moderator: Thanks everyone f-for coming to
another Authors@Google SF. Today we've got
Paolo--and you know what, I'm just gonna be
honest. I’m not gonna try to butcher your
last name.
[audience laughter]
moderator: But Paolo is going to be talking
about The Windup Girl as long--as well as
his--his former collection of short stories.
The Windup Girl was named one of the best
novels of the year by TIME Magazine, Publishers
Weekly, Library Journal, a number of other
prominent publications.
It was nominated for the very prestigious
science fiction Hu--Hugo Award, and recently
won a Nebula Award for best novel. And what's
special about that is that this is his first
novel. And I believe it was Gibson--William
Gibson you said, is the only other science
fiction author who has won a--a--a Nebula
for their very first novel.
So Hugos and Nebulas, very prestigious awards.
But a--a special honor to get it for his first
novel. He is also a Theodore Sturgeon award-winning
science fiction author and fantasy writer
from Colorado. His fiction has appeared in
a number of magazines, including The Magazine
of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science
Fiction, a number of other publications.
His short fiction, the work before this, was
collected in Pump Six and Other Stories. And
I have personally been reading The Windup
Girl. I'm absolutely immersed in the disturbingly
relatable future that Paolo paints.
A semi-distant future where the fundamentals
of--of society have changed much less than
we would hope, which I feel adds an undertone
of--of even more haunting realism. So I' think
you're gonna enjoy it. Certainly we're gonna
enjoy the talk by Paolo. Thanks.
[audience clapping]
>> And if all video conference offices can
make sure to mute for the entire talk.
Paolo: Okay. Can--can people hear me okay?
I can't really judge levels. I can see heads
nod or something like that [laughs]. Okay,
great. This isn't actually my natural mode
to be standing in front of people.
So this is a little more—-I'm supposed to
be behind a computer hiding out in a dark
room somewhere [audience laughter], not--not
in front of all of you. So it's a little bit
nerve wracking, but I'm gonna try not to be
crazy up in front of you.
Yeah, my name is Paolo Bacigalupi [laughs].
That's--and yeah, I live in a w—-small town
in Western Colorado. I've been writing for
about 15 years. And while this is my first
novel that's sold, it's not actually my first
novel.
I originally started writing when I was about
23 years old. And I was sure that I was gonna
be some wunderkind amazing writer who'd have
my first novel sold by 25 and I'd be rich
and famous and all these other things.
And so I--I actually did quit my day job when
I was 23 to--to sit down and write my first
novel. And I told everybody I was gonna do
it, because I didn't want to back out. I was
gonna write this novel and I quit my job and
I did all this research and I wrote this novel
and I got myself an agent.
And we sent it out to publishers and it was
promptly rejected by everyone. And I thought,
"Well, okay. That's—-that's fine. That's--that's
my first novel. I'm gonna try again here though,
'cause I think I've learned some things this
time around." And so I wrote another novel,
and I sent it to my agent and he sent it out
to all these publishers. And they all rejected
it again.
And-and so at that point I thought, "Well,
okay. Now I've definitely learned some stuff."
And--and so I sat down and I wrote another
novel. And each one of these takes me about
a year, a year-and-a-half to write. And--and
so I'd written another novel. And I’m getting
halftime jobs on the side and stuff, and my
wife is like being really supportive but also
like trying to believe that I'm not crazy.
[audience laughter]
Paolo: And--and I write that third novel.
And--and I--I write it. I sent it to my agent.
And this one my agent actually rejects out
of hand. He just says, "This is crap."
[audience laughter]
Paolo: Okay, so now I think I'm really--I--I'm
learning here. I was try, fail, learn, try,
fail, learn. Okay. And so then I sit down
and I go, "Okay. I can--I can do this. I'm
gonna write another novel." And-and I do.
And I write my fourth novel. And I sent it
my—-to my agent, and he gets really excited.
He's like, "This I can sell." And he sends
it out to all the publishers, and they all
reject it again. And so at that point I know
I'm crazy. Even though my wife hasn't told
me I'm crazy, I know I'm crazy.
And-and I really can't take the--the idea
of being rejected anymore. And I really can't
stand the idea of writing for a year-and-a-half
to write a novel that's gonna fail anyway.
And so I started writing short fiction instead.
I still liked writing, but I just--the--the--that
process of--of putting everything in and then
seeing nothing come out was just--just too
much.
So I started writing short fiction instead
and--and figured, "Well, I guess writing's
gonna be a hobby. I'm not gonna be anything
at all, but that's fine. And [laughs]-
[audience laughter]
Paolo: -at least I get to write. And writing
makes me less crazy than when I'm not writing.
So I--I started writing short fiction. And
everything sort of changed for me at that
point. The first story that I wrote after
that was called The Fluted Girl and it was
selected in Science Fiction for several different
years' best anthologies.
The next story that I wrote after that was
called The People of Sand and Slag, and it
was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards.
The story after that was The Calorie Man.
And that one won the Theodore Sturgeon Award
for best science fiction short story of the
year, as well as being nominated for the Hugo
Award.
And it kind of kept going like that. And so
suddenly I started thinking, "Wow, maybe I'm
not crazy after all. I should write another
novel [laughs]."
[audience laughter]
Paolo: And--and this time I was like, "I really
have learned some things. I'm gonna write
this in a year. I know what I'm doing." And--and
so I sat down and I started working. And I
started to build out this story.
And the more I worked on the story, the bigger
it got. And so one year became two years,
and two years became three years. And I suddenly
had this monster of a novel that oh, had gone
off in all sorts of different directions.
And when I finished it, or sort of finished
it, I was--I was actually thinking, "This
book needs to die. This is bad. This is really
bad, and I know how to fix it though." And
my wife is like, "No, don't touch it. You
can't touch it, send it out."
And so I sent it out, and my agent took it.
