Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Last year, I was totally blown away by Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel, The Windup Girl, which has since gone on to win a Nebula, is in the running for a Hugo award later this year and was named as one of Time Magazine's top ten books of the year. The book certainly deserves that attention, and Bacigalupi has rapidly established himself as a rising star in the genre, already with the Theodore Sturgeon award for his short story The Calorie Man in 2006, as well as several Hugo and Nebula nominations for The Calorie Man and The People of Sand and Slag. It comes as no surprise, then, that Ship Breaker, his first foray into Young Adult fiction, is a high quality and fast paced novel, one that is both thought provoking and exciting to the reader.

Set at some point in the indeterminate future, Ship Breaker could easily fit into the worlds that have been established in Bacigalupi's other stories. The age of cheap energy has ended, and the consequences of that time have caught up to civilization. Global warming has caused the oceans to rise and society's boundaries to shift. In the former Gulf Coast region, Nailer Lopez is a Ship Breaker, a young man who is part of a team that goes onboard abandoned and decaying oil tankers and transport ships, stripping them of their wiring and anything of value, which is then turned into a sort of company boss, who sells them to someone else. The citizens in this region are an indentured workforce, unable to move away or to seek out a better life.

For Nailer, his prospects shift dramatically when a major storm (nicknamed a ‘City Killer’, something akin to Katrina, most likely), comes through the area, blowing to shore an advanced clipper ship, one with the daughter of a wealthy company owner onboard. Nailer must navigate through a complicated set of events, each of which can fundamentally change his life for better or worse. Throughout the story, he is faced with choices: to take a monumental risk and hope for something better to happen because of it, or act on his instincts, preserving what is familiar. This is a theme that permeates the book throughout, and for that reason, it’s a solid addition to the Young Adult market, because of the lessons that can be learned from it.

What truly stands out for Ship Breaker, much like The Windup Girl, is that Bacigalupi’s vision of the future, one that seems firmly rooted in reality, transposing current issues into the future. Ironically, I picked up this book around the same time as the ongoing Deepwater Horizon explosion and read it during the resulting oil spill that has since contaminated much of the Gulf in the past five weeks. With that in the back of my mind, it’s clear that Bacigalupi has a point throughout his stories: we need to care for our environment, and his biopunk stories (including the fantastic People of Sand and Slag) really look to this theme.

Like The Windup Girl, this story also integrates a fantastic cast of characters into the environment that he’s put together. Nailer is highly relatable for a protagonist, someone caught in the middle of a vast number of changes outside of his control, and provides a very heroic figure throughout, but one who is tortured by his choices, such as his relationship with his abusive and violent father, and some of his fellow workers. ‘Lucky Girl’, or Nita, plays a sort of damsel in distress, whom Nailer discovers after the storm. Tool is a ‘half-man’, a bioengineered guard, composed of human and canine DNA , who’s broken away from his genetic programming to assist Nailer. All of these elements blend together in a notable book, one that is likely to really win awards.

What struck me the most, however, is the detail and care that has been put into the world-building of this future. While the plot left me wanting a bit more (and keeping in mind that this was a YA novel), what left me far more interested in finishing was the society and issues that Bacigalupi has put into the story. There’s a major stratification of society between the rich and poor, with major industrial powers rising, and with people looking to survive off of whatever they can find. There’s an immense amount of relevant commentary within this book, even though at points, I found the plot to be somewhat predictable. Despite that, it’s certainly far superior to most YA novels that I’ve read recently, and it’s certainly something that will bring more attention to Mr. Bacigalupi.

In the end, Ship Breaker is an exciting and rewarding read, one that is good, and should bring new messages and meanings to a variety of age groups, whether it is to the young adult demographic or to adult speculative fiction readers. Bacigalupi presents, once again, a frightening vision of the future, one that seems very likely to me. While I did not feel that it’s up to the same caliber as The Windup Girl, it stands very well on its own, and leaves me wanting much more from Bacigalupi’s world.

The Weather Outside

It's finally snowing again in Vermont, and we're expected to get up to a foot in some places. Not necessarily central Vermont, which has lost a lot of its snow and taken on a spring-like atmosphere, something that will hopefully be changing. Meanwhile the rest of the country has gotten all of the snow that should rightfully be Vermont's, with feet of snow at a time, exhausting the budgets of state highway departments two months into the year.

With the snow came, from conservative pundits, a quick outcry as to how the storms invalidated the theory of global climate change, on the grounds that if there is snow on the ground, clearly, there can't be any sort of warming in the atmosphere, and that the liberal lies concerning man's impact on the planet have been unraveled by the white stuff on the ground. Just as quickly, liberal commentators slammed, and rightly so, the thinking behind these fairly short sighted arguments.

There are a number of different theories when it comes to how the climate of the world has interacted with humanity in the past ten thousand years of our existence. Scholarly evidence points to irrefutable evidence that the planet has indeed been heating up - both the atmosphere and the oceans (which are a major component to the Earth's atmosphere), and that this trend largely fits with the rise of industrialization around the world. By and large, there is an assumption that these two figures are inextricably linked together. This may or not be the case, but it does present a compelling notion that humanity is indeed responsible, at least in part, for some of the changes in the atmosphere. Numerous scientific groups from around the world look to general circulation models (which attempt to mathematically link the atmosphere, the oceans and life of the planet into a representation of the world) to help see what is happening in the world. While their methods differ, there is a general consensus that humanity has contributed to