The People of Sand and SlagĪ simple story about a group of security contractors guarding a mining operation. The story begins benignly enough with a servant-girl’s recalcitrant game of hide-and-seek, but as the reader pieces together clues to the true meaning of the story’s title, one sees everything in a new, unsettling light. (Imagine Downton Abbey but replace the noblesse oblige with sociopathy.) It’s perhaps a parody of a society that values “job creators” above all else–after all, when everyone serves at the pleasure of a lord or lady, the aristocracy is the de facto source of all jobs. In the world of “The Fluted Girl”, society is organized into fiefdoms run by the idle rich. Its stories are a dialogue with our time, and Bacigalupi’s side of the dialogue tends to begin with “Really, guys? Did you even try to think this one through? Okay, let me show you…”Ī few of the stories especially resonate with me: The Fluted Girl In other words, Pump Six wouldn’t be nearly as interesting to read a century ago (or, I’m sure, a century hence). In the same way the reader only gradually learns that, for example, the widespread infertility that one story’s characters take for granted is the result of decades of unchecked pollution, we in the real world seems to learn only gradually and often too late that the BPAs in our ubiquitous plastic bottles can cause birth defects or that the chemicals used in rapidly-expanding hydraulic fracture drilling can cause cancer. This is useful because these are, after all, cautionary tales. You’ll be confused–Why are people behaving this way? What is this “cleansing” they refer to?–but as you slowly figure out how this particular world works, you’ll feel the eureka-like ecstasy of comprehension. He drops you in the middle of a world, disoriented enough not to see it as you might expect, but as it is. One of Bacigalupi’s prime virtues as a storyteller is his measured illumination of what’s really going on.

Like the novel, the stories in Pump Six imagine what life might be like if our species’ current challenges–global warming, technology outpacing morality, inequality, and environmental degradation most prominently–go unaddressed. Pump Six was Paolo Bacigalupi’s first collection of short stories, two of which inspired his novel The Windup Girl. Our species can barely handle the present day: how the hell are we going to handle the future?

Paolo bacigalupi pump six