And--and she sent it out to publishers. And
every single one of them rejected it again-
[audience laughter]
Paolo: -except for th--this time there was
a small press publisher in San Francisco called
Nightshade Books. And where there hadn't been
that kind of a resource before, Nightshade
was willing to take a risk on a dark dystopic
science fiction novel about crushing environmental
issues, and--and say that that was actually
worthwhile to publish.
And--and I think much to all of our surprise
it actually started to sell. And [laughs]
what--what was interesting to me about that
is like writing science fiction almost automatically
in--in commercial sense is a bad idea. And
you know that because any time you walk up
to anyone on the street and say, "Hey, I write
science fiction," they say, "Step the fuck
away."
[audience laughter]
Paolo: [Laughs]And--did I just say that on
streaming? Shit. [laughs]
[audience laughter]
Paolo: And--and science fiction just isn't
respected. Science fiction, when you say the
word science fiction people already look at
you and say, "I don't read science fiction."
You say, "Well, but there's good stuff in
science fiction. There's really interesting
ideas here in science fiction."
And--and what you find is you've got that
wash of the assumptions about science fiction
are oh you write Star Trek, oh you write Star
Wars, oh maybe you write Avatar, Aliens, something
like that. Or even worse it's Barbarella.
And it's rocket ships and old amazing stories
babes on the covers and scantily clad. And
that's sort of what science fiction means
to people.
And--and it's really weird, because to me
science fiction is--is--is so much more than
that. And I'd actually like to read something
from my short story collection actually, that
sort of illustrates a little bit of what I
think is interesting about science fiction.
And this is from a story of mine called Pop
Squad. And I'm sorry for all of you who are
eating at the moment.
[audience laughter]
Paolo: The familiar stench of unwashed bodies,
cooked food, and shit washes over me as I
come through the door. Cruiser lights flicker
through the blinds, sparkling in rain and
illuminating the crime scene with strobes
of red and blue fire. A kitchen. A humid mess.
A chunky woman huddles in the corner, clutching
closed her nightgown. Fat thighs and swaying
breasts under stained silk. Squad goons crowding
her, pushing her around, making her sit, making
her cower. Another woman, young-looking, pretty
but pregnant and black-haired, is slumped
against the opposite wall, her blouse spackled
with spaghetti remains. Screams from the next
room: kids.
I squeeze my fingers over my nose and breathe
through my mouth, fighting off nausea as Pentle
wanders in, holstering his Grange. He sees
me and tosses me a nosecap. I break it and
snort lavender until the stink slides off.
Children come scampering in with Pentle, a
brood of three tangling around his knees--the
screamers from the other room. They gallop
around the kitchen and disappear again, screaming
still, into the living room where data sparkles
like fairy dust on the wallscreens and provides
what is likely their only connection to the
outside world.
"That's everyone," Pentle says. He's got a
long skinny face and a sour small mouth that
always points south. Weights seem to hang
off his cheeks. Fat caterpillar brows droop
over his eyes. He surveys the kitchen, mor--mouth
corners dragging lower. It's always depressing
to come into these scenes. "Well, they were
all inside when we broke down the door."
I nod absently as I shake monsoon water from
my hat. "Great, thanks." Liquid beads scatter
on the floor, joining puddles of wet from
the pop squad along with the maggot debris
of the spaghetti dinner. I put my hat back
on. Water still manages to drip off the brim
and slip under my collar, a slick rivulet
of discomfort. Someone closes the door to
the outside. The shit smell--smell thickens,
eggy and humid. The nosecap barely holds it
off. Old peas and bits of cereal crunch under
my feet. They squish with the spaghetti, the
geologic glares of past feedings. The kitchen
hasn't been self-cleaned in years.
The older woman coughs and pulls her nightgown
tighter around her cellulite and I wonder,
as I always do when I come into situations
like this, what made her choose this furtive
nasty life of rotting garbage and brief illicit
forays into daylight. The pregnant girl seems
to have slipped even further into herself
since I arrived. She just stares into space.
You'd have to touch her pulse to know that
she's alive. It amazes me that women end up
like this, seduced so far down into gutter
life that they arrive here, fugitives from
everyone who would have kept them and held
them and loved them and let them see the world
outside.
The children run in from the living room again,
playing chase: a blond, no more than five;
another, younger and with brown braids, topless
and in makeshift diapers, less than three;
and a knee-high toddler boy, scrap diaper
bunched around his little muscle thighs, wearing
a T-shirt stained with tomato sauce that says
"Who's the Cutest?" The T-shirt would be an
antique if it wasn't stained.
"You need anything else?" Pentle asks. He
wrinkles his nose as new reek wafts from the
direction of the kids.
"You get photos for the prosecutor?"
"Got 'em." Pentle holds out a digicam and
thumbs through the images of the ladies and
three--and the three children, all of them
staring out from the screen like little smeared
dolls. "Do you want me to take 'em in now?"
I look over the women. The kids have run out
again. From the other room, their howls echo
as they chase around. Their shrieks are piercing.
Even from a distance they hurt my head. "Yeah,
I'll deal with the kids."
Pentle gets the women up off the floor and
shuffles out the door, leaving me standing
alone in the middle of the kitchen. It's all
so familiar: a typical floor plan from Builders
United. Custom undercab lighting, a black
mirror tile on the floors, clever self-clean
nozzles hidden behind deco trim lines. It's
all so much like the stuff Alice and I have
that I can almost forget where I am. It's
a negative image of our apartment's kitchen:
light vs. dark, clean vs. dirty, quiet vs.
loud. The same floor plan, everything in it
the same, and yet nothing is. It's archeological.
I can look at the layers of gunk and grime
and noise and see what must have underlain
it before, when these people worried about
color coordinating and classy appliances.
