Bacigalupi: A lot of what I write is a combination of free association and then conscious polishing. In "Pop Squad" I wanted to have soaring, ethereal cities, mostly because I wanted to play with a classically futuristic setting. That was the start. I liked that aesthetic. Later, I decided to throw in some references to global warming, just because it seems like any story that has even a whiff of the futuristic has to at least tip its hat to the problem. From global warming came jungle—the carbon sequestration project—and from that came monkeys ... and pretty soon I had this ripe, wild, fecund ecosystem rustling around the base of Angel Spire. But it was all free-associative in the initial stages, adding things that pleased me aesthetically, but without much deliberation.
Then, as I was doing rewrites, I became enamored with the idea of the fecundity of the new world I was creating and the potential for a visual reinforcement of the contrast between these very clean, barren people up in the cities, separated from the muck and grime of the life cycle and the wildness and dampness of the jungle understory—and life with children. At this point in the story creation process, the women who were having children were all still hiding out in the towers, so I moved most of them down into the jungles, to make that contrast more obvious and to really surround them with the ripeness and fecundity and the imperatives of biology, and then I went through and tried to emphasize the differences between these two versions of life throughout the story. So it's on purpose ... by accident.
Something about this characterization troubles me. Possibly it's the reductive aspect, that these are political stories, as opposed to quality stories. That the characters and their settings and their experiences are nothing but marionettes and paperboard backdrops, all used for cynical political manipulation ... yikes. Its not that my stories aren't playing with big ideas, because they often are, but there's something about having a story described as political—well, we know what we think of Soviet art.
Also, I think it's interesting what we call political and what we don't. Take John Scalzi's
Old Man's War, for example. In it he creates a universe that depends entirely on a kill-or-be-killed worldview, in which the peaceful, the diplomatic and the unarmed are all disposed of with a certain smug glee. Scalzi does such a good job with this universe that his more right-wing fans are sometimes dismayed to discover that he has a significantly more nuanced political view than
Old Man's War would suggest. And yet the book is imbued with a political value system that many of his readers wrap themselves in like a warm blanket; for them, this is inspiring stuff—political, even. But we don't call Scalzi's fiction political; we call it top-notch military SF. And it is top-notch. Really. He's a brilliant writer, so I don't want this to sound like a knock on him, because it's not. My point is that Scalzi writes about warfare without end, and we call this entertainment. I write about the patenting of GM grains and agribusiness, and it's political. That's interesting. It says a lot about us as a society.
The craft of storytelling is inherently manipulative—the storyteller aims to excite, to scare, to titillate, to inspire awe, or sadness, or empathy. Everything about fiction is manipulative in the sense of affecting people, even if it's just to keep you turning pages. That said, there are other layers to fiction; story can also have meaning, can provide lenses for viewing the world—Dickens peering into the lives of orphans, John Irving writing about abortion, Orwell showing us a police state. The story must always succeed—characters must be interesting, plot must move—but with fiction there is an opportunity to provide more than a simple story, entertainingly told. Fiction provides a reader with the opportunity to experience the world entirely differently, to live inside that vastly different place, and to come away with a more nuanced view of her or his own surroundings because of it. Mostly, we don't call that political. Mostly we call that transporting.
So, do I desire to use the genre for political purpose? No. At least not in the "go out tomorrow and buy an organic carrot!" sense. I want to use the genre to reflect what I see around me. I write about what frightens me. I write about what I see as trend lines. I write about ideas that I see in play in the world. With something like "The Calorie Man" I'm interested in where we get our food and who controls it. With "Pump Six" I'm curious about the synthetic chemicals that we breathe and taste and rub up against every day. With my latest story, "The Gambler," I'm interested in what an information society is and could become. I think of this as being aware of my surroundings and being curious enough to ask questions. Do I have opinions about what I see? You bet. Do those opinions show up in my fiction? Absolutely. After all, I'm not providing just any lens for viewing the world, these are
my lenses—they're going to have my tint. Maybe that tint works for a certain reader, maybe it doesn't, but I would hope that the stories read as more than just political manipulations; if that's all they come across as then people should avoid them. I certainly would.
Finally, to answer the last part of your question, I'm doubtful my stories will have much impact on anything. A tiny number of people will read these stories. Of those, a few will think seriously about what I'm writing. A few might change a behavior ... but really, that's a bit of a stretch. The majority of the world will continue watching the Ultimate Fighting Championships, salivating over the Food Network and shopping for iPods. It's what we do. We're having a good time right now, why mess it up? And really, when we think about political reach, the Food Network has sort of got me beat—between creme brulee recipes and Iron Chef, the message that everything is fine and we should just keep on cooking is a pretty powerful one. Putting my stories up against that, or MTV's
Cribs, or (my current personal favorite)
Pants-Off Dance-Off seems a bit like pitting a 400-pound gorilla against a banana. I'm guessing that business as usual will prevail. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. That would be nice.
