01.25.08

Science Fiction Friday: Paolo Bacigalupi

In the last episode of Science Fiction Friday I had a conversation with one of science fiction's elite in Greg Bear and learned how we might all die from bioterrorism.  This time around I've turned to SF's new guard in Paolo Bacigalupi and received an education about how we might all die from environmental disaster. 

Paolo's new book, PUMP SIX AND OTHER STORIES, is a collection of his award-winning short fiction and a never before seen story (the title story "Pump Six").  Paolo offers up fairly dystopic, near-future landscapes that explore the implications of the not-so sustainable ecological practices of industrialized (and industrializing) societies.  

While PUMP SIX is Paolo's first book, he's certainly no tyro as an SF writer.  Among his accomplishments in short fiction are: winning the Theodore Sturgeon Award, thrice being named a Hugo finalist, as well as a earning a ticket to finals of the Nebula.  That said, his personal story isn't well known so I decided to start off by asking him a little about his biography.  Turns out this SF writer started out in the most rural of locales and not-so-long ago moved back there.  The road from Western Colorado to published SF writer was sometimes bumpy, but Paolo seems to have turned his experiences into fodder for his stories and motivation to keep writing.  (As per usual, we yammered on for quite some time so check back in over the weekend for more SFF posts.)


Damon Gambuto: So tell me a little bit about your background.

Paolo Bacigalupi: I actually grew up in a really small town in Colorado called Paonia.  It's got about 1,500 people in it.  It's actually outside the town of Paonia is where I lived on a Mesa.  My family was sort of back-to-the land hippies and they moved out to Western Colorado to grow organic apples.  That was sort of their dream.  They did very poorly at that actually.  Eventually elk came down and killed all of the apple trees--stripped all of the bark off of the apple trees--that was sort of the end of a dream

DG: So maybe if they had genetically modified their apple trees so that the elk would die if they ate the bark you'd be an apple baron today?

PB: You know, the actual high tech solution for it all is to just put up a really big fence around your orchard.

DG: Well, either way, I'm glad you ended up writing interesting SF.  So you grow up with a hippie family on a Mesa in Colorado outside of a town of 1,500 people.  Where do go from there?

PB: From Paonia I end up going out to college in Ohio--I went to Oberlin College.

DG: So you really rebelled from those hippie roots?

PB: "Not really. I was told Oberlin was a hotbed of liberalism, and I thought that was what I wanted at the time. At any rate, it was an interesting place for meIt is an interesting place for me.  It's where I studied Chinese language--that was my major--I was an East Asian Studies major focusing on Chinese language and that actually sort of sent me out into the rest of the world.  I ended up moving to China and living in Southwestern China in Kunming for a while and then up in Beijing as well doing work up there.

DG: How long was that?

PB: I went over to Kunming as a student and then over to Beijing as a student and then was in Beijing for about a year doing work and then later on I had time in Beijing again doing research for a book that I was writing--that didn't pan out--but...

DG: Did you travel throughout Southeast Asia?

PB: Yeah.

DG: It was one of my questions on my list because I noticed that your stories happen all over the world.  I was noticing that you had a real sense of...

PB: I faked it, right?

DG: Well - I thought he must have spent time in Asia, or that they were really good fakes.  So you spent some time there?

PB: Yeah, I spent time in China and then have traveled throughout Southeast Asia-- so down through China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, all of that.  That entire region I've been through a fair number of times and yeah, so some of those things have provided inspiration as I've been writing and stuff like that, and my longer term time in China as well--especially parts of Southwest and rural China have been useful for me as I've been writing.

DG: So do you come back to the States after this stint in China or do you go somewhere else?

PB: I come back to the States. I end up living in Boston for a little while after I've been in China and doing work for a web development company out there. It seems like it's what happened to every single Liberal Arts grad--they end up becoming web developers.  It's like the one thing that you could figure out how to do and that people wanted you to do was to write some HTML.  So I ended up doing web development work and I still actually do some of that.  I ended up in Boston for about a year working at this web development company and it was pretty demoralizing actually.  The technologies were interesting and the internet was exciting, but what you saw is that all of your clients were these sort of software, marketer types.  And all of these marketing people would be coming into my cubicle--it was very Dilbert--they all said the exact same things, they all had the same exact anecdotes no matter what company was coming in.  It was really sort of soul killing, and so I actually started writing science fiction around that time.  Something to do on the weekends.

DG: When was that?