I opened the fridge (smudgefree nickel, how
practical, hmm). Ours contains pineapples
and avocados and endive and corn and coffee
and Brazil nuts from Angel Spire's hanging
gardens. This one holds a shelf cluttered
with ground mycoprotein bars and wadded piles
of nutreshen--nutrition supplement sacs like
the kind they hand out at government reju
clinics. Other than a bag of slimy lettuce,
there isn't anything unprocessed in the fridge
at all. No vegetables except in powder jars,
ditto for fruit. A stack of self-warming dinner
bins for fried rice and laap and spaghetti
just like the one still lying on the kitchen
table in a puddle of its own sauce, and that's
it.
I close the fridge and straighten. Here's
somethin' here in the mess and the screaming
in the next room and the reek of the one kid's
poopy pants, but I'm stumped as to what it
is. They could have lived up in the light
in the air. And instead, they hid in the dark
under wet jungle canopy and turned pale and
gave up their lives.
The kids raced back in, chasing each other
all in a train, laughing and shrieking. They
stop and look around, surprised, maybe that
their moms have disappeared. The littlest
one has a stuffed dinosaur by the nose. It's
got a long green neck and a fat body. A brontosaurus,
I think, with big cartoony eyes and black
felt lashes. It's funny about the dinosaur,
because they've been gone so long, but here
one is, showing up as a stuffed toy. And then
it's funny again, because when you think about
it, a dinosaur toy is really extinct twice.
"Sorry kids, mommy's gone."
I pull out my Grange. Their heads kick back
in successive jerks, bang bang bang down the
line, holes appearing on their foreheads like
paint and their brains spattering out the
back. Their bodies flip and skid on the black
mirror floor. They land in jumbled piles of
misaligned limbs. For a second, gunpowder
burn makes the stench bearable.
[pause]
Paolo: All right. So the thing I like about
science fiction is the opportunity to take
what looks normal and then to twist it, to--to
take an idea and stretch it out into some
unreasonable place where you think that the
world is going to be safe and stable, and
then to rip the floor out from underneath
you and drop you into something else.
Ideally that process is a bit like stretching
a rubber band. You pull somebody out into
a different world, and then you let the rubber
band snap. And when people come back to this
world they're going to look at our pl--our
place now, the present, with a different lens
as well. And that's really the thing that
excites me about science fiction.
And it's a tool in science fiction that you
really don't get to use in another genre or
any other style. It's what science fiction
does best and it's what I love. So despite
the fact that science fiction is sort of scorned,
this is the place where I get to play with
the tools that give me an opportunity to talk
about the world in some really interesting
ways.
The--the--the thing I'm sort of looking for
is that opportunity to help people see what
they thought was normal is abnormal. And the--the
best personal description I have of this is
a time when I was a--a--I was a student in
China. I'd gone over to China to study Chinese.
I'd done an immersion program.
And while I was over there I spent, I guess
about six months. And I came back to the states.
And I was at my college and I was sitting
out in the--in the quad, in the park. And
there's trees and everything. And it was really
beautiful. And it was like the first time
I'd been around greenery in a long time, it
was really beautiful.
Except for that there were all these rats
running around in the--in the quad. And--and
I kept looking around at all these rats. And
I saw them and there's a rat and there's a
rat and there's another rat. And nobody else
seems to care at all that there are these
rats running everywhere. And then I suddenly
realized they were squirrels.
[audience laughter]
Paolo: [laughs]And--and I was--and then I
was like they're squirrels. Okay, they're
squirrels. And I am still thinking, "Do people
really let these rodents run around [audience
laughter], really? Why do they feel okay with
this? Why don't they kill them? Why don't
they--I mean, this has to be bad."
And it was that moment where the place I'd
been for a while didn't have squirrels running
around, and so they just disappeared as a--as
a natural element of what we consider our
sort of pseudo natural urban surroundings.
And so coming back into that suddenly that
was alien. And--and so normal became alien
and--and that's the moment when you can actually
start looking at the--our customs and habits
and saying, "Well, why do we do this? Why
do we live this way? Why do we have this kind
of a world?" And all things can be up for
grabs and all things can be questioned. I
think that's really interesting.
The other thing that I'm really interested
in, in science fiction, is the process of
extrapolation. And for me the--the quote that
sort of sums that up is William Gibson's comment
that "the future is here, it's just not evenly
distributed", which I love.
And being in some place like Google where
you guys are actively sitting around in your
computers building the next ver--iteration
of the future that's going to be evenly distributed,
or more evenly distributed, is really interesting
to me.
You guys are seeing nodes of future that could
come into being. And--and in science fiction
that--that idea is really powerful. And so
I’m really interested in looking at--at
little data nodes and sort of saying, "Well,
if this is the future that's becoming more
evenly distributed what does that more evenly
distributed look like?"
And so that applies to all sorts of things.
I think about like sort of cell phone networks
in Japan and what cell phone culture looks
like in Japan, and does that become more evenly
distributed? You look at something like the
iPad coming out and you say, "Oh, is this
gonna be more evenly distributed?"
But there are other kinds of interesting aspects
of that too, because you can look at something
like the country of Afghanistan and say, "Oh,
here's a place where the future hasn't been
evenly distributed." You know, women's rights
are severely curtailed, life spans are short.
There's all sorts of parts of our future that
theoretically could be more evenly distributed
over there.
The thing about that is that it also demands
that we sort of understand what the narrative
is. That we understand that--which data points
are creating the dominant narrative, and that
we understand where the story lines are going.
If I'm George Bush and I say that democracy
is an ascendant storyline for the last 250
years, then applying it in Iraq makes a lot
of sense because I know the storyline. This
is democracy. Democracy goes everywhere. But
if we look at that from another lens, if I
go back and I look at something like--like
Afghanistan or like Bangladesh. Bangladesh
is really interesting to me.
