Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi (born August 6, 1972) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer.

He has won the Hugo, Nebula,Compton Crook, Theodore Sturgeon, and Michael L. Printz awards, and was nominated for the National Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the environmental journal High Country News. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated in newspapers including the Idaho Statesman, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Salt Lake Tribune. He was a webmaster for High Country News starting in 2003.

His short fiction has been collected in Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2008). His debut novel The Windup Girl, published by Night Shade Books in September 2009, won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards in 2010.The Windup Girl was also named by Time as one of the Top 10 Books of 2009.Ship Breaker, published by Little, Brown in 2010, was awarded the Michael L. Printz Award for best young adult novel and was nominated for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl is a biopunk science fiction novel. The novel was Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel and published by Night Shade Books on September 1, 2009. The novel was named as the ninth best fiction book of 2009 by TIME magazine, and as the best science fiction book of the year in the Reference and User Services Association's 2010 Reading List. This book is a 2010 Nebula Award and a 2010 Hugo Award winner (tied with The City & the City by China Miéville for the Hugo Award), both for best novel. This book also won the 2010 Compton Crook Award and the 2010 Locus Award for best first novel.

Setting

The Windup Girl is set in 23rd-century Thailand. Global warming has raised the levels of world's oceans, carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices. Biotechnology is dominant and megacorporations like AgriGen, PurCal and RedStar (called calorie companies) control food production through 'genehacked' seeds, and use bioterrorism, private armies and economic hitmen to create markets for their products. Frequent catastrophes, such as deadly and widespread plagues and illness, caused by genetically modified crops and mutant pests, ravage entire populations. The natural genetic seed stock of the world's plants has been almost completely supplanted by those that are genetically engineered to be sterile.

Paolo

Paolo may refer to:

People named Paolo

Athletes

Football players

The Water Knife

The Water Knife is a 2015 novel by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is Bacigalupi's sixth novel. It takes place in the near-future Southwestern United States, where drought has devastated the country.

References

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas." It usually eschews the supernatural, and unlike the related genre of fantasy, historically science fiction stories were intended to have at least a faint grounding in science-based fact or theory at the time the story was created, but this connection has become tenuous or non-existent in much of science fiction.

Definitions

Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a wide range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it", a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography: you do not know what it is, but you know it when you see it.