Excessive Candour
The Day's Work

How do you tell a book if the book is already stories? Because the order in which individual fictions are presented in a gathering of fictions—whether chosen by the editor of an anthology or Paolo Bacigalupi putting his own work on parade—is of course in itself a narrative, a way of selling the shot. The more complicated that narrative—as Adam Gopnik, in "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life" (New Yorker, March 17, 2008), shows is the case with complicated modern magic tricks—the less visible should be the principles that govern its construction. The magic formulas which an editor like Ellen Datlow applies to gain her effects should be as faster than the eye can see as any good sleight of hand. Bacigalupi, however, has not gone for sophisticated magic in Pump Six; his narrative is clear: The stories are given us in the order of publication. His cards are on the table.

And certainly if you accept the tacit premise of such a strategy that the stories were written in the same order as they were published, all does seem clear and open. But of course nothing is ever entirely clear and open with human beings. Chronological order is, after all, a form of storyline. Just as human beings are disinclined to accept that anything is ultimately patternless, so we are inclined to think that the chronological order of the presentation of Bacigalupi's stories constitutes a kind of claim that his creative life—which we catch ghost glimpses of in the implied "and then" tying one tale to the next—itself makes sense.

Here's a spoiler: I think the claim is justified.

But unless the author is Cordwainer Smith or Truman Capote, there is a risk of alienating the reader before the reason for publishing a collection has been exposed to view. First stories—beginner's luck aside—can be dearer to their author than their audience, and such may be the case here with the slightly congested kitchen-sink cyberpunk sentient-city noir flourishes of "Pocketful of Dharma" (1999), which I think Gordon van Gelder was absolutely right to buy for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, because the author's obvious talents elbows the mind's eye from every paragraph of the thing; but which does outstay its welcome the second time around.

The setting is a pumped-up near-future Chengdu, in the heart of the new China. An AI-governed edificial artifact is quasi-organically transforming the city into one labyrinthine structure. Cyberpunk riffs attend any mention of this. A young streetwise ragamuffin beggar kid acquires a cube into which has been downloaded the mind of the Dalai Lama, who on being activated is terror-stricken at his nullity. Too many thieves and runners and wide boys and international agency folk for us to keep track of vie for Lama in the box. Someone who looks a lot like William Gibson is immediately killed. There is at least one point-of-view change without any reason except duff cinematics; and emotive repetitions—"he became nothing except a small child shadow. An irrelevant shadow in the rain ..."—pump the air. What we get out of the tale is a hint that one day Bacigalupi will be able to juggle the goulash a little more deftly.

Growing up in chronological order

We come to the next story chosen for Pump Six, "The Fluted Girl" (2003), four years down the line, and things have improved a lot, though we're not there yet. It is the second story featuring adolescents, which means that things always happen to the protagonist instead of to the world; and the pumps are still pumping: "But Master Weir exacted a price for his aid, Faustian devil that he was. Stephen and Lidia had watched as Weir took his pleasure from Belari ..." Sort of thing. But there is a very hot live wire throbbing through the tale: the "fluted girl" and her twin sister have been gene-engineered until their bodies have become instruments, blown and plucked and strummed and poked into for organ notes. They play each other on the stage, while also having sex. It is all grotesque and gonzo, but also extremely haunting in the folding and unfolding of the telling. Bacigalupi doesn't quite yet seem to know exactly what to do with the utter strangeness of the world he places right before our eyes; but from this point on I knew, as a reader of a chronology of stories claiming to lead me somewhere, that I would be willing to follow. That I was very nearly ready to let Bacigalupi see for me.

And in the very next story, "The People of Sand and Slag" (2004), we have come home. The protagonists are adults, and the world they knowingly inhabit is unpacked for us in a Tiptreean rush: which means that, instead of our pacing children in their discovery of those bits of the world that bite them, Chen and Lisa and Jaak pace us. It is after the 21st century has done with the world. After generations of gene engineering, Humans are able to morph constantly, though (as here) they remain indentured to vast corporations gouging up the last of the planet. But no one cares. We eat s--t because it tastes good and the "weeviltech" that maintains us allows us to digest it, along with almost anything else. We can impact targets at airplane speeds and regrow our shattered corpuses instanter. The world is a cinder, but Hawaii is an enclave for down time. We are illimitable. We glow in the dark. The reader longs to be there in that world, for a very little while, because it entices us to identify with the tidal wave of the kinetic; and longs for Bacigalupi to set us free, because this world—this planet Earth—is the death of us.