If I look at a place where there's resource
scarcity and I'm looking at a country that's
dealing with resource scarcity, then I start
to wonder well what does resource scarcity
look? And if resource scarcity is the story,
it's going to become more evenly distributed.
What does that tell us also about other kinds
of cultural imports? Do we become more and
more set in our ways as there's more scarcity?
Do we fight up against each other more?
Is there some point where Republicans Dem--and
Democrats take to the streets and just shoot
each other because we just stopped getting
along at some point and we want to take the
territory? Those are the kinds of things that
I sort of spin out in my head and I ask, "Well,
what story is gonna be the dominant one?"
When I look at some place like Bangladesh--I--I
was just recently became enamored of ship
breaking yards, the Chittagong Ship-breaking
Yards. And if you've never seen these, these
are amazing.
There's a photographer named Edward Burtynsky
who's taken some fantastic photos of this.
And there's actually a film called Manufactured
Landscapes which documents some of this. And-and
you see a landscape of--of where our stuff
goes to die.
But what you also see is that Bangladesh isn't
just--just the place where we're dumping these
things because they've got crummy labor laws,
and crummy environmental controls. The other
thing is, is that for--for Bangladesh ships
are a resource. They aren't recycling those
ships, they're mining them.
And that's really interesting. I think, "Oh,
there's something that tells me about resource
scarcity." Is here our--our manufactured objects
are resources. So what does that look like
down the road? If resources are scarce, what
do we do with our resources and how do we
treat them? And what does Bangladesh have
to tell me about what would an America look
like with a resource scarcity problem?
So there are things like that that I'm really
interested in. But again it just kind of keeps
bunk--back--keeps coming back to that question
of what data points we like to look at. And
so in science fiction I'm sort of a--I'm sort
of an outlier, because not many people are
particularly interested in writing in sort
of environmental issues. But that doesn't
really make me right, it just marks me sort
of one line of thought.
And so what you'll see is that science fiction
will touch on anything. Robert Sawyer's gonna
write about a different set of storylines
and data points than Charlie Strauss is gonna
write a different set of data sets--data points
than Neal Stephenson. You're going to see
that divergence of what we look at.
And we're all sort of feeling the elephant
blind. I'm grabbing onto the leg and claiming
that this is really a tree that we're looking
at in the future. And somebody else is grabbing
the trunk and claiming it's a snake. And good
luck, we're trying to figure that out.
But one of the things that's really interesting
to me about how we go about looking at those
trends is that--well, okay. [Heavy sigh]I
guess when I--I tend to look at a certain
set of data points that don't seem to show
up in the news a lot. I guess that's the thing.
And--and a lot of those data points tend to
be about distributed sort of topics, or distributed
issues.
I'm really interested in why is this small,
furry mouse in the Sierras going extinct?
And it's not gonna get a lot of news and so
it's not a big data point.
And I’m trying to figure out whether or
not that data is actually maybe the most telling
piece of information about where we're going.
More telling than North Korea and South Korea
getting into a huge fight, more important
than whether or not the iPhone OS or Android
OS is gonna win, more--more telling than any
of those things.
And--but it's interesting that we--we sort
of have a hard time looking at those. I'm
gonna read another section here. This is from
a short story called The Tamarisk Hunter.
[pause]
Let's see--yeah, if I can find it right--sorry.
All right.
[Heavy sigh]
A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of
river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus
water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter
long.
Ten years ago, it was a good living. Back
then, tamarisk shoulder up--shouldered up
against ever riverbank in the Colorado River
Basin, along with cottonwoods, Russian olives,
and elms. Ten years ago, towns like Grand
Junction and Moab though they could still
squeeze life from a river.
Lolo stands on the edge of a canyon, Maggie
the camel his only companion. He stares down
into the deeps. It's an hour's scramble to
the bottom. He ties Maggie to a juniper and
starts down, boot-skiing a gully. A few blades
of green grass sprout neon around him, piercing
juniper--tagged snow clods.
In the later winter, there's just a beginning
surge of water down in the deeps; the ice
is off the river edges. Up high, the mountains
still wear their ragged mantles of snow. Lolo
smears through mud and hits a channel of scree,
sliding and scattering rocks.
His jugs of tamarisk poison gurgle and slosh
on his back. His shovel and rockbar snag on
occasional junipers as he skids by. It'll
be a long hike out. But then, that's what
makes this patch so perfect. It's a long way
down, and the riverbanks are largely hidden.
It's a living; where other people have dried
out and blown away, he has remained: a tamarisk
hunter, a water tick, a stubborn bit of weed.
Everyone else has blown off the land as surely
as dandelion seeds, set free to fly south
or east.
Or most of all north to where watersheds sometimes
still run deep and where even if there's no
more lush ferns or deep fish--deep cold fish
runs, at least there's still water for people.
Eventually, Lolo reaches the canyon bottom.
Down in the cold shadows, his breath steams.
He pulls out a digital camera and starts shooting
his proof. The Bureau of Reclamation has gotten
uptight about proof. They want different angles
on the offending tamarisk, they want each
one photographed before and after, the whole
press--process documented, GPS'd and uploaded
directly by the camera. And they want it done
on-site. And then they still sometimes come
out to spot check before they calibrate his
headgate for water bounty.
But all their due diligence can't protect
them from the likes of Lolo. Lolo has found
the secret to eternal life as a tamarisk hunter.
Unknown to the Interior Department and its
BuRec subsidiary, he's been seeding new patches
of tamarisk, encouraging visher--vigorous
brushy groves in previously cleared areas.
He has hauled and planted healthy root balls
up and down the river system in strategically
hidden and inaccessible corridors, all in
a bid for security against the swarms of other
tamarisk hunters that scour these same tributaries.
Lolo is crafty. Stands like this one, a quarter-mile
long and thick with salt-laden tamarisk are
his insurance policy.
