Babel Clash

Thanks for having me here, Morgan. I really enjoyed it.

“For those that haven’t read your work yet, what would you tell them to encourage checking out Windup Girl?”

Bottom line, The Windup Girl is a GMO thriller/political intrigue set in a future Bangkok.  And it’s pretty much guaranteed to give you a couple good shocks and surprises. But don’t believe me. Check out the reviews and see if the book seems like it fits your taste.

SF Signal describes The Windup Girl: “In a future Thailand struggling against gened plagues and rising seas, the most important elements of life are the calories needed to stay alive. But as iron-fisted food corporations, flawed rulers, and an impure army of environmental defenders fight to impose their views on this world, an unlikely girl—who could be the next step in human evolution—fights for the right to simply live as she wants.”

And some reviews, with links:

Publishers Weekly: (Starred Review) “This complex, literate and intensely felt tale, which recalls both William Gibson and Ian McDonald at their very best… is clearly one of the finest science fiction novels of the year.”

SF Signal: (Five out of Five Stars) “A disturbing novel… beautiful, fast-paced, exciting… One of the best first science fiction novels of recent years; a completely realistic and terrifying future.”

IO9: “The Windup Girl is obviously about the geopolitics of the present, where Monsanto tries to supplant local seedstocks with its own, and many governments teeter between the politics of isolationism and global capital. And yet Bacigalupi never slides into moralism or judgement. All his characters have their flaws and heroic moments. Nobody is clean, and there are no heroes who want to save the environment or bad guys who want to destroy it. Ultimately that’s what makes this debut novel so exciting. It’s rare to find a writer who can create such well-shaded characters while also building a weird new future world.”

And of course, you can always come to my website at windupstories.com where I have some of my short stories available for free download, if you’d like to try out some of my writing before you buy.

Thanks for letting me drop by.

-Paolo

You know, Morgan, you’re probably asking the wrong person about this stuff.

But off the cuff, I’d point out that all of the disasters you cite are simply not going to happen.  They’re storytelling tools of fantasy.  They’re broadly designed to disengage a reader from the here and now and carry them far away. Which is great.  And it’s also why stories of this type, and apocalypses and disasters of these types, will remain highly popular.  Zombies/Machines that Take Over/The Oncoming Prophecy of Doooooom!  They’ve been popular for decades now, though the zombie increase recently has been rather astonishing.  Read someone like John Joseph Adams zombie anthology The Living Dead to get a good taste of brains, er, treatments of zombies in literature.

But I have to think that even though we can point to a few environmentally-related collapse stories, we aren’t very serious about it, and it doesn’t gain much ground in literature precisely because it’s a little too real.  To the extent that environmental stories become absurd action stories (what was that global warming movie a few years ago? I’ve already forgotten, and the ebola-like outbreak movie? bleh.) you see environmental topics showing up as a factor, but mostly it’s to provide an action set-piece (Water World. ugh.)

The extent to which the environmental aspects of a story are relevant and uniquely connected to the plot makes for a much smaller subset of books. Mostly, it comes across as the old science fiction cliche where a the trusty six-shooter becomes a ray gun and the white horse becomes a star fighter. If you could do the story with the environmental components flipped to something else, then it’s not really an environment story. It’s just another action thriller.

And really, I doubt that more genuine stories of environmental collapse will gain much ground. The more relevant they are to our present, the more disturbing they are, which destroys their function as escapist literature. I’m sure we’ll be telling stories about zombies around our campfires while we ride camels through the desert of whatever real apocalypse we actually encounter, but we won’t tell stories about how our daughter got H1N1 and died miserably.

So books that I’d recommend? They’re all non-fiction. Read something like David Quammen’s astonishingly good exploration of speciation and extinction in Song of the Dodo. Read Jared Diamond’s fascinating Collapse.  James Howard Kuntzler’s worst case scenario meditations on peak oil.  Read Alan Weisman’s end of the world examination in The World Without Us.  Those books do what good science fiction does.  They will change the way you look at the world.

And as horror goes, they aren’t bad, either.

So, as I wrote previously, it doesn’t seem impossible to write a positive future, where society is actively sorting out its problems instead of creating new ones.  So… Why don’t we?  I’ve been mulling this, as I’ve gotten a certain amount criticism over the years about the kinds of futures that I create.  Generally this criticism runs along the lines of “Bacigalupi writes well, but after you’ve finished one of his stories you just want to go slit your wrists.”

