I hesitated a long time over whether to buy this story collection, not because I didn’t think they’d be any good, but because it seemed to be a lot more expensive than similar books. I ended up paying about £13.50 for it, which is pretty good, considering that it now appears to be out of print, and is selling for around £50 second-hand.
I might have to get me some of that second-hand action, because my other fear – that I’d already read a lot of the stories in the collection – proved to be all too true, and I should have checked the list of contents.
This slim – 235 page – volume contains 10 stories, and I’d read 4 of them before. If you take account of the length of these stories, I’d read close to half the book, which is why I wouldn’t pay £50 for it.
Bacigalupi writes fascinating, if bleak, stories set in a depressingly convincing future. Imagine that the big agrochemical companies get their way and somehow manage to corner the market in copyrighted seedstock (helped by a few genetically engineered plant diseases which kill of the remaining non-copyright crops). Imagine that the oil runs out and that we start to measure everything we do in terms of the energy it takes to do it vs. the amount of energy you get from it. Imagine that we somehow end up losing essential scientific and engineering skills, because our manufacturing industry dies and nobody chooses to study those things any more.
These – and other – scenarios make up the background of these stories of individuals struggling against the systems under which the labour, looking for a little taste of freedom, or a reason to live.
If, like me, you regularly read Gardner Dozois’ annual collections, you may already have read “The Fluted Girl” (surgically modified twins play their own bodies as musical instruments); “The People of Sand and Slag” (almost-indestructible canon fodder who can regrow their own blown off limbs encounter a real dog); “The Calorie Man” (a reluctant trader tries to help a scientist who has the secret of genetically modified seedstock); and “Yellow Card Man” (a Chinese refugee in Thailand tries to find work in a crowded and mercilessly indifferent city).
These are powerfully imagined stories which choose not to overplay their implied criticisms of our present, but they are nevertheless thought provoking.
There’s a novel, The Windup Girl set in the same future as “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man”, which is in my pile of books to read.
Recommended, if you can get hold of it!
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