[Music plays]
Documentation finished, he unshafts a folding
saw [laughs], along with his rockbar and shovel,
and sets his poison jugs on the dead salt
bank. He starts cutting, slicing into the
roots of the tamarisk, pausing every thirty
seconds to spread Garlon 4 on the cuts, poisoning
the tamarisk wounds faster than they can heal.
But some of the best tamarisk, the most vigorous,
he uproots and sets aside for later use.
$2.88 a day, plus water bounty.
It takes Maggie's b--rolling bleating camel
stride a week to make it back to Lolo's homestead.
They follow the river, occasionally climbing
above it onto cold mesas or wandering off
into the open desert in a bid to avoid the
skeleton sprawl of emptied towns.
Guardie choppers buzz up and down the river
like swarms of angry yellowjackets, hunting
for porto-pumpers and wildcat diversions.
They rush overhead in a wash of beaten air
and gleaming National Guard logos.
Lolo remembers a time when the guardies traded
potshots with people down on the riverbanks,
tracer-fire and machine-gun chatter echoing
in the canyons. He remembers the glorious
hiss and arc of a Stinger missile as it flashed
across redrock desert and blue sky and burned
a chopper where it hovered.
But that's long in the past. Now, guardie
patrols skim up the river unmolested. Lolo
tops another mesa and stares down at the familiar
landscape of an eviscerated town, its curving
streets and subdivision cul-de-sacs all sitting
silent in the sun.
At the very edge of the empty town, one-acre
ranchettes and snazzy five-thousand-square-foot
houses with dead-stick trees and dust-hill
landscaping fringe a brown tumbleweed golf
course. The sandtraps don't even show anymore.
When California put its first calls on the
river, no one really worried. A couple towns
went begging for water. Some idiot newcomers
with bad water rights stopped grazing their
horses, and that was it. A few years later,
people started showering real fast. And a
few after that, they showered once a week.
And then people started using the buckets.
By then, everyone had stopped joking about
how "hot" it was. It didn't really matter
how "hot" it was. The problem wasn't lack
of water or an excess of heat, not really.
The problem was that 4.4 million acre-feet
of water were supposed to go down the river
to California. There was water; they just
couldn't touch it.
They were supposed to stand there like dumb
monkeys and watch it flow on by.
"Lolo?"
The voice catches him by surprise. Maggie
startles and groans and lunges for the mesa
edge before Lolo can rein her around. The
camel's great padded feet scuffle dust and
Lolo flails for his shotgun where it nestles
in a scabbard at the camel's side. He forces
Maggie to turn, shotgun half-drawn, barely
holding onto his seat and swearing.
A familiar face, tucked amongst the juniper
tangle. "Goddamnit!" Lolo lets the shotgun
drop back into its scabbard. "Jesus Christ,
Travis. You scared the hell out of me."
Travis grins. He emerges from amongst the
juniper's silver bark rags, one hand on his
gray fedora, the other on the reins as he
guides his mule out of the trees. "Surprised?"
"I coulda shot you!"
"Oh, don't be so jittery. There's no one out
here 'cept us water ticks."
"Yeah, that's what I thought the last time
I went shopping down there. I had a whole
set of new dishes for Annie and I broke them
all when I ran into an ultralight parked right
in the middle of the main drag."
"Meth flyers?"
"Beats the hell out of me. I didn't stick
around to ask."
"Shit. I'll bet they were as surprised as
you were."
"They almost killed me."
"Well, I guess they didn't."
Lolo shakes his head and swears again, this
time without anger. Despite the ambush, he's
happy to run into Travis. It's lonely country,
and Lolo's been out long enough to notice
the silence of talking to Maggie.
They trade ritual sips of water from their
canteens and make camp together. They swap
stories about BuRec and avoid discussing where
they've been ripping tamarisk and enjoy the
view of the empty town far below, with its
serpentine streets and quiet houses and shining
untouched river.
It isn't until the sun is setting and they've
finished roasting a magpie that Lolo finally
asks the question that's been on his mind
ever since Travis's sun-baked face came out
of the tangle. It goes against etiquette,
but he can't help himself. He picks magpie
out of his teeth and says, "I thought you
were workin' downriver."
Travis glances sidelong at Lolo. And in that
one suspicious uncertain look, Lolo sees that
Travis has hit a lean patch. He's not smart
like Lolo. He hasn't been reseeding. He's
got no insurance. He hasn't been thinkin'
about the head about all the competition,
and what the tamarisk endgame looks like,
and now he's feelin' the pinch.
Lolo feels a twinge of pity. He likes Travis.
A part of him even wants to tell Travis the
secret, but he stifles the urge. The stakes
are too high. Water crimes are serious now,
so serious Lolo hasn't even told his wife,
Annie, for fear of what she'll say. Like of
the most shameful crimes, water theft is a
private business, and at the scale Lolo works,
forced labor on the Straw is the best punishment
he can hope for.
Travis gets his hackles down over Lolos invasion
of his privacy and says, "I had a couple of
cows I was runnin' up here, but I lost 'em.
I think something got 'em."
"It's a long way to graze cows."
"Yeah, well, down my way even the sagebrush
is dead. Big Daddy Drought's doin' a real
number on my patch." He pinches his lip, thoughtful.
"I wish I could find those cows."
"Oh, they probably went down to the river."
Travis sighs. "Well, then the guardies probably
got 'em."
"Probably shot 'em from a chopper and roasted
'em."
"Californians."
They both spit at the word.
[audience laughter]
The sun continues to sink. Shadows fall across
the town's silent structures. Rooptop-rooftops
gleam ruby, a red cluster decorating the blue
river necklace.
"You think there's any stands worth pullin'
down there?" Travis asks.
"Well, you can go down and look. But I think
I got it all last year. And someone had already
been there through before me, so I doubt much
is comin' up."
