Paolo Bacigalupi
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 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.
There are parents who are really angry that I decided to portray people who have come into the country illegally as decent human beings.
I'm definitely writing my fears. It's almost therapeutic to at least voice a terror, to say, 'I'm worried that Lake Powell looks low and Lake Mead looks even lower.'
We're all happier when we know less, because the details are frightening and haven't really improved much. The more you pay attention, the more horrifying the world is.
Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.Collection: Hands
The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.Collection: Riding
Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.Collection: Lying
The more you read about and immerse in a culture, the more it comes alive, and the more textured and nuanced and detailed and unstereotypable it becomes.Collection: Culture
Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.Collection: Soul
Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.Collection: Men
It’s human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.Collection: Successful
At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.Collection: Differences
I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.Collection: Games
We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.Collection: Nature
The future looks a bit bleak to me.Collection: Looks
Most of the news about the state of the environment is pretty ugly. This is frightening for me personally, but actually motivational for me artistically.Collection: News
A desert's a stupid place to put a river.Collection: Stupid
Men are loyal when you lead from the front.Collection: Leadership
Maybe because we're photosynthesizing we'll do more work outside. So our laptops will have to get rid of these damn glossy screens that have become so popular. And then we'll sit around outside, sucking up sun, getting fat and green, and surfing the net.Collection: Work Out
I write at a standing desk, which has helped me be much more productive and solved some back problems, but mostly all my quirky habits have to do with procrastination and avoidance rather than with work. I'm slowly trying to stamp those out.Collection: Writing
Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit.Collection: Sake
Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.Collection: Sex
The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.Collection: Stories
Take three different Thai writers and ask them to extrapolate their county's future, and one hopes that you'll get three very different - but all deeply honest - versions.Collection: Different
Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.Collection: Children
Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.Collection: Law
If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.Collection: Long Ago
Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.Collection: Law
They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.Collection: Military
Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?Collection: Poetic
All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others' lives for it.Collection: Average
Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.Collection: Eye
An untrampled scorpion troubles no one.Collection: Scorpions
We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.Collection: Writing
At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water-right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.Collection: Math
For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out - it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by.Collection: Reading
Don't tell me about worth," Nita said. "My father commands fleets." "The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money." Tool leaned close. "Sadna once risked herself and the rest of her crew to help me escape from an oil fire... Your father commands fleets. And thousands of half-men, I am sure. But would he risk himself to save a single one?Collection: Father
I used to love reading, but since I've started writing, it's harder for me to immerse, because I spend so much time looking at how the story is structured and trying to see what the author is doing behind the curtain.Collection: Reading
Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.Collection: Dog
Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.Collection: Running
They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.Collection: Breathing
For pleasure, I'll read military sf, or Elmore Leonard capers, anything that's fast and fun. Otherwise, I mostly pick at books, without any clear focus.Collection: Fun
Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.Collection: Thinking
She’d survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn’t anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She’d looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she’d survived.Collection: Cities
No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.Collection: Tattoo
When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.Collection: Reading
But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.Collection: Real
When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.Collection: Ocean