The New New Thing: Paolo Bacigalupi, "Pop Squad"; "Yellow Card Man"; "Softer"; "Pump Six"; "Small Offerings"

I finally finished Paolo Bacigalupi's Pump Six and Other Stories; so this omnibus post will cover the final five stories and any general comments I want to make. I previously posted on Pump Six stories here, here, here, here, and here.

The last five stories I'll cover today are

• "Pop Squad" (2006): in a future where humans are functionally immortal and procreation is illegal, some people go off their immortality meds so they can have kids; our protagonist is one of the cops whose job it is to track down these women and kill the kids. Bonus: people seem to live in a jungle that was once the tundra, complete now with lots monkeys.
• "Yellow Card Man" (2006): once a rich man in Malaysia, the protagonist was forced out by nationalist riots and now tries to survive as one of the yellow card men (refugee immigrants), avoiding the white uniformed Environment Ministry cops/thugs. This takes place in the Wind-Up Girl universe; and is a novella in length.
• "Softer" (2007): a man kills his wife, thinks his life is over, but when he gets away it, decides to rededicate himself to really living his life. The only non-science fiction story in the collection.
• "Pump Six" (2008): reminiscent of The Marching Morons and Idiocracy, an average man tries to save the city of idiots by keeping the sewage system working. Bonus: the man and his wife are trying to have a baby, hoping the environmental pollutants don't give them an idiot; and the city is overrun with these monkey-like idiot hominids. 
• "Small Offerings" (2007): in a polluted world, a doctor wants to leach the pollutants from her body to have a normal baby, which is a better alternative to having a dead baby just to clear the pollutants for a good baby.

"Softer" is an anomaly, focusing more on the character's thought processes than on any of the environmental factors that he's dealing with. I want to perform some literary analytic prestidigitation, where I turn the story inside out and show that the pattern is the same as his others... but it really doesn't seem all that similar.

All the other stories share a real interest in environmental/ecological issues, including pollutants. Whereas the protagonists of "The People of Sand and Slag" were physically impervious, normal humans in these stories tend to be undone by their environments. (Or by their parents' environments in the case of the idiot kids and troglodytes of "Pump Six.")

"Pop Squad" might be a slight outlier here, since what people are undone by are their own inbuilt urges to have kids. Although they are living in a post-climate change world, the problem isn't that; the problem is that they have two genetic imperatives warring: the desire to live and the desire to pass on one's genes. The environmental issues seems secondary. 

"Yellow Card Man," "Pump Six," and "Small Offerings" all tell the story of someone fighting the environment, whether that environment includes dangerous people; idiots and pollutants; or pollutants.

OK, fine, I told you what they're about; but how good are they? "Yellow Card Man" is clearly the standout here, not as a story--it's an almost structureless meander through the life and incidents of an old man--but as a world that he's building. It's hard to say since I've already read another Wind-Up story and know that was the world for his novel; but that world seems the richest and most interesting. 

The New New Thing: Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Pasho" (2004) and "The Calorie Man" (2005)

First, I want to note that almost all the stories in Pump Six are long:

• "Pocketful of Dharma" pp1-24
• "The Fluted Girl" pp25-48
• "The People of Sand and Slag" pp49-68 
• "The Pasho" pp69-92 
• "The Calorie Man" pp93-122 
• "The Tamarisk Hunter" pp123-136
• "Pop Squad" pp137-162 
• "Yellow Card Man" pp163-196 
• "Softer" pp197-208
• "Pump Six" pp209-230

And maybe that's part of my disappointment with them: they take a long time and there's generally one image that pops. Take "The Pasho," which breaks from the formula I previously extracted from Bacigalupi's short stories--"(1) inhuman(e) condition (2) is disrupted by possibility of betterment (3) only for the world to prove much worse"--but still hits hard only at one moment in the long tale.

Here, "The Pasho" is the title of a learned man who has been to the big city in a watery environment; and now he returns to the desert village of his youth, where they still keep the old ways (such as "quaran," which is clearly "quarantine"--one of the hints that this world is post-apocalypse). He's a new man returning to the traditional world, so you'd think the tension is between progress and stasis; but the Pasho's main role is to throttle progress down, so that the changes that are made are considered and manageable.

So it's unclear what's inhumane here: the Pasho's interest in manages progress? Or his traditional grandfather's interest in war? Both seem pretty human and neither seems anywhere as bad as the previous apocalypse. Here's the spoiler: after trying to blend back into the old town-life, the Pasho reveals that his mission is to kill his grandfather, thus preventing a new war, all of which happens in the last page. On one hand, you'd think this structure was a gut-punch surprise. But on the other hand, because of the story's ambiguity, this surprise never becomes as meaningful as a gut-punch, either as tragedy or victory. Now this is a funny complaint to make, and it reminds me of my complaint about the open ending of "The Fluted Girl," but I'm no longer really interested in "Lady or the Tiger?"--I'd like a story to have a POV and take a stand for something. (At least, today I do.)

