The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi strikes a sweet spot for a brand of fiction I like to call survivalist SF. He starts with a premise that's been used since the Golden Age of science fiction: humanity is on the brink of extinction. Not only does Bacigalupi use this familiar predicament to write a super exciting story with great characters, but he builds an intriguing history of how humanity has gotten itself into such a mess.

Bacigalupi does a far better job than I ever could detailing the privations suffered by survivors in Bangkok, and dropping intriguing nuggets of information on blister rust, cibiscosis, Calorie Men, White Shirts, and Yellow Cards. I'd rather focus on what makes the Windup Girl stand out in the field of survivalist SF.

When reading science fiction about life after large scale disaster, I sometimes end up depressed, dreading the story, and counting the pages until I make it to the grueling end. I didn't have this reaction to the Windup Girl because the story is just as much about the beginning of a new chapter in humanity as it is about the end of the old. As in much survivalist SF, most characters in the Windup Girl are motivated to save their own skin, and convergence of their struggle to survive meets in vicious conflict. But not all characters are driven solely by the urge to save their own lives- some are worried for their families, their friends, their people, their country, and some even risk their lives for personal and religious values.

And perhaps the thing that tickled me the most about the Windup Girl was Bacigalupi's use of motif. From the dangerous, coiled DNA of a mutating plague, to kink spring energy technology, to the stutter-stop movements of the title character, to the tightly wound plot, Bacigalupi really embraced the idea of winding things up- and the repeated motif brought a touch of literary quality that put his book above much of the other survivalist SF I've read.

There were a few minor disappointments as I read the novel. Bacigalupi's portrayal of Buddhism proved that he has observed the difference between street Buddhism in Thailand and the Western intellectual interpretation practiced, for instance, at a well-to-do Zen center in downtown San Francisco. However, Bacigalupi's attempt to make Buddhist characters despise engineered beings based on lack of a soul was not at all consistent with Buddhism, and seemed a little silly to me. And one final point: although the prose was good throughout the novel, the use of the word "blossom" to describe every blow, gunshot, or injury drove me a little crazy.

The Windup Girl ranks 2,918 in Books on Amazon.com. It is not available for the Kindle.

The Silver Pigs

I didn't need Wikipedia to verify that Lindsey Davis, author of the The Silver Pigs, was born in England. Davis writes with distinctly British class-conscious humor. Like Terry Pratchett and China Miéville, Davis builds deliciously complex worlds teeming with distinctive characters and defined by social stratification. And, of course, his protagonist of choice comes does not come from the upper echelons of society.

The main difference between Davis and his spec fiction counterparts is that Davis isn't writing about a fantasy world, but is writing about Ancient Rome. In The Silver Pigs, protagonist Falco is the ancient version of a private eye. Falco has a lot in common with the Maltese Falcon-era private eye. His landlord is hounding him for the rent, a damsel in distress is seriously complicating his life, and his devotion to the case is going to force him into slave labor and freezing-cold deprivation in an ancient British mine. Oh, wait...I guess that last part is just Falco.

I am not an expert in the history of Ancient Rome. But having recently read Empires of Trust-- How Rome Built-- and America is Building-- a New World (Thomas F. Madden) I can verify that Davis got certain details about life in Ancient Rome correct. The attitude of Ancient Romans toward Ancient Greeks, for instance, was depicted by Davis just as Madden described it- somewhat the way Americans traditionally view the French as very intellectual and a little snobby. So, as with all truly fun mystery stories, the reader not only enjoys a good who-dunnit, but learns a little about an interesting topic at the same time- in this case, about life in the ancient world.

The Silver Pigs the first in a series of 19 (to date) Marcus Didius Falco mysteries. The Silver Pigs ranks #34,931 in Books on Amazon. There is no Kindle version available. However, Davis's most recent book in the series, Alexandria, is available on the Kindle. Alexandria ranks #2,674 in the Kindle store, and #4,876 in Books.

A world built of strings

A marionette stands, dejected, in the falling rain. He bows his head, raises a knife, and cuts his strings- then splashes to the ground, dead. The marionette is the king of Hebalon, and he has just committed suicide in the hope that his son will lead his people toward peace.

Strings is not a fantasy played out by puppets. The fact that the actors are marionettes is vital to the plot, the setting, and the characters. Soldiers kill one another by cutting the string that holds their foe's head. Slaves of war have limbs harvested to replace a vetran's arm or leg, severed from its string in combat. The city gate is just a thin piece of wood that lowers to let welcome travelers in, and need only raise a few feet to block the enemy's strings, and, so, the enemy. The prison is a grid that separates inmates with a lattice, blocking them by their strings from high above their heads. Playing children tangle themselves in each other's strings. The birth of an infant marionette is just something you have to see.

