by Ed Finn

Paolo Bacigalupi is the New York Times-bestselling author of novels for adults including The Water Knife (2015) and The Windup Girl (2009),   and novels for young adults including Ship Breaker (2010) and its sequel The Drowned Cities (2012). Paolo is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, Michael L. Printz, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, alongside awards in Japan, Spain, Germany, and France.

In September 2015, Paolo visited Arizona State University to deliver our annual Imagination and Climate Futures Lecture. During his visit, he sat down with me for a conversation about the emotions he tries to provoke with his writing, the push-and-pull between optimism and pessimism in imagining possible futures, and the power of storytelling to shape our responses to climate change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 Ed Finn: Why is fiction such a powerful tool for helping us understand the enormity of climate change and how to confront it?

Paolo Bacigalupi: Fiction is able to move you past the political identity debates. A lot of times, I can set a story in a future where the world is already broken by climate change. I don’t need to have characters representing the green  perspective versus  the industrial perspective. I can just have a bunch of characters who run around in a devastated world. That fictional world makes the argument about how serious climate change is, so the characters don’t have to. And that means that you can tell stories to people who otherwise would be completely

unwilling to look at climate change, or take it seriously. They may start out in the funhouse playroom of the broken future, saying, “Hey, it’s just an apocalypse story.” But you can also make the argument that there are a lot of trend lines around this that are troubling.

So that’s first thing: you can break through those really strongly constructed identity barriers that we have around hot-button topics like climate change and get in the reader’s head, despite their other political leanings.

Beyond that, fiction has this superpower of creating empathy in people for alien experiences. You can live inside of the skin of a person who is utterly unlike you. And if I can live inside of the skin of somebody who is a different gender or a different race or from a different class background and suddenly imbibe their concerns and live inside of their concerns, that’s really powerful.

Writing science fiction also means that you can extend out into the future. You  can create that empathy into the fourth dimension for  a future version of yourself, or empathy for the life your child may

inherit. You get to live inside of the skin of a climate refugee as they drag themselves across New Mexico, hated by all the New Mexicans, blown out of Texas by droughts and flooding and hurricanes. You get to live  that sense of displacement, and then you get to live that sense of loss,   and the struggle of trying to find a new place and a new land. All of that is an opportunity to let a reader experience the consequences of our failure in the present, our failure to create a good future for that person who they will then identify with and connect to.

Fiction has this power to engage us with a set of consequences that we otherwise would discount. We tend to weight our present prosperity over our future costs, and so we discount future risk quite a lot. Fiction is a way to build up that sense of risk in a future scenario.

EF: What kinds of emotions are you hoping to provoke in your readers when you’re writing about climate change and other environmental challenges?

PB: What I’m really aiming for is to provoke a sense of anxiety. I’m trying to create a feeling that after you’ve read a book like The Water Knife, you will come back into your present moment and look around at the world differently.

I’m hoping that in the moment, you actually are having a fair amount  of pleasure. You’re excited about the gun battles and you have that frozen-chill sense of “is this character going to make it out alive?” Both the triumphs and failures of the characters should be really engaging, and you’re fascinated by this world that’s broken but also kind of weird— all the different layers are there, provoking fascination and interest.

But afterwards, there’s another set of emotional reactions that I’m  looking for. When you close the book and return to this present moment from that future broken world, I’m hoping that you’re going to look around and see your world differently—that the present moment will be re-contextualized.

And so when you open up a newspaper and you’re reading about a water rights fight between cities in California and farmers, suddenly you’re like, “Oh, water rights, those exist. I remember how water rights work. Oh, this is actually happening right now. People are engaged in zero-sum fights over who gets the water and where it goes.”

EF: How do you grapple with scientific literature and scientific research? How do you use it and what role does it play in your writing?

PB: Usually, I’m looking for a couple of data points that seem to indicate a trend. For The Water Knife, there were two data points that were really powerful to me. They were both inspired by Texas.

In 2011, I was down in Texas during their drought and it was extraordinarily bad. The land couldn’t support the cattle. The crops were dying. You were seeing towns that were having to pump and truck in water. You were seeing rolling brownouts because they didn’t have enough water in their dams and so they didn’t have enough hydroelectricity. There were all these weird synergistic things happening and it was all really bad.

You see that stuff happening and you can go and look at climate models that say, “Yeah, this looks like the new normal for Texas in the future.” So you’re looking at the data, and you have this emotional experience of your own where you’re heat stroking in 100-degree weather and you’re like, “This is troubling to me.”

But then there’s another layer too where you have politicians in Texas holding prayer circles and praying for rain. That’s not scientific data, that’s social data, and it’s also really useful.

You put those two pieces of information together and you say, “You know, all of our climate data says that we are moving towards drier, more extreme weather for the southwestern United States.” And then you also have this other piece of data that says our leadership is completely disengaged, that they are engaged in magical thinking.

The core function of science fiction is to look at some moment and say, “If this goes on, what will the world look like? If this trend continues and becomes exacerbated, what will happen?” And then you go spin out that extrapolation in a story.

So for me, each piece of data is a jumping-off point to start saying, “What if? What if? What if? Ask that next question.”