Which actually makes me laugh, because a lot of times, that’s how I feel after I’ve finished writing the story, too.

So what’s wrong with writing a Utopia?  Or at least creating a positive version of a future society? And why don’t more SF authors do it?

My theory is that the real problem with writing Utopias is that it puts a writer’s values front and center. It’s the artistic equivalent of tearing open our shirts and baring our chests while bleating about the need for true love in the universe.   It’s a vulnerable position because in a society that values the the ironic eye over the naive one, you’re basically setting yourself up as the artistic equivalent of Dennis Kucinich.

He’s just so painfully sincere, y’know?

Writing a Utopic vision of the future means you really are going to talk about people working out their differences (yawn), show them living as is if they valued the earth (gag), and worst of all, you’re not even going to make fun of them.  The future awaits, and it’s made of granola.  Nearly everything that you propose (reducing consumption? controlling corporations? making people aware of waste streams?) has that reek of do-gooderism and social engineering that even if you do it well, it still has the whiff of singing The Internationale. It’s not so much that it’s impossible to write a positive future, it’s more the fear of someone making fun of your vision that really sends a writer running in the other direction.

That’s my theory, at least.  Artists want to look smart, and smart and painfully sincere go so badly together.

Hi Morgan,

You say:

“At the heart of storytelling is drama, tension and struggle.  In a world lacking scarcity issues, much of the tension is removed, and it becomes more difficult to tell a traditional story.  Unless the Utopia is an illusion or secretly corrupt, and that makes for good stories, too.  Assuming that the Utopia is real, is it still possible to infuse that story with danger and suspense without creating an outside source to threaten it?”

I think you’re conflating two very different types of story. One is Utopian storytelling.  The other is telling a story set in a society that functions sustainably.  These are two very different beasts.

While I agree that storytelling requires drama, tension and struggle, I’m not certain that I can think of all that many “traditional” plots which actually depend on questions of scarcity to function.  Most conflict plotlines I can think of actually tend to revolve around human struggles–politics, relationships, power, obsessions etc.–I’m thinking Shakespeare here–none of which are precluded by a society which handles its day-to-day affairs in a sustainable way. A Romeo and Juliet story isn’t off the table just because both families recycle.  A society that burns very little carbon, reuses its waste efficiently, and recognizes its interdependence with its resources isn’t necessarily Utopian in the perfected sense, it’s just a less stupid society.

Being a smarter society doesn’t preclude power struggles, feuds, and though you take it off the table– outside threats.  In many ways, 21st-century America is Utopian. Compared to earlier points in history (and to many countries around the world today) we live in an astonishingly luxurious society. We live longer, are better educated, eat better, have more toys, have more leisure options than at any point in human history.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t intensely human stories going on within it. Wealth does not end conflict and human drama, nor do I think does sustainability equal the death of story.

The question of writing a genuine Utopian story is a different thing.  Utopian world-building not only assumes that you’ve solved resource problems, you’ve also solved human conflict problems, social and health problems, education problems….  This sort of world is more an exercise in political theory, an exploration of how societies might organize themselves in more rational or positive ways than we do spontaneously, and often based on the assumption that people at root could also be radically different in behavior and outlook than they are in reality. They’re deliberately stories of perfected worlds, where all children are above average.

To the extent that a Utopian story has conflict, I think that it’s contained in the tension between how *readers* react to this very differently ordered world, and how they then consider their own world with the new lens that a Utopian theory provides.  My sense is that Utopian novels tend to focus on ideas rather than plot, and that’s okay because they’re a conceptual exercise rather than a story per se. They’re just a different beast and provide different satisfactions.

But even then, I suspect a clever writer could find a thread of conflict if they were motivated. Certainly looking at past Utopian novels, I can see ways of rewriting everything from Bellamy’s Looking Backward to Callenbach’s Ecotopia that might provide a better thread of story than the one that was chosen by the authors.

One of the interesting things that came up at the symposium I attended in Japan, was about the way we in SF treat scarcity concepts–mostly with rioting, looting, banditry, complete societal breakdown, and Australian desert–and how that may work to embed certain images and perceptions in people’s minds about what scarcity might mean in the future.

SF isn’t predictive very often, or, at least, not successfully predictive, but it does have an interesting function in illustrating mythologies about our future.  SF written during the aerospace expansion of the cold war was not only inspired by the changes that were happening in technology, it also provided in some ways a dream for people to live into.  By the time something like 2001 was in theaters, you could see a version of the future that was inspired by and also inspiring, and you could almost unconsciously lean into that shuttle flight to the moon.  To the extent that we’re all still wondering why our 2001 was so lame in comparison to Clark and Kubrick’s, it’s an indication of how powerful the myth was.