There is no evil puppet master in the film, no unseen god, no hints from above that help or hinder the characters as they struggle. The strings stretch high as the marionettes can see. Above the clouds, where only the audience has eyes, the strings continue upward to infinity. The strings are life and death, freedom and slavery, love and hate. The story would be impossible to tell without the strings. Watch them tangle, watch them fray. Check out Strings.

Coconut Bras and Drug Smuggling- Where Science Fiction Ideas Come From

How do science fiction writers get their ideas? It's a question every writer who does a book signing, interview, or question-answer inevitably hears. Today we'll go step by step through the process.

Over the last few posts, I've gone into a lot of detail about environmental responsibility and green cleaning. We've talked global warming, we've talked trash, we've talked about environmental problems now and in the future, and looked at possible solutions.

The science fiction writer researches a topic and gathers as many of these possible solutions around her as possible. Then she examines them, one by one, and tries to think of all the new problems that could come out of those solutions. See, a story isn't a story unless there's a problem.

Let's get more concrete here and talk about coconuts. Yesterday in the segment on green cleaning I mentioned that today's environmentally friendly vegetable based soaps are made out of Copra (oil from the pressed seeds of coconuts). Sounds like a great idea, right? Coconuts are a renewable resource, and the use of soap in place of detergent cuts down on the use of the non-renewable resource, petroleum. An International Herald Tribune article even claims that the oil used to manufacture soaps is also being successfully tested in Samoa as an alternative fuel source for cars and power plants! Hooray for coconuts, they'll save the planet. They grow on trees, for gosh sake. What could possibly go wrong?

Evil giggle of the science fiction writer.

We already know biodiesel fuels have drawbacks. That solvent property that makes coconut oil into great dirt-dissolving soap, actually loosens engine debris which jams filters. Biodiesel breaks down rubber engine components and compromises seals and pumps in automobiles. Lower fuel efficiency, high cost, and sparse availability are also problems. (HowStuffWorks.com ) Can these problems be overcome? Sure. Car manufacturers can design new cars to run on these solvent, lower efficiency fuels. But what about Joe-Bob from Booneville, IA? He's still driving his 1990 Chevy Silverado. The old Silverado's still got life in her, but since everybody in the surrounding cities have switched to new-fangled coconut diesel, Joe-Bob can't find any old-fashioned fuel for his pick-up (biodiesel stalls the Silverado and stops her up good). Joe-Bob's wife is expecting their first son (Joe-Bob knows it's a boy no matter what that crank doctor says in Urbandale). The baby is practically a miracle, since Joe-Bob and his wife have been trying to conceive all seven years of their marriage. Joe-Bob needs the Silverado filled with old-fashioned diesel so he can get Peggy to Urbandale for the delivery without breakdowns. He's going to have to trek all over Dallas County to find the coconut-free diesel he needs- and the fact that his Silverado is out of fuel isn't going to make his journey any easier.

Enough Joe-Bob. Let's go city-chic.

New York goes green. Public transportation runs on coconuts. A heavy tax on petroleum based consumer products makes it cheaper for New Yorkers to buy environmentally responsible cleaning products. It's going to take a lotta coconuts to fuel, bathe, and scrub the city (or the nation!!). So what happens to all the coconut shells? It's not a long-term problem, since the shells will eventually biodegrade. But what if coconut shells became all the environmentally-conscious fashion rage? According to Wikipedia, coconut shells can be used to make buttons, musical instruments, and, my personal favorite, can be used to "theatrical effect" by making an "improvised coconut bra". Can you see it now? Lingerie shops across Manhattan, the dummies in the store front windows are dressed in hula skirts and coconut bras. All the best parties are filled with women who have rigged coconut shells to make a sexy, environmentally-conscious fashion statement. I can hear the jokes about shell size now.

On to more story-centric musing. Wikipedia suggests coconut shells can house small animals or make nifty guitar-esque Asian instruments and drums. The thing that strikes me about the coconut shell is that they can be hollowed. The coconut shell could be made into the perfect drug smuggling scheme. In my future vision, coconut shells, whole or hollowed, are going to be moving across borders for processing and waste disposal. Anything from cocaine to a bio-engineered germ that would kill millions of people (or maybe just wipe out all the cash crop coconut trees) could be smuggled inside a coconut.

My fingers are itching with three or four other more potential problems. Yikes! There's number five. This is how science fiction writers get their ideas. Not all of them make it to the story development phase, but science fiction stories are born as ideas, and this is (more or less) where they come from.