EF: When you extrapolate into the future and come up with stories, they tend to be fairly pessimistic. What is the role of optimism? How should we be engaging with the future? What’s the best way to use our capacity for imagination to think about the world?

PB: The reason I tend to write pessimistic futures is because none of the data that I’m seeing says that we’re doing anything that earns us a hopeful future. One of the things that I’m concerned about is writing consolatory fiction, something that you can snuggle up to and say to yourself, “Oh, yeah, things are bad, but we’re such clever monkeys.

Somebody is going to figure it out. Technology always finds a way. We’ve always gotten out of the frying pan before.” There’s an assumption that, well, it hasn’t screwed us up yet and we’ve always expanded and always become more healthy and wealthy and wise, so it’s always going to go this way.

There’s a complacency there, and I particularly feel it in the technophilic can-do space where it’s like, “Eh, don’t sweat it. The markets will

take care of it. We’ll eventually come up with a new solution.” Our marketplaces often solve the wrong problems. They don’t tend to  be interested in solving root causes. They tend to put Band-Aids on symptoms. That’s why you see people wearing dust masks in Beijing and other heavily polluted cities. You don’t get rid of the factories or deal with the air pollution. You give everybody dust masks, and you sell them and then you accessorize them and then you make them a brand name item and you make a lot of money off of them. That’s kind of what capitalist markets do.

In The Water Knife, you see the same thing with Clearsacs. It’s not like, “Oh, we need to get together and collectively solve our water infrastructure and over-building problems.” Instead, we’re going to have everybody buy these bags that they can pee into, and they can drink their own pee. And now some corporation is going to sell these by the millions.

So the problem that we solve is not necessarily the right one. In my mind, our marketplaces tend to solve all the wrong problems. So part  of it is that I have a cynical understanding of how our society engages with big social issues and how we use our markets and capitalism to do that. And some of it is that I just feel like we’re stupid as a species and as a society.

The idea that you can create a future that assures people that things will be fine, and that is fundamentally fair, is as magical as praying for rain and just as stupid. That’s part of what I’m concerned about: that I could write a future that’s hopeful in way that we haven’t earned yet. We haven’t done the hard work.

EF: Do you approach these issues of optimism and pessimism in the same way in your young adult novels?

PB: When I’m writing for young adults, I do think about this slightly differently. Science fiction creates these interesting mythologies, these things that people think we can live into. And in some cases, we can. In some cases, kids who grew up reading about rocket ships go on to become NASA scientists and build rocket ships.

The idea that a science fiction writer can imagine something and then an engineer will glom onto it and create that thing, that you can instantiate reality simply by imagining it, is pretty powerful. I always get chills when I think about that kind of thing, and you see it happening again and again in science fiction. You see Arthur C. Clarke imagining communication satellites, then we have communication satellites. You see Neal Stephenson creating the Metaverse in his novel Snow Crash, and suddenly we have Second Life.

When I’m writing for young people, I do think about that. And that was certainly what I was thinking about when I was writing Ship Breaker, where I wanted to create futuristic technologies that were optimistic— to make wind power look really exciting and really sexy and really sleek and really innovative and all the things that a wind turbine isn’t.

For me, the answer was to create these beautiful, high-tech clipper ships. It’s a new age of sail in the future. Oil has run out, the world is wrecked, but we’ve created these amazing sailing ships and there’s a new global economy getting going all based on sail.

It’s as if we suddenly put all of our innovative energy into materials science and physics. What kind of cargo sailing ship would you create, knowing everything that we know about physics and materials science now? You’d have carbon fiber hulls, you’d have high-altitude parasails, you’d have hydrofoils. There are all these amazing technologies that you could combine and suddenly a clipper ship is a pretty fast, sleek, high-tech thing. It’s as exciting as a Ferrari, and that was the objective: to create that aspirational object, and wait and see what people make of it.

EF: Great works of science fiction often create new terms for describing strange and unexpected realities, from George Orwell’s Big Brother to Ursula Le Guin’s ansibles and William Gibson’s cyberspace. How can the language of science fiction help us get a handle on climate change and other complex environmental challenges?

PB: One of the things I feel like I’m bad at, that I want to work on more, is this challenge of creating a new vocabulary. As a global society, a global species, I feel like we don’t have the words to describe the kinds of impacts that we’re seeing on a global scale, with climate change and other complex phenomena.

One of the big ones is that I’m still hunting for is a word for a huge, slow-moving risk that starts in the past and then comes to bear on you twenty years in the future, and yet it is a definite danger. There is something coming. It’s not here yet. We collectively create it and it’s really bad.

Imagine if we had a noun for that, if that’s a “boogum-boogum.” The boogum-boogum is coming for you. You can go look around and there’s a fair number of boogum-boogums, actually. If we had that word, we could say yes, we know about those. We can see how global societies and lots of people all collectively contributing to some tragedy of the commons is an existential risk to the species, to the planet. If we had a set of terms to engage with those phenomena, if we could describe that reality, then maybe we would also be able to more successfully manipulate that reality. We’d know that whenever we create this boogum-boogum thing, that we all need to get together and not let  it destroy us.

 

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. He is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (2017) and co- editor of Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds (2017) and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014).