Paolo Bacigalupi
National Book Award finalist, and The Drowned Cities. He is also the author of The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories, and a Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner. He lives in western Colorado with his wife and son.
Author's Comment: There’s a moment when a word stops meaning one thing and starts meaning another thing because we use it in a different way, and I do feel like we are moving to that space where you say, oh, it’s a dystopian story. But what we’re really asking is, why do we like seeing really screwed-up worlds? That’s actually kind of a puzzle. One of the things that surprises me, whether I’m writing for adults or writing for young adults, is how much people seem to engage with stories that previously I’d been told were unsellable, that they were too dark, too depressing, just too awful to be considered to be viable. There’s a certain amount of anxiety about where we’re headed next, and there’s something cathartic about seeing these broken versions of where we might go.
Nationality: American