Green Cleaning- Part 2 (Signing Your Garbage)

Whether you're living wild off the land in the Australian outback or kicking up your heels in Manhattan, everybody, I mean everybody, makes trash. Trash could be as simple as fruit rinds, animal bones, and human waste buried in the ground, or as complex as an old refrigerator that has to be disposed of carefully, draining the poisonous Freon and removing the doors so children can't lock themselves inside and suffocate.

So, with trash the big question is, how do we get rid of it?

When I moved to Italy, I couldn't take all my stuff with me- I had a lot to unload. We gave appliances to family and called the Volunteers of America to take furniture, exercise equipment, kitchen things. The rest of our unwanted belongings filled up the industrial-sized dumpster outside our house- four weeks in a row.

Trash takes up space.

When we moved into our first Italian apartment, understanding the garbage bureaucracy was quite a challenge. There were black bags for regular garbage, yellow bags for plastic bottles, I think blue was for paper and cardboard, pink for cans and bottles, and green was the color for biological garbage (known affectionately by the locals as bio, known in our house as the "stinky trash"). You've got it, the Italians recycled food. The bio garbage went to some communal compost heap in the country. Egg shells, coffee grinds, leftover pasta, cheese rinds, cat food covered in sock lint- anything that could biodegrade went in there. Separating all those categories was fairly space consuming in my tiny kitchen, as I needed bins to keep everything separate. I also had to keep track of alternating collection days. Later in Turin, the process was simplified by marked dumpsters practically outside my front door. No more color-coded bags of garbage piled in my kitchen. On my return to the states it took me about a month to stop reflexively pausing every time I dumped carrot and potato peels in with the regular trash.

While visiting my father-in-law I was introduced to a whole new way of thinking about garbage- by the pound. He opted not to pay for garbage collection, but instead to load all his trash into the back of his car and drive it to the dump. There he was presented with a game card. He drove from station to station, and workers weighed his trash and his various forms of recycling. The game card tallied the weight of the recycled material against the weight of the garbage, and he paid the difference by the pound as he left.

Trash has weight, ergo mass.

Here in Brooklyn I needed to get rid of a large appliance still in working order. I called the Salvation Army, and after nearly an hour of run-around was told they wouldn't come take it. When I told my neighbor this story, he laughed, and helped me carry the appliance to the curb. He'd had a similar experience with the Salvation Army, and told me around here all I needed to do was leave my item on the curb a few days before collection. He'd gotten rid of a working refrigerator and broken water heater that way. Someone would pick it up, he told me- and, sure enough, my item disappeared. Yesterday on the way to buy bread I almost tripped on a toaster oven- a sticky note on the side read, "still works."

Growing up in Iowa garage sale Saturdays were thrilling family treasure hunts.

In Turin used wardrobe bins were all over the neighborhood. Homeless people broke into them overnight, and in the morning immigrant women and children picked through the used shirts, trousers, and shoes.

Trash can be reused.

My grocery service delivers all my produce and deli items with stickers that bear my name and address. Someday when future generations are mining a landfill they're going to come across my name. "Heather Pagano of XYZ St., Brooklyn dumped her Styrofoam banana padding here." I know the service is just trying to keep my bananas from arriving smashed, but my name is on that stuff! People are going to know I'm responsible. I actually stopped buying certain items because of the packaging. Ecologically unsound packaging costs my grocery service at least $7.50 a week Could ecological packaging ever become a selling point? Only if consumers are signing their names to their garbage- literally or figuratively.

We're responsible for the things we don't want anymore.

And what about a world where the cost of garbage disposal is super high? This is already true in places like Japan, where the disposal of furniture or appliances requires the Japanese to go to city hall, fill out a form, and purchase a costly seal they attach to the used item so collectors know the pick-up has been paid for. What if trash collection became too expensive for families to afford? Imagine people just chucking their trash outside- what a mess! The freelancer junk market would boom as it collected, refurbished, and resold used goods. Services like eBay would be flooded with remade junk. How would the economy continue to flow if purchasing items became a liability?

The fewer places there are to go with the garbage, the more costly its removal.

In a sense, modern man isn't that different in his trash technology than the first caveman who buried the remains of his meal. We can't do much more than dig a hole and bury stuff underground. We've learned a lot about previous generations by examining the stuff they buried, or that got buried by earthquake, flood, volcanic eruption, time. We are putting the signature of our civilization into landfills. Someone is going to be digging through it someday, looking for non-renewable resources we thoughtlessly threw away. I wonder what they'll think of us?