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Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Specfic collection, with a tilt towards smart, scary near-future dystopias. People keep comparing him to Ted Chiang. It's accurate in that they're both really good short storyists, but Bacigalupi is doing fundamentally different things than Chiang does. These stories stress-test individual pieces of what we think of as our normal infrastructure – safe drinking water, reproduction, renewable food sources. A few selections, with links to the stories where available online. I recommend the whole collection, though.

"Pop Squad." The problem with immortality is that you really wouldn't want new babies, would you? The one that's sticking with me the most right now. Ouch.

"The Calorie Man," and "Yellow Card Man." Two stories in the same universe, but different hemispheres. When food monocultures are intellectual property, and calories are contraband. Wow. Read them both here.

"The People of Sand and Slag." A different dystopic take on what it would be like if we were all immortal. This freaked me right out. It's prototypical of the collection: beautifully written and effective in its transparent manipulativeness. Read it here.

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