"Shit. Well, maybe I'll go shopping. Might
as well get somethin' out of this trip."
"There sure isn't anyone to stop ya'."
As if to emphasize the fact, the thud-thwap
of a guardie chopper breaks the evening silence.
The black-fly dot of its movement barely shows
against the darkening sky. Soon it's outta
sight and trick--cricket chirps swallow the
last evidence of its passing.
Travis sighs. "Remember when the guardies
said they'd keep out the looters? I saw them
on TV with all their choppers and Humvees
and them all saying they were gonna protect
everything until the situation improved."
He laughs again. "You remember that? All of
them drivin' up and down the streets?"
"I remember."
"Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't have fought
'em more."
"Annie was at Lake Havasu City when they fought
there. You saw what happened." Lolo shivers.
"Anyway, there's not much to fight for once
they blow up your water treatment plant. If
nothin's comin' outta your faucet we might
as--you might as well move on."
"Yeah. Well sometimes I think you still gotta
fight, even if it's just for pride." Travis
gestures at the town below, a shadow movement.
"I remember when all that land down there
was sellin' like hotcakes and they were buildin'
shit as fast as they could to ship in the
lumber. Shoppin' malls and parking lots and
subdivisions, anywhere you could scrape a
flat spot."
"Yeah. Well, we weren't callin' it Big Daddy
Drought, back then."
"Forty-five thousand people. And none of us
had a clue. And I was a real estate agent."
Travis laughs, a self-mocking sound that ends
quickly. It sounds too much like self-pity
for Lolo's taste. They're quiet again, looking
down at the town wreckage.
"I think I might be headin' north," Travis
says finally.
Lolo glances over, surprised. Again he has
the urge to let Travis in on his secret, but
he stifles it. "And do what?"
"I dunno, pick fruit maybe. Maybe somethin'
else. Anyway, there's water up there."
Lolo points down at the river. "There's water."
"Not for us." Travis pauses. "I-I got to level
with you, Lolo. I went down to the Straw."
For a second, Lolo is confused by the non
sequitur. The statement is too outrageous.
And yet Travis's face is serious. "The Straw?
No kiddin'? All the way down there?"
"All the way there." He shrugs defensively.
"I wasn't finding any tamarisk, anyway. And
it didn't actually take that long. It's a
lot closer than it used to be. A week out
to the train tracks, and then I hopped a coal
train, and rode it right to the interstate,
and then I hitched."
"What's it like out there?"
"Empty. A trucker told me that California
and the Interior Department drew up all these
plans to decide which cities they'd turn off
when." He looks at Lolo significantly. "That
was after Lake Havasu. They figured they had
to do it slow. Worked out some kind of formula:
how many cities, how many people they could
evaporate at a time without ta--making too
much unrest. Got advice from the Chinese,
from when they were shuttin' down all their
old communist factories. Anyway, it looks
like they're pretty much done with it. There's
nothin' movin' out there except highway trucks
and coal trains and a couple truck stops."
"And you saw the Straw?"
"Oh Sure, I saw it. Out toward the border.
Big old mother. So big you couldn't climb
on top of it, flopped out on the desert like
a damn silver snake. All the way to California."
He spits reflexively.
"They're spraying with concrete to keep water
from seeping into the ground and they've got
some kind of carbon-fiber stuff over this
top to stop the evaporation. And the river,
it just disappears inside. Nothin' but an
empty canyon below, bone-dry. And choppers
and Humvees everywhere, like a goddamn hornets'
nest. They wouldn't let me get any closer
than a half a mile on account of the eco-crazies
trying to blow it up. They weren't nice about
it either."
"Well, what did you expect?"
"I dunno, it sure depressed me, though. They
work us out here and toss us a little water
bounty and then all that water next year goes
right down that big old pipe. Some Californian's
probably fillin' his swimmin' pool with last
year's water bounty right now."
Cricket-song pulses in the darkness. Off in
the distance, a pack of coyotes starts yipping.
The two of them are quiet for a while. Finally,
Lolo chucks his friend on the shoda--shoulder.
"Ah hell Travis, it's probably for the best.
A desert's a stupid place to put a river,
anyway."
So, that sort of future doesn't have to exist.
It's based on an extrapolation of the way
that we currently run water rights. And some
pretty immutable laws about how water is organized.
Phoenix has lower water rights than California,
and that's just the way it's going to be.
Theoretically with water rights when there's
scarcity what happens is the least important
holder of the water right will lose their
right so that the next most important holder
can get all of their right. And so there's
a cascade of people getting--having their
water turned off. And you see that happening
in major drought times.
The thing that's interesting is that Lake
Powell and Lake Mead are having a hard time
refilling right now. The Colorado River Basin
is having a hard time refilling itself right
now, even as our population's increased. We
are moving towards scarcity. And how we decide
to adapt to that is sort of up for grabs.
The thing that's interesting is that that
hasn't stopped Phoenix from growing. It hasn't
stopped any of us from growing, and it hasn't
stopped us from--from making the assumption
that we can sort of duck around our essential
resource inputs.
And so what I hope--what--what's--what I hope
is that I can write a story that gives a person
a visceral experience of something that's
actually fairly abstract. We've known for
a long time that the Lake Powell isn't refilling.
In fact, it's lower every year. But what does
that mean? It's just abstract. It doesn't
really do anything.
And so I want to run out an extrapolation
that sort of says, well this is kind of what
it looks like. And so that's--that's sort
of my attempt to--to use science fiction to
talk about some specific issues. And--and
to look at a certain set of data points that
aren't really in the news particularly.
Oh, what's the water level of Lake Pow--Lake
Powell? Really, who gives a shit? And maybe
we should, though. And so that's sort of what
I'm interested in.