So, even if "The Pasho" upends the Bacigalupi plot formula, it still focuses a lot of feeling on one particular moment in time that takes a while to get to.

By contrast, "The Calorie Man" seems a little richer, both in the world-building and in the characterization. This is the story of Indian expat Lalji who has left his family--where they may have starved thanks to genetically modified infertile seeds--who lives on the fringes of the energy corporations that now trade in food: the calories from various agri-products go into modified animals for conversion into kinetic energy or stored in springs. For instance, his helper Creo is pretty good with his gun--which has to be pumped up and shoots out spinning disks that don't seem to go as far as bullets. (Any relation to Nerf products is accidental, I'm sure.)

Lalji is hired to ship a scientist who knows how to crack the seeds' infertility problem, which means he's a target by the corporations and the IP police. Naturally, things don't go as planned--Bacigalupi takes seriously the "gun on the mantlepiece" theory of foreshadowing--though there is a semi-hopeful end to this: though the scientist gets kills, he's already created his monopoly-cracking seeds--seeds that are fertile and will mix with other seeds, spreading fertility.

I not only like the mixed-to-happy ending here, but I like the way that Lalji's image of the seeds his family planted gets echoed through the story, as past to run away from and as future hope. I also like the fact that this story deals with something serious about our own time--IP laws and GM food. This story breaks the formula by keeping (1) and (2)--inhumane/strange conditions and promise of betterment--but doesn't pull a switch with (3), the tragic ending. And while Lalji is haunted by his memory of abandoning his family, his condition seems more relatable: not a crippled and exploited worker, but just a guy caught in the middle. That relatability, I hope, makes this story effective.

The New New Thing: "The People of Sand and Slag" (2004)

I just listened to a podcast interview with Paolo Bacigalupi, which might be a little old (it's before The Windup Girl won any awards), but is still interesting, especially in light of the last few stories I've read. In it, PB makes the argument that YA fiction is better for making readers change or at least assess their lives, particularly their environmental impact. So, an adult may read a story, be moved by it, but what are they going to do--give up their car? Whereas if you get them young, before they're set in their ways, they might make environmentally responsible decisions.

In light of that, "People of Sand and Slag" seems a powerful but failed activist statement: it takes place in a future where humans have destroyed the environment totally but also enhanced themselves to deal with the degradation. So the three characters here are enforcers for a mining company, who, as luck would have it, can eat sand and dirt, and regenerate from just about any trauma. In fact, on their days off, they engage in trauma as play of various sorts: setting knives into one's body, amputating and caring for a loved one (just for a day--the limbs regrow quickly).

Perhaps next time I read a PB story I will put it down after the first, oh, 10%, and write what I think will happen. I feel like I might be able to because his stories have a certain plot arc:

• inhuman(e) condition--
• the beggar in "Dharma," 
• the fluted girls in "Fluted Girl," 
• the monstrous humanoids of "Sand and Slag"
• --is disrupted by possibility of betterment--
• the beggar gets the lama cube, 
• the fluted girl contemplates suicide-as-freedom,
• the monstrous humanoids who live without a safe environment adopt a dog"
• --only for the world to prove much worse--
• the lama cube that makes him a target can't actually help him,
• the fluted girl accidentally eats the boy who helped her,
• the monstrous humanoids decide to eat the dog.

Or put another way, as soon as these monstrous humans discuss whether to adopt or eat the dog, it's pretty clear that the dog will end up as dinner, even if it's after an adoptive period.

What's curious about "Sand and Slag" is that it's told from the POV of someone not at the bottom of the food/exploitation chain, but someone firmly in the middle: these guards may be inhuman because of their environment but they retain certain powers, both because of their technology and their jobs.

(The question then being: if you can eat rock, why do you need a job at all, especially a job killing things? The whole military/guard side of the equation--the "Slag," as in "battle"/"war" (in Swedish/Dutch/Afrikaans)--isn't really examined in this story, but only hinted at. What is this installation mining and who wants to attack it?)

The New New Thing: Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Tamarisk Hunter"

If you want to read this story, here; if you want to listen to it, here.

