Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.

Paolo Bacigalupi

Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.

Paolo Bacigalupi

long hands ideas

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

Paolo Bacigalupi

riding problem ghost

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.

Paolo Bacigalupi

tinkering nature world

Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.

Paolo Bacigalupi

loss talking children

Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.

Paolo Bacigalupi

ocean sides lying

Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.

Paolo Bacigalupi

pieces killing soul

I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.

Paolo Bacigalupi

cowardice battle fighting

The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.

Paolo Bacigalupi

trends stories world

When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.

Paolo Bacigalupi

rising ocean

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Paolo Bacigalupi

stitches toys real

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.

Paolo Bacigalupi

tattoo hate baby

Take three different Thai writers and ask them to extrapolate their county's future, and one hopes that you'll get three very different - but all deeply honest - versions.

Paolo Bacigalupi

honest three different

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

Paolo Bacigalupi

mad made thinking

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

Paolo Bacigalupi

ugly doubt men

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

Paolo Bacigalupi

breathing blame gold

What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.

Paolo Bacigalupi

specificity honestly stories

Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.

Paolo Bacigalupi

yield pain running

She’d survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn’t anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She’d looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she’d survived.

Paolo Bacigalupi

flying example cities

She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.

Paolo Bacigalupi

innocent care stranger

Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.

Paolo Bacigalupi

eye stories people