CRMS alumni on Time Magazine's Top 10 Fiction Book list

Delta County Independent - Written by Kathy Browning

Wednesday, 30 December 2009 00:00

“Dude, you should check out what’s happening right now on Twitter.” That was how Paonia author Paolo Bacigalupi learned TIME Magazine had ranked his book, “The Windup Girl” number nine for 2009. Paolo Bacigalupi “It was a thrill. It was pretty out of the blue,” Bacigalupi said. He knew that a new book reviewer for TIME, Lev Grossman, had liked the book. Grossman wrote about it on his blog at www.Techland.com. Bacigalupi received no official notice from TIME, but the news spread very fast. “It was up half an hour before I heard about it. It was fantastic news.” He has enjoyed a couple of years of gaining recognition building his reputation in literary circles. A collection of short stories, “Pump Six and Other Stories,” came out last year. It was named Best Book of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly. He has won some major science fiction awards for his short stories, among them was a nomination for the Hugo Award. “The Windup Girl” is his first published novel. “It was a complicated novel for me to write.” It took three years of steady work to finish the book. “I wasn’t really sure of the response it would get. I had the feeling when I finished it, that it was a little too much of a hybrid. In some ways it’s a classic style science fiction, but at the same time it is wandering through some pretty complicated questions in our society about environmentalism and the nature of humanity. Those issues get addressed in science fiction, but it doesn’t seem exactly the way I was doing it. I was concerned the novel was a little too literary for science fiction, and a little too science fiction for literary, and maybe a little too environmental for both,” he laughed. “I didn’t anticipate the response would be so positive. It’s going into its fourth printing.” His publisher is Night Shade Books in San Francisco. They had handled his short story collection and made a big push to get his novel. “They did a great job of promoting it, and getting it out to people. They’ve been real champions for the idea of this book, which I think in a lot of ways, wasn’t an easy fit with bigger publishing houses,” he said. “It’s a little bit of an unlikely success for a book like this coming out from a small science fiction specialty house and get this kind of recognition.” Raphel-Lacoste was the artist who did the artwork for the book cover. He does imagery for matte painting for movies and video games. “It’s a puzzle when a reader picks up a book. You always have expectations what you are going to see. With certain genres it’s really easy to fulfill those expectations,” he shared. “When you start taking different forms and start putting them together and crossing over with different genre elements, you end up in some very interesting places, but they don’t necessarily fair well with people’s psyche.” In “The Windup Girl,” Bacigalupi found it necessary to spend a good deal of time of world building to make this futuristic world seem real. In some ways the book is a political thriller while not automatically falling into that mold. The plot includes huge civil unrest resulting in explosive action. As an author, Bacigalupi was willing to take the chance on combining elements from different styles. “I thought it would be a failure because it was too strange, too different.” Obviously, he now knows he was absolutely wrong in misjudging the reception by readers. They got it, and they liked it. The book takes place in Bangkok, Thailand after global warming has occurred and sea levels have risen. Bangkok is a walled city with huge levees and dikes to protect it from the rising waters. At the same time, there have been worldwide agriculture plagues wiping out the food supply. Thailand has survived with their seed banks which other countries do not have. The calorie companies are trying to hunt down and find those banks with genetically diverse seed. Bacigalupi was born in Colorado Springs, moving to Paonia when he was just six months old. He grew up on Sunshine Mesa. He attended Hotchkiss Middle School, Hotchkiss High School and Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale. It was at the last school where he learned how to write clean, tight prose. He thought he would be published by 25, but his first four novels all failed. He’s now 37 and his fifth novel sold. “Fifth time is the charm. I’ve been writing for about 14 years. It’s been a slow process.” For more information, visit his website www.windupstories.com.