PB: I think that might have been '96 or something.  I graduated in '94 so it was about '96 when that was happening.  I was out there for about a year.  I started writing science fiction and I ended up actually quitting my job to write more science fiction and mostly, I don't know, just on sort of a whim I decided that I was going to become a writer.  I started working on a novel.  I just started banging away on it and began taking my writing more and more seriously and taking everything else less and less seriously.  I ended up moving back to China then again to do research for a book that I was working on.  After that I ended up in Denver for a while and then moved out here, but all of that time I was basically working.  I was writing books that weren't selling and slowly started to write some short fiction that was selling, and that's what you see in the collection.  "Pocketful of Dharma" was the first story that I sold, and that was really my first attempt at writing something short.  

I'd stalked William Gibson at one point at a book signing and had asked him what his secret to success was.  You know I was a very hungry, very needy sort of writer and was just looking for any kind of a clue about how the whole thing worked.  I sort of hovered over his shoulder while he was signing other people's books.  I hit him with all of these questions and one of the things that he said was that he'd written short stories until somebody would take him seriously and that was when he managed to actually sell a novel.  So I sort of took that to heart and went home and sat down and was like: 'OK, so I need to write a short story.  How the fuck do I do this?'  

So I bought some science fiction magazines--fantasy and science fiction magazines and stuff-- and read all of the short stories in them and went, 'OK, I just need to write something better than any these things.'  I sat down and started banging away and eventually what I got was "Pocketful of Dharma."  

DG: What made you make the decision to start writing science fiction specifically?

PB: I grew up reading science fiction and I think that was probably the biggest thing.  I grew up on Heinlein and my father's science fiction collection.  My father was a big SF reader and those were really the first books that I read.  They were science fiction and fantasy.  Heinlein's CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY.  It was STARMAN JONES.  It was things like THE HOBBIT by Tolkien.  Those were the first books that I read where I actually remembered what I'd read afterwards and actually cared about the characters enough to want to run home and finish reading whatever book I was reading.  So I've always had a connection to the genre because of that-- those big adventure stories that science fiction and fantasy provided.  

I think when I first sat down to write a book - when I was first sort of testing out the idea of being a writer - I just naturally gravitated to the idea that I would write science fiction.  I read so much of it, I was familiar with it, and I liked it, and so that was where I started out thinking that if I was definitely going to write a book, it was definitely going to be science fiction.  This original book that I was going to write, it was all set in the future China world, sort of the version that you see in "Pocketful of Dharma," and it was entertainment--it was pretty fun to write.  It was interesting in it's own way, but science fiction was just sort the thing that seemed like it was the natural thing.  

Later on, when I sold Pocketful of Dharma, I had Harlan Ellison call me up and he was convinced... Are you familiar with Harlan Ellison?

DG: Yup.

PB: Harlan Ellison called me up out of the blue.  It was soon after the short story had come out and I was in my house mopping the floor and I get this phone call and this man on the other end was like 'This is Harlan Ellison, do you know who I am?' and I was like 'Yeah, yeah, um yeah.'  So he says, 'Go get your story.'  So I do.   He then proceeds to basically critique every single aspect of my entire story.  

He starts out by saying 'At first I thought that you were some sort of professional writing under a pseudonym because, you know, nobody has a name like Bacigalupi, I know the Abbot and Costello routine blah blah blah...' He goes off about how Paolo Bacigalupi is obviously a pseudonym or a joke name of some sort.   Now he's getting  a bit worked up.  He says, 'You know, I thought you were a professional, and then I got to page 5 and right down there at the bottom you used the word jerked... and then 2 sentences later you used the word jerky--you took all of the power out of the fucking word!'  

I'm sitting there on the line sort of terrified of this man just haranguing me.  At the end of that whole conversation - a conversation in which he critiques, line by line, my entire story - he finishes up by saying, 'Well you got some potential, but don't write in genre, it's a waste of time. Don't get stuck in it like I got stuck in it.' And then he hangs up.  

That was the last thing that I heard from this guy--I don't know what it was--sort of like a love tap I guess, but I actually sort of got to me. I proceeded to write a bunch of stories that weren't science fiction.  I wrote historical fiction novels set in China, I went on and wrote a landscape... I don't know what you call it... sort of landscape porn I guess is the best word for it.  You know, one of those love of place and the rural west sort of stories.  Then I wrote a mystery/western story and none of those genres is related to sci-fi in any way, shape or form, and none of them sold.  

At the end of all of that, I'm sitting there with all of the rejection letters in my hands and thinking: Well, you know, actually I kind of liked writing science fiction and then I went back into it and started doing the short stories, and that's when I started writing things like "The Fluted Girl," and "The People of Sand and Slag" and started finding my niche.  It's been a long process.

to be continued...

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

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