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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that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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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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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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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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The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes.
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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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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 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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Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative.
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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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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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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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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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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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The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province.
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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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There are parents who are really angry that I decided to portray people who have come into the country illegally as decent human beings.
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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.
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Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.
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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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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.
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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.