One of the other sort of interesting data
points that's just kind of come up is the
Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf, which
isn't really interesting to me as an environmental
tragedy. It's, okay we've got another oil
rig that blew up and whatever.
What's really interesting to me actually is
how we as a society react to that data point.
And so--because there are things we can extrapolate
from it. And--and the--the thing that really
strikes me about Deepwater Horizon, that oil
rig, is that it was an ultra-deepwater drill
rig, which means that it could drill in depths
up to 10,000 feet of water.
And it actually set the record for drilling
by drilling down 36,000 feet into the earth.
It's--it can drill down six miles. And it
can do it in deep water. And you don't build
a drill rig like that. You don't create that
sort of technological gee whiz thing. I mean,
this is high tech. And you don't do that unless
all the easy stuff is gone.
That's what Deepwater Horizon--the existence
of Deepwater Horizon as an object tells us
that we're running out of cheap easy access
oil. We're running out of our cheapest, easiest
energy source. That's what's most interesting
about Deepwater Horizon. It's not that it
blew up. It's that it exists at all.
And--and so that's sort of--when I look at
that, that's--there's a data point there that's
saying something really interesting that we
aren't really grappling with in the news.
Again, because of it's sort of distributed
kind of intangible nature. What is--what is
a loss of cheap energy look like?
The other thing that's sort of interesting
to me about Deepwater Horizon is how we interact
with that explosion in terms of we make fun
of it a lot. I've actually been watching the
Twitter feeds where--there's a couple of awesome
Twitter feeds out there. One of which is--let's
see, let me find it 'cause it-BP Global PR
is the Twitter feed, which is hilarious.
I mean--and this is where they sort of pretend
to be the-the CEOs of BP ad make all sorts
of snide comments like, "We think the ocean
looks slimmer in bap--in black," [audience
laughter]and things like that. And it's--it's
awesome. It's a--a lotta--a lot of fun. And
there's a tag BP Cares, which is a lot of
fun too.
The thing is, is we poke fun at them and we
scorn them. But--but basically BP is just
a dog that we sent out to fetch. And now we're
blaming it because it didn't get the bone.
I mean basically you send out a dog, you say,
"Go fetch that. Go get that bone." And it
comes back and you say, "Oh good dog, here's
a treat."
And that's what we do with BP. We say, "Go
get us some oil. Come back, we'll give you
some money." And, so they were just doing
what we asked them to do. The fact that they're
failures at it, well you know that's--that's
when we start scorning them. But we would
have been perfectly happy tossing them little
treats as long as they kept doing it anyway.
We were trying to send them out.
And that's another thing that's interesting
is we don’t really engage very well with
what our supply chains are. Where--where--how
far we reach. We like our--our--our sort of
consumer objects to not have a history.
And right now when we look at Deepwater Horizon,
suddenly the gas in my tank has a history.
And what do I do? I actually don't actually
say, "Well, I was sticking gas in my tank,"
which is asking BP to go hunt there. I actually
just say, "Oh, you suck over there." And that's
really interesting to me, because I think
we've do that in a lot with our consumer objects.
And it's another one of those sort of hidden
data points about how we engage with our world.
If I look at something like the iPad, it's--it's
a historyless object. It--it lacks any--any
history. I don’t know whether there's lithium
or nickel or copper in there. I don't which
mines that might have come out of.
I don't know anything about the object. It's
supposed to come to me pristine. It's like
virgin birth sort of. And--and--and I'm supposed
to love it just for itself. And then it's
gonna disappear, and it's not gonna have any--any
afterlife either 'cause I'm not gonna know
about that either.
And our sort of like--the--I feel like when
I see something like the--the Deepwater Horizon
explosion, for just this brief moment that
we've sort of lifted the curtain and we're
looking at the full extent of our--our supply
chain. Where drilling is happening, what happens,
people die doing it. And that's actually true
all the time, it's just not a big enough news
story for us to really care.
The last thing that's really interesting to
me about Deepwater Horizon is how we characterize
it as an environmental t--catastrophe. And--and
this actually goes back to how we look at--at
data points that might be important to us.
And we look at Deepwater Horizon and we say,
"Oh my God, all that oil is washing up on
all of these wetlands." But the reality is
we were just gonna burn it out our tailpipes
anyway. So we're just pissed off that we didn't
get to do the polluting.
[audience laughter]
Like, I mean that's it. That's it, they got
to it first. I mean, so they dump it all over
there. "Goddamn it, I wanted to burn it and
send it into the atmosphere. That's what I
wanted to do. I wanted to use that for global
warming instead of just poisoning some little
wetland over there. I had a big plan for this."
[audience laughter]
So, at that moment you--there's this--there's
this thing where you have this weird sort
of response to environmental catastrophe.
We respond really well to point source catastrophes
like this. We can see it, we can respond to
it, we understand it, we can engage with it.
We actually probably will eventually plug
that well [laughs].
[audience laughter]
But we aren't gonna stick anything in our
tailpipes, not really. And I know that 'cause
I just got on a plane to fly out to talk to
all of you guys. So like [laughs]-
[audience laughter]
-there's the hypocrisy right there. And so
hating this kind of pollution while sort of
engaging in a daily set of behaviors that
are fundamentally destructive, that's a really
interesting human capacity that we have.
And--and that's something that I'm really
interested in my fiction, because I sort of
feel like again, where this spice--space where
the--the catastrophes that face us are distributed.
They're not tangible. They're long term. And
they're really unclear. And there's a lot
of uncertainties in them.
And so I hope that when I write science fiction
and sort of look at drought or look at how
chemicals might disrupt our endocrine systems
and turn us all into stupid people. Or how
agricultural companies with their IP and their-and
terminator genes might actually really change
the way that we interact with food.
But those are ideas that we can spin out and
kind of look at and play with. And maybe interact
with in a more tangible, visceral way than
we would otherwise.
