Paolo Bacigalupi Stories Quotations

I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.

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

I have friends who are science journalists, and I'm seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they're pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology.

As a kid, I always liked reading stories where I had a power-projection fantasy. I wanted to be inside of a story where I had power and influence, was going to rise to power, was going to somehow influence my society.

Everyone in China knows The Topics. The television stations and newspapers run the same state-generated stories all across the country, and the Chinese form their opinions based on these somewhat controlled sources.

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

The main reason I want someone to read a story of mine is so they can enjoy it and feel like they got something interesting out of it.

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.

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.