Paolo Bacigalupi

I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth.

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.

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.

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives__heir avatars__n the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the __ssue_ books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own.And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, __orry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different._ You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.

It__ still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we__ be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We__ be rich and they__ be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They__e all full of it. Nothing balances out.

Everything__ bad, until you find something worse.

Crew up, Nailer!" Lucky Girl shouted. "You think I'm going to pull your ass up here like a damn swank?

They__ blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they__ still blame you.

Start by loving, instead of needing.

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.

Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.

No one else could see all the bodies she__ left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or maybe that was just her, looking at herself, and not liking what she saw. Knowing she could never escape her own judging gaze.

The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares.

Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.

The Drowned Cities hadn__ always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn__ belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond.

At root, I think that any given technology (think nuclear power, gunpowder, the written word...) has the potential to improve our lives, wound it, and also to create unexpected accidents. It's not the technology that's the problem, it's us, the users. However angelic or demonic, or thoughtful or thoughtless we happen to be is then amplified by our technologies.

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way if justice.

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.