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Biography
American

Paolo Bacigalupi

1972

The most important writer of climate fiction in science fiction, Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel The Windup Girl (2009) — set in a near-future Thailand ravaged by bioengineering corporations, rising seas, and calorie monopolies — won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and defined the 'biopunk' subgenre. His fiction imagines futures where environmental collapse has already happened, and the question is not whether civilisation will survive but what form its survival will take. The Water Knife (2015) — about water wars in the American Southwest — proved equally prescient.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi (b. 1972) was born on 6 August 1972 in Paonia, Colorado. He studied East Asian studies at Oberlin College and lived in China, where he studied Mandarin and worked as a journalist. He has worked as a web designer and environmental activist in Colorado.

Life and Career

Pump Six and Other Stories (2008) — his debut collection — established his themes: environmental degradation, corporate control of biological resources, and the human cost of ecological collapse. Stories like “The People of Sand and Slag” (in which humans have been so genetically modified that they can eat sand, and encounter a dog — an organism so fragile it seems impossible) and “Pop Squad” announced a writer of fierce moral intelligence.

The Windup Girl (2009) — set in twenty-third-century Bangkok, where fossil fuels are exhausted, megacorporations control the world’s food supply through patented genetic seeds, and a “windup girl” (a genetically engineered servant) becomes the catalyst for revolution — won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards. It is one of the most awarded debut novels in science fiction history.

Ship Breaker (2010) — a YA novel about a boy who scavenges beached oil tankers on a drowned Gulf Coast — won the Printz Award. The Drowned Cities (2012) is its companion. The Water Knife (2015) — a thriller about water rights, climate refugees, and corporate warfare in a drought-devastated American Southwest — was praised for its terrifying plausibility.

Major Works and Themes

Bacigalupi writes about the consequences of choices already made — the futures that are locked in by present-day environmental and economic decisions. His fiction is angry, specific, and politically engaged. His worlds are not dystopias of imagination but extrapolations of data.

Key Works

  • The Windup Girl (2009)
  • Ship Breaker (2010)
  • The Water Knife (2015)

Collecting Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl (2009, Night Shade Books) — the small-press first — brings $100–$400.

Ship Breaker (2010, Little, Brown) brings $30–$80. Bacigalupi signs at conventions and environmental events.