It's really--that's--and--and so like there's
this point where I--I just sort of have to
say, "Yes, I want my characters to be interesting.
Yes I want my stories to be fascinating and
gripping. And yes, I actually am this evangelist
banging on my pulpit trying to get people
to pay attention to some things that are pretty
interesting and fundamental. And that we mostly
spend our time not looking at. And that we
prefer not to."
So anyway, that's pretty much sort of my shtick
[laughs]. So do you have any questions about
any of this?
moderator: Actually, if you can use the mic,
it's for our YouTube audience, that'd be great.
[pause]
male in audience #1: So, it was--it was actually
very interesting what you were saying about
Deep Horizon. And I was sort of like trying
to think a--as an analogy, kind of Google
and kind of what we do. And one of the things
I was thinking about is Deep Horizon it's
not just that it's the cheapest--or the--all
the cheap oil, sources of oil, are used up
so we're moving to that.
It's that even though it's expensive, it really
does it at scale. Right? You can get a lot
of oil out of that thing, which you may not
be able to do in cheaper sources. And I wanted
to--I wondered if you had thought in kind
of coming here, if you had thought about kind
of Google and kind of what our--what our role
is. How we did--not in oil obviously, but
with information and etcetera.
Paolo: Yeah, I've thought about it. I actually--I--I
actually have these really complicated sort
of feelings about--about big companies generally.
Because they--they sort of seem to be both
promise and peril all wrapped in one.
But yeah, with Google the things that stand
out to me. I mean, on one level you're doing
some really interesting things with sustainability.
On the other hand, Google exists as a commerce
engine basically. It exists off of advertising.
It lubricates consumption.
And if there's anything that we understand
about sort of our impacts on the world, lubricating
consumption is probably bad. And so there's
a certain number of things that you can do
because you're well financed by my bad buying
habits.
So it's sort of like you're standing in the
middle of that stream of consumption and plucking
out a certain number of fish. But--but at
the same time, that stream of consumption
and--and enabling that stream of consumption
is--is probably leading us in unsustainable
directions.
And so I'm not sure if you get to a point
where you can get enough benefit from the
stream of consumption that you can actually
sort of offset the damage of the extreme of
consumption. So I'm not sure really how you
balance that. That's sort of my quick and
dirty take.
[pause]
male in audience #2: Hi, and thank you for
coming. One thought I had about the--just
what you had described is the stories that
interest you. That--it seems like another
common factor of them is that they're very
slow. They take years to happen, instead of
happening over the course of a day or a week
or so forth.
And this puts in mind an idea that's been
floating around very recently, which is about
how people of--in their 40s and 50s think
of urban centers as--as very high crime, because
in the 70s when they were young, they were
very high crime. But in fact violent crime
is way lower than it's been since then, yet
we still have these sort of memories of that.
And so we still treat them as that. And we
helicopter our kids and so forth and so on.
And so it's like is there a sort of--like
our resource consumption habits. Do they also
sort of follow from our--our childhood experiences
of the world? And what other habits do we
have that can't move forward or get locked
into a--into a mindset from decades past and
are hard to move forward. Do you have any
thoughts on that?
Paolo: Yeah, actually I think we--we--especially
in the United States, I sort of feel like
we--we actually have--we start out with a
really high level comfort level of consumption.
I’m seeing that in my kid right now, where
he's got a certain number of toys in his room.
The fact that he has his own room is actually
really interesting too. I mean there's--there's
like these--the things that we take for granted
as just the assumed level of an adequate prosperity.
Not--not crazy prosperity, but an adequate
prosperity are so ingrained in us at this
point.
I assume that a decent living is having a
three bedroom home and a small plot of land
in Paonia, Colorado. I mean, which is exurb
and sprawl and a whole bunch of other things.
I--I can just go off on that too.
But--but--but basically, I mean when you grow
up saying that three--three bedrooms is the
norm, then that means that scaling back is
a really tough thing, because we do perceive
loss in that. And--and when we grow up with
those assumptions is that's our human right
essentially. That's really interesting.
And I spent a bunch of time in China. My wife's
family comes from India actually, and so we
spent a bunch of time over there. And seeing
the--the difference of assumption about what
prosperity looks like and--is really interesting,
because prosperity is really this moving target.
It's--it's actually a--it's actually not--not
this absolute thing will make you happy. If
I just have three bedrooms, that's always
the happiness thing, or if I have one bedroom
that's the happiness thing.
I mean, there's a family that I used to stay
with in China. And they had a--a two bedroom
apartment that was about the size of my living
room in my current house. And we were all
packed in there together, but nobody was sitting
around saying, "Oh, life is so hard." They
were actually hanging out with each other
and being convivial.
And--and so there was--there was a weird moment
when I went back to our very empty house in
the United States and thought, "Huh, what
do we do with all this space?" And then my--my
stepmother at the time was really pissed off
that I was even at the house at all. She felt
like I was just crowding her too much.
We could be on different levels of the house
and totally different parts. I’m like, "You
can't even see, hear or smell me. Like really,
I'm so far away. This is like," but she--I
was still invading her gigantic bubble that
she had for space. And I'm thinking my God,
I was--I was shoulder--to--shoulder with people
and they weren't bothered by me. Like, and
here this is like--so yeah, so those habits,
yeah.
And it makes it hard for us to have a rational
conversation about what--what actual cons--what
our needs really are. Our needs versus our
wants, and being able to separate those out.
And probably that's really connected to sustainability.
So-
>> Well, again thank you for coming. And despite
all the talk about need versus want, you should
want to buy this book. It's a--it's an excellent
read.
[audience laughter]
Paulo: Yeah, so kill more trees for me.
moderator: Yeah [laughs], and I think you'll
all enjoy it. Paolo Bacigalupi, thank you
very much for coming to Google.
Paolo: Thank you.
[audience clapping]
