Words matter. These are the best Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future – those are science fictional questions.
Teens want to read something that isn’t a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we’re writing for our kids.
Maybe storytelling belongs in audio – a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.
I think that, when I think about the future that ‘The Water Knife’ represents, it’s one where there’s a lack of oversight, planning and organization.
People don’t actually stay still, you know – when their area is a disaster, they go somewhere else, right? And that’s just a natural human impulse.
As a kid, I always liked reading stories where I had a power-projection fantasy. I wanted to be inside of a story where I had power and influence, was going to rise to power, was going to somehow influence my society.
I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential – up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.
When we live the 21st-century good life, almost every aspect of it is predicated on not looking at the implications of what we’re up to. Happiness at this point has a lot to do with not looking, so you don’t feel complicit in some vast and awful enterprise.
I’m less crazy and unhappy when I’m writing.
I know people who have gone into career death spins, and that’s something you’re always aware of as a writer.
I have friends who are science journalists, and I’m seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they’re pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology.
A wise human would have an understanding of the supply chain and how the pieces fit together. But it’s against our nature to think about it.
I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.
I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we’re failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.
I focus a little more on pacing when I write books in the young adult category, and of course there’s the great American fear of anything sexual, so that’s somewhat backed off in YA.
I didn’t think of myself as writing ‘cli-fi,’ but I’ll take the label. I’ll take any label that makes someone think they might be interested in my stories.
I’m really interested in how conflicts arise and how they reach points of no return. I’m no pacifist. Sometimes force is necessary. But war is a choice.
When somebody keeps telling you, ‘This book is amazing,’ you sort of have this pleasing instinct to say, ‘Oh, let me make you happy again; let me do that trick again.’
My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I’ve matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it’s someone who’s not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who’s going to give me enough slack to tell my story.
As an author, you’re really grateful for the people who are supporting you, but on some other level, that can be a dangerous echo chamber.
As a writer, you should care about reluctant readers. You want these kids to feel like books are amazing and cool and that they’re an escape.
The conclusion I came to was that even if I couldn’t sell books, I still liked the process of writing.
I think inherently, a little bit, I’m a bit of a pleaser, and I want people to like me and be nice, and to not ruffle feathers and just make everybody happy and stuff. It’s a personality flaw.
I started really thinking a lot about where does a country go when we stop being able to speak to each other, when a nation stops being able to solve problems because its ideological differences become so deep that it just becomes dysfunctional.
Economies are embedded inside ecosystems. Companies dependent on tourism, for example, are affected by low rainfall – there’s less snow for skiers, and forest fires are more intense.
When I was writing ‘The Windup Girl’ and ‘Ship Breaker,’ I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
I’m interested in how we react when we’re heavily pressed. When we’re vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave?
Everyone in China knows The Topics. The television stations and newspapers run the same state-generated stories all across the country, and the Chinese form their opinions based on these somewhat controlled sources.
I don’t put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction – looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That’s a science fictional tool.
All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you’re writing science fiction, you’re writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it’s inequity where The Man must be fought.
I used to work for a newspaper that covered local resource issues, and my coworkers and friends were journalists. Their reporting work was always pretty grim.
By nature I’m sort of an introvert.
The sources and research I use for my inspiration aren’t your typical sci-fi subjects, but it’s really driven by obsession and personal anxiety more than trying to take up the sword and do what’s right.
