Paolo Bacigalupi’s books include The Windup Girl and The Water Knife. From his Q & A with Joel Cunningham at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:[The Windup Girl] kicked off a new wave of environmentally conscious sci-fi. In this case, did the stark message of the kind of future we might be facing come first, or the story, or were they indelibly intertwined? Did you set out to write an environmental dystopia?The Windup Girl is among Maddie Stone's top seven novels that show the real terrifying prospect of climate change, Diana Biller's 22 great science fiction and fantasy stories that can help you make sense of economics, Torie Bosch's twelve great pandemic novels, Madeleine Monson-Rosen's top 15 books that take place in science fiction and fantasy versions of the most fascinating places on Earth and Annalee Newitz's lists of books to prepare you for the economic apocalypse and the 35 essential posthuman novels.
I really wanted to write a story that felt relevant to me. I wanted to write about questions that I have about our future. How do we deal with technologies like genetic engineering? What does it mean to be able to alter the natural world for profit? What happens next? Where does that take us? It’s the same with questions about where we get our energy, and how we use it, along with things like climate change. I think there are a lot of question marks, and they’re worth exploring. The fact that story is set in a broken future highlights a lot of my concerns about...[read on]
Writers Read: Paolo Bacigalupi (March 2010).
--Marshal Zeringue