"The Tamarisk Hunter" was first published in High Country News, an environmentally-directed news outlet that employed PB as an editor. It's a present-tense story about a man named Lolo who rips out tamarisk (or salt-cedar) from the banks of the Colorado River (I think) as a way to make a living; what's especially important is that he gets a water bounty for that work, which enables him and his wife (and camel) to survive on a little patch of dry western land. And while other tamarisk bounty hunters have had to move on, Lolo keeps himself in business by secretly planting tamarisk; and this scheme could go on forever, except the river is being walled in more and more. So the story ends with some National Guardsmen telling Lolo that there's no more water bounty, which means he won't be able to survive there.

Now, I live in a city that knows drought, so this story might hit me in a different way, but here's what I got out of this: a view of the future of water scarcity and state (and city) claims on watersheds. But the story itself is very thin in terms of plot and characters: Lolo does what he does, he's worried about his wife Annie who doesn't like cities, but that's not a major part of the story. Rather the wordcount focuses on very realistic information about the effects of drought on many communities. It's an important topic, but not a moving story.

Still, it was republished in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, so someone liked it.

The New New Thing: Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Fluted Girl" (2003)

On his website (where you can read this story), Bacigalupi notes that this was his first published story after a failed period of trying to write novels; and in some ways, it seems to return to the themes and form of his previous story, "Pocketful of Dharma" (covered here).

Like that story, this is the story of a poor, crippled, exploited person and the pitiful stand they take against the system that's using them. In that story, Jun is a poor country boy whose back is hunched from disease or malnutrition; who gets caught up in a search for a datacube between powers that are far beyond him and whose struggle he doesn't even understand; and whose rebellion takes the form of climbing down a giant tower, not knowing if he'll even survive the climb, let alone if he'll survive life on the hard streets below.

Here, the main character Lidia is one of a pair of twins who have been bought by the media super-star Madame Belari, who has shaped the twins through a series of grotesque surgeries into perpetual children whose bodies are also musical instruments. (The performance they put on is a mix of decadent pornography--twins! underage girls!--and music.) So here we see a slight change between the stories: Jun's crippling was incidental, Lidia's (and Nia's) was intentional.

Like Jun, Lidia doesn't really understand the wider world, though she has an information source--a fellow slave who tells her all about how there are places out on the coast where people control their own lives, not these "fiefdoms" where rich people consume the lives of others. This definitely helps to give Lidia's story some explicit depth (though you've got to wonder where fellow slave Stephen got all this info).

"Fluted Girls" also has another axis here, in that Madame Belari may be a rich star, but she's also at the whim of certain market forces. In fact, her desire to make profitable freaks of Lidia and Nia is motivated by a desire to stay free from TouchSense. The irony here is thick, almost too like an anvil: Belari consumes others in order not to be consumed herself (like Ed Harris in The Truman Show, whose desire for privacy was bound up with his total surveillance of Truman).

It's a rich, political story, and I mostly like it, though there were times where the description seemed to repeat itself to no purpose--except maybe to delay te reader and heighten anticipation? Maybe, but it wasn't always successful. The other slight misstep I felt here was the open ending: it's a nice mirroring of the opening--Lidia holds the poison in her hand, weighing the possibilities of it. But her sudden realization that she could feed the poison to Belari was just that--too sudden.

I may be in the minority there, though, since this was republished in both Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection and Ellen Datlow's The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection.

The New New Thing: Paolo Bacigalupi's "Pocketful of Dharma"

Here's another ongoing but intermittent project: instead of rediscovering some older works, I'll be reading some newer stories to see how they succeed or fail. First up, Paolo Bacigalupi's first published short story, "Pocketful of Dharma."

Unfortunately, this story was first published in 1999, which makes it less interesting for the purposes of finding what's being published and read now. "Pocketful of Dharma" comes across as a pleasant diversion: no great shakes in the plot or characterization department, it leans heavily on the vision of a bio-punk China, with a giant luxury building being grown in the middle of Chengdu, while everyone else gets coated with soot and smoke. This is arch-cyberpunk, down to the recording of a person's personality in a tiny datacube. That's the Mcguffin of the piece, with a Dalai Lama's mind being a bargaining chip for some trade commission, wanted by Chinese authorities, Tibetan rebels, American businessmen, and the triads. And it falls into the hands of crippled orphan Wang Jun, a kid from the provinces who begs in the city.

The story is primarily told from Jun's POV, with one notable exception; and since Jun is a dumb pawn, we don't get a super-clear idea of what's really at stake here. The only thing we know is that Jun is living a hellish day-by-day existence, which may be why he feels some kinship with the frozen personality of the Dalai Lama. Like I said, the characterization here could be more explicit; and the fact that the narrator breaks from Jun's consciousness once makes it seem arbitrary not to dip into anyone else's mind at any point.

Still, the image of a crippled beggar climbing down the outside of a spongy living building is worth the price of admission.