Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes
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An untrampled scorpion troubles no one.
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I'm less crazy and unhappy when I'm writing.
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When we talk about dystopias, especially in young adult fiction, a lot of them are essentially science fictional futures. They aren't necessarily tied to the traditional concept of dystopia. And so in that space, my impression is that kids love reading about weird, wild, adventurous places, and dystopia fits that bill.
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Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.
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The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes.
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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that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.
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I think that we live in a highly specialized, technologically advanced society. Highly developed societies tend to have very remote understandings about what underlies our prosperity.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Novelists want to be published and need a publisher to decide to print 20,000 copies. So you need to entertain on some level. I want to reach out and connect.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative.
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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.
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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.
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The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that.
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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.
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Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.
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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.
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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.
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The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province.