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" By nature I'm sort of an introvert. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

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" The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" There are parents who are really angry that I decided to portray people who have come into the country illegally as decent human beings. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I think the fact that we, as writers, don't engage with resource-level questions is a symptom of our society where we just don't know where our stuff comes from. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" When we live the 21st-century good life, almost every aspect of it is predicated on not looking at the implications of what we're up to. Happiness at this point has a lot to do with not looking, so you don't feel complicit in some vast and awful enterprise. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I didn't think of myself as writing 'cli-fi,' but I'll take the label. I'll take any label that makes someone think they might be interested in my stories. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I'm definitely writing my fears. It's almost therapeutic to at least voice a terror, to say, 'I'm worried that Lake Powell looks low and Lake Mead looks even lower.' "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I focus a little more on pacing when I write books in the young adult category, and of course there's the great American fear of anything sexual, so that's somewhat backed off in YA. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" People don't actually stay still, you know - when their area is a disaster, they go somewhere else, right? And that's just a natural human impulse. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" We're all happier when we know less, because the details are frightening and haven't really improved much. The more you pay attention, the more horrifying the world is. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" As a writer, you should care about reluctant readers. You want these kids to feel like books are amazing and cool and that they're an escape. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" When somebody keeps telling you, 'This book is amazing,' you sort of have this pleasing instinct to say, 'Oh, let me make you happy again; let me do that trick again.' "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Economies are embedded inside ecosystems. Companies dependent on tourism, for example, are affected by low rainfall - there's less snow for skiers, and forest fires are more intense. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I'm interested in how we react when we're heavily pressed. When we're vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave? "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Businesses that decide to be reality based and identify where they're vulnerable to climate impact, that start thinking about how to buffer against it, are going to be able to take advantage of shortages. When the water runs out, not everyone is in the same pickle. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I am interested in agricultural corporations and how they function. The idea that they own the genetics of our food supply is a really compelling thing to me. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" I don't put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction - looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That's a science fictional tool. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" Novelists want to be published and need a publisher to decide to print 20,000 copies. So you need to entertain on some level. I want to reach out and connect. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" A wise human would have an understanding of the supply chain and how the pieces fit together. But it's against our nature to think about it. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I've matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it's someone who's not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who's going to give me enough slack to tell my story. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take. "

Paolo Bacigalupi

" As an author, you're really grateful for the people who are supporting you, but on some other level, that can be a dangerous echo chamber. "

Paolo Bacigalupi