Who decides who eats and who dies and who makes a profit off of that?  Those things were really interesting ideas to me, and so I finally figured out that the story shouldn't be set out in Southeast Asia, where I'd originally started writing the story, but that it needed to be in the Heartland of America... in the breadbasket.  If you're going to write a calorie story it has to take place in exciting Iowa!  So that was the genesis of it.  

DG: When looking at all of the stories you chose for the collection, I had a moment where I felt like singing the song from my childhood: "One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others."  That came when I read the story "Softer."  I'm curious why "Softer" made it into the collection and what the origin of that was.  For our readers at home: "Softer" is a first person narration of a man's murder of his wife and the interior monologue directly subsequent to the event.  Okay - so I think it's really well executed - wow, that's a horrible pun.  Okay, really well written, but I was wondering about its inclusion because....

PG: Yeah, "What the fuck is this?"

DG: (Laughing) Maybe I'd just say, it didn't seem to fit with the generic conventions that were being deployed in the rest of the collection.  That is to say, it's not really SF.  I'm just curious as to the motivation. Was it just a publisher saying: "Hey, we really like that story, let's put it in"?

PG: Yeah, that's what's sort of interesting, it definitely was a publisher thing.  I was actually surprised that they wanted that one.  When I had suggested the collection to them initially, I had suggested that that one be left out.  Specifically because it's so much more jarring... it's jarringly different from the others.  If anything, the connecting set probably is my general sense that humans do the stupid and simplistic thing over the complex and difficult thing.  

In this particular case, it's easier for this guy to kill his wife than it is to actually deal with his marital problems.  (Laughing.) Yeah, when I think about it, that's exactly the connection, but yeah, it's an interesting thing to put together a collection because I didn't have as much control as I might have over some of the things.  The publishers were really excited about the short story and I was like: OK, well if you want to have it in there, go for it, knock yourselves out.
 
You know, when I think about it, the other story that really doesn't fit is "Pocketful of Dharma."  With that one I was trying to just work out an adventure story.  Even though it's sci fi, I feel like it's a very different stage.  It was written significantly earlier than any of my other writing, so those two stories both were aiming at very different things for me than the rest of the stories in the collection.  With the others I was starting to beat on some idea or another that I was interested in.

DG: So where do you go from here?  Obviously you're excited, the short story collection's coming out.  When will it be released exactly?

PB: Mid-February the collection comes out.  After that, it's an interesting question.  A lot of the stories in that collection are really grim and one of the things that I've been trying to do is figure out ways to address ideas but without being quite so grim.  The stuff is just so dystopic in a lot of cases--in a lot of cases I'm really depressed after I write a story.  

I'm sort of feeling my way towards something, maybe a slightly different style honestly.  With my newest
short story "Pump Six," I was starting to play around with that a little bit.  I thought: 'OK, well is there anyway I can make this a little bit, I don't know, lighter in some strange way--even though it's talking about an environmental disaster?'  

The big project that I'm working on is a novel, and it's set in the same universe as "The Calorie Man" and "Yellow Card Man" and it goes more heavily into the whole idea of genetic engineering and control of feed stocks and things like that. After that, I don't know.  

You know, it's actually sort of hard for me to even look down the road.  I used to have all of these plans about where I thought that I was going to be as a writer, or where I thought that I was going to end up.  Now I sort of look at the future and I think: 'well, I'll keep writing about what I'm interested in.'  

You know, the latest story that I wrote-- I just finished it two days ago-- wasn't about the environment at all.  It was actually about information  Transferring information control.  Now we're moving into a society where we really have a high correlation of measurability with the information that we put out.  'If I write this kind of news about this kind of topic, I'll be rewarded with this many hits.  If we write this other kind of news about that kind of topic, we won't be rewarded.'  So I just wrote a story that focuses on that aggressively.  About the idea of media hunting for clicks and being able to measure instantaneously whether or not it's working and then adjust and adapt and keep hunting for clicks.  

It's not at all the story that I thought that I was going to be writing when I sat down two weeks ago to start working on it.  I thought that I was going to be writing another environmental story actually, and it was sort of an environmental parable that I started out writing and then I ended up throwing away almost everything that had to do with the environment and focusing almost entirely on ideas of free speech and media.  I was like: 'where'd that come from?'  I just sort of end up following these themes and ideas wherever they go and hopefully the stories come out OK.

DG: So where can the readers keep abreast of what's going on with your career?  Do you have a website that they should check in on?

PB: Windupstories.com is where I keep my homepage and I love to talk there and post stories and stuff like that.  That's the spot.  Notice that it's not PaoloBacigalupi.com because no one would be able to spell that.  Windupstories.com is the website to go to for me.

DG: Excellent, so our readers can find you there.  Thank you so much for joining me on Science Fiction Friday.

Tags: Paolo Bacigalupi, Pump Six, science fiction, Science Fiction Friday

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