So we follow the author elsewhere, onto another planet. It seems to have been inhabited by humans for aeons. If a backstory had been implanted, which Bacigalupi very properly does not do, we might have learned that we are viewing a colony planet long after Earth has burnt to ash; but there is no need for anything explicit, "The Pasho" (2004) rests comfortably within the SF megatext. The ruins of the very ancient city. The modern cultures: urban and progressive, rural and savagely resistant to new technologies; and a network of monks to mediate. The telling seems slow but is swift; Bacigalupi is in fact as brilliant a massager of narrative pacing as anyone I've come across for a lot of years. We are in fact told we must be slow, by the young monk whose task it is to prevent yet another savage hinterland rape of the soft civilized urbanized underbelly. It is a message repeated more than once in Pump Six, an utterance of faith in the great winds cavitating our own historical moment:

Our ancestor moved quickly, quickly, as impatient as ants. We move slowly now, with care. We understand that knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross [an ocean in which the protagonists of "The People of Sand and Slag" are drowning ignorant of any shore], and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.

Then the young Pasho does something very savage and necessary. It is no easy task for a culture to measure its pace.

The dialectic—maybe too high-toned a word for "natural progression," but that's what the narrative ordering of this book does in fact make us think we're following—now carries us back to an Earth we recognize intimately. In "The Calorie Man" (2005), traditional energy sources have disappeared, and agribusinesses control all biofuel production. A lone geneticist asks to be extracted from the American heartland, and is conveyed partway down the Mississippi before a sort of disaster strikes. But his heirloom plants survive, and maybe his rogue engineering feat: which is to infect the sterile (and therefore proprietory) monocultures of the great firms with fertile variants: so that the world will bloom again. Believe this will happen if you wish: because the story ends upon the great river, nearing that 21st-century icon of the triumphant viciousness of our owners: New Orleans.

As the planet turns

A shorter tale, "The Tamarisk Hunter" (2006), elegantly anatomizes life along the Colorado River a century after Chinatown; "Pop Squad" (2006), though much longer, does not quite match the extraordinary high level of thought and execution of the previous four tales. But then the obscenity of any culture, dreadful real or dreadful warning, which persecutes women for bearing and/or not bearing children is, by now, a rote obscenity, an intolerable reality it is very difficult to address without lessening. But the Mean Streets ambience of the depicted world is fun, and the protagonist bears his ambivalence and anguish and stuff like a true knight; and we move on.

"Yellow Card Man" (2006) is set, like "The Calorie Man," some time after the period of Expansion on planet Earth; it is an old man's version of "Pocketful of Dharma," hugely less melodramatic, intensely sadder, smooth and pell-mell and intensely knowing about what one might call occupational hazards—it is in fact a mark of Bacigalupi's mature work that almost every tale is about a person—usually up to now a man—with an occupation to obey. He may not quite have Rudyard Kipling's genius in delineating the intricate pyrotechnic of hard jobs being done by heroes lashed together; but he comes a lot closer to to the depiction of the actual gears of the world than most of his contemporaries. The final story in the book, "Pump Six" (not previously published), is in fact far more like Kipling than (say) Heinlein: mainly in the sense that in order to describe any genuinely complex "routine" operation one must really use a vocabulary which invokes the supernatural.

A tale like "Pump Six"—though set in a world racketing down the junk path into terminal illiterate stupor, a world Kipling could not have imagined—is in fact a Kipling tale. Except for the world-encompassing despair, it reads almost like one of the dozen exhilarated occupational-hazard tales whose assembly in The Day's Work (1898) turns that book into a kind of vastly clamorous hymn to the supernaturally complicated job of making the imperium run. As the tale ends, Bacigalupi's engineer protagonist may be on the verge of being able to fix a great sewage pump under Manhattan; but it's clearly too late now to fix a world we are no longer smart enough to work.

We have come to the end of Pump Six, which has taken us on quite a ride through the world. The first stories of the book were written at the end of the 20th century, and were overfull with gesture: just as that time was overloaded with the cheap thrills of Millennium. The end of the book—which is only the end of the narrative of Paolo Bacigalupi pro tem—debouches us smack into the planet burning. It is not a fun place to end, but we must be grateful to have been shown the fire next time by a writer who has learned, unlike most of us, how to tell the truth.