And so with scarcity and apocalypse. If the visions of scarcity that SF provides are all visions of horror, it means that in some ways we (as sf writers) are providing powerful reasons for our society to not look scarcity questions squarely in the face, and also not challenging society to come up with positive versions of societies handling scarcity well, as opposed to poorly.  If you don’t have a model or archetypal pattern of a highly functional society that deals with drought or peak oil or global warming it makes it difficult for a rational dialogue to commence about how to create an adaptable society.  Instead, we all bury our heads in the sand and hope the apocalypse will never come, because a Mad Max world can only be met with denial.

Couldn’t help posting this. Despite the fact that I’m pretty left-leaning in my own writing, I really enjoy reading David Weber’s Honor Harrington books (I like things that explode, apparently).  So I really did geek out when I found them in Japan, repurposed for a female readership.

Morgan,

It’s funny that you mention Japanese SF coming across the ocean.  One of the other presenters at this symposium was Housuke Nojiri, author of Usurper of the Sun, which is coming out this month in the States from Viz. The book won the Seiun Award here in Japan (Japan’s equivalent of a Hugo Award) so it’s a good representation of what Japanese readers like in their SF.  Depending on how Viz markets him, I think he’s got a shot at finding a readership.

One of the things that’s interesting about seeing literature go into translation is how it becomes recontextualized.  Over here in Japan, David Weber, the military SF author who made his name blowing up starships in massive nuclear battles, has a huge following–but it’s dominantly women who read him. Apparently because the main character, Honor Harrington, is a woman. Honor captains a starship and nukes the bad guys every time, and she’s basically an icon of women’s empowerment for Japanese readers. Which, I have to say, I find completely awesome (I’m a big fan of Honor Harrington, myself).

Another interesting example of differences in reader taste is Ted Chiang. He’s hugely respected here (as in the States), but in Japan, his short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others does very well commercially as well, as opposed to in the States where short stories seldom find much more than a niche following.

…is tan, apparently.  Because all the ones that really stand out in my mind happen in the desert.

What is it about bleak desert landscapes and the crash of civilization?  I’m sort of wondering if the iconic experience of Mad Max has so imprinted itself on our minds that we as sf authors can’t get away from it.  Ho hum. One more journey across the desert, with roving gangs all around, looking to do nothing apparently except wreak havoc on the few innocents who are still left alive.

Apparently, the good people either all get selectively nuked, poisoned, turned into zombies or just plain turn to evil as soon as the apocalypse hits. Because, you know, only psychopaths survive.  Which is sort of funny, because in general, it seems like people are basically decent, and basically decent people do a better job of cooperating and organizing than wingnuts.  If they didn’t, we’d already be at each other’s throats.

Hi Everyone,

I’m Paolo Bacigalupi, and I’ll be hanging out here for the next couple weeks or until Morgan throws me off.  I write science fiction almost exclusively, and mostly I focus on environmental topics–things like peak oil, global warming, chemical pollution, drought, GM foods… cheery stuff.  No seriously, it’s a bucket of laughs.  Okay, well maybe not.  But hopefully still gripping and thought-provoking.

I’m currently posting this from Japan, where I just finished presenting at an academic symposium on sustainability.  I was invited to speak, along with a pair of Japanese science fiction authors, about sustainable futures–where we think we’re headed, what trends we see, and what a sustainable society looks like to us.  Other presenters included anthropologists and acheo-botanists and archaeologists, which made for an interesting exchange of ideas, some about patterns in the past, and some about where we’re maybe heading in the future.

One of the things which was interesting about speaking on these topics in the Japanese context is that the Japanese often use the word “futurability” instead of sustainability.  Which sort of indicates the slightly more optimistic approach to the future that seems to permeate Japan as opposed to in Western societies. “Sustainability” seems to indicate that we’re just trying to hang onto what we’ve got.  Whereas “futurability” seems to have more of a sense of planning to be around for a long time.  I didn’t really understand why Japanese science fiction writers seemed so much more upbeat than I was, until I had a chance to ride the Shinkansen, aka the bullet train, aka the coolest train evah.

Here it is pulling into Kyoto Station:

Once you’re rocketing across the landscape at 268 miles per hour, it’s hard not to feel excited about what lies around the corner.