When you discuss the iterations your stories take, does that process occur during the writing or the thought process?Bacigalupi: The writing and the thought process are the same thing for me. I start writing and slowly find my way to a story. I sometimes think of writing a story as kneading dough. You start out with something, you mush it, you smash it, you mush it again, maybe you stretch it. Maybe you add some flour if it's too wet; you keep messing with the mass until it seems satisfactory. I very seldom have clear "drafts." I just have a mass of story that I mush around until it seems like it's done. Sometimes I'm working on one section, sometimes on another, then I'll see something in the writing that gets me excited, and I'll try to bring that out in the rest of the story, but I don't really have discrete stages for writing: brainstorming, planning, writing first draft, writing second draft. It's not like that. I just keep manipulating the story and its scenes, time after time, from different angles, and at some point I either find something cool and figure out how to make it work and then finalize it, or I realize that I'm doing something stupid, throw it all away and start again with another fresh attempt. But there's no separation between the writing process and the thought process. Writing
is the thought process.
"Pop Squad" squarely builds a dichotomy between men and women, particularly as the fathers are notably absent in one layer of society and mothers in the second. Was that deliberate? Have you encountered any criticism?Bacigalupi: Huh. Never really thought about it. I suppose I'll get criticism now. Mostly, when I wrote "Pop Squad," I was just working out my own ambivalence about fatherhood. I wanted to ask why we bother with the pain and difficulty of parenthood when it's so obviously easy to live without kids. So I created a world where there were no social benefits to child-rearing and played with the idea some. If the fathers are absent, and you want to speculate why, you might plausibly say that it's because I sure wished I was absent from my own parenting responsibilities.
The male POV character is a kid killer because he's me, working out my angst. I just really wanted to spend some time blowing away little kids—my visceral response to the joys of fatherhood. That and the idea of shooting the little suckers with a big honking gun felt pleasingly subversive when, in my daily life, I kept running into people who were telling me how "precious" children were and how they were "a gift." This, after the third straight week of tear-your-hair-out all-night howling where my wife and I were basically losing our minds.
So "Pop Squad" is, at root, parent rage working itself out. By far the most criticism I've gotten about it has nothing to do with gender roles or representation—it's that I didn't just kill the last kid and keep the Pop Squad guy unaffected and unchanged. Some readers felt like his epiphany wasn't earned. I'm OK with that; I don't feel like killing my own kid either anymore, and I have no good explanation for that switch either. One day I just woke up and was finally OK with being a dad.
How long does it take you to finish a story?Bacigalupi: It varies. All told, with the initial flailing around and abortive attempts, I think "The Calorie Man" took about a year. For my latest story, "The Gambler," it took just under two weeks of focused work.
Do you have many stories that never made the final cut?Bacigalupi: Not really. Mostly I'll work a story to death, and eventually something serviceable will come out of it. Before I started doing that, though, I did write two pretty mediocre stories that ended up trunked. This was right after I sold "Pocketful of Dharma" and I was feeling particularly full of myself; the first short story I ever wrote sold, so I thought I could walk on water. Ha. I sent one of them out to a couple markets and was deservedly rejected. The other I just never sent out—it wasn't coming together, and I knew it, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it. So I abandoned it completely.
When I came back to writing short stories with "The Fluted Girl" I had a different attitude about rewriting—much more aggressive—and I've gotten better results since then. These days I'm almost pathological about rewriting until a story works. In the worst-case scenario, I'll throw away everything except a couple of phrases from a story or a character and I'll start a new story from that kernel. ... You know, when I think about it in that sense, a fair number of my stories have wreckage behind them that didn't make the cut. But they died honorably, in order to create a later better version. "The Fluted Girl" had an entire version that I blew away. "The Calorie Man" was a failed short story where the only thing I kept was the calorie economy—the physical setting and characters and plot arc all got blown away. "Yellow Card Man" came out of that same failed short story. "Small Offerings" had four different attempts that failed before I figured out how to write a story that short. My latest, "The Gambler," had a 6,000-word version that was completely awful and had to be thrown away. So in that sense, I've got a fair number of stories that didn't make the cut, but they were part of a process of getting to a story that did.
I have a rule that once I've done everything I can for a story in terms of craft, I send it out. It's the editor's job to put a bullet in the head of my stories, not mine. It's my job to write the stories and give the editors an opportunity to make that decision. So once I've finished working the story, I send it out. Every time. That said, there have been times where I felt hesitant. I was embarrassed that I'd written something as aggressive as "Pop Squad." I was uncomfortable that I'd written "The Fluted Girl." My wife asked me if I was really going to send that one out, and wasn't sure if she wanted her mother to see it. I felt very uncomfortable about "Softer." Those were all stories where I felt like I was crossing a line of decency, and it made me worry what people would think of me when they read them.
You are working on a novel set in the "Calorie Man" universe. Could you tell us a little about it? How has the process of writing a novel differed from short stories?Bacigalupi: For me, it's hard. Or at least, this one is hard. I've got a lot of ideas in play, everything from peak oil to GM foods to invasive species and genetic diversity to trade vs. isolationism to imperialism to ... it's just a mess, really. It's set in the city of Bangkok after the seas have risen and the petroleum economy has collapsed. Four different characters are in motion, and there's a lot of mayhem and political skullduggery going on. I'm pretty good at understanding how many ideas and how much information I can pack into a novelette. I've got an instinct for what I can stick into 10,000 to 12,000 words. With the novel, I don't have that instinct, so I don't have a good handle on pacing, or on how many character arcs I can sustain, things like that, so writing the book has been a fairly brutal learning process. I'm finally getting to the point where I'm going to let a few people see a complete draft, but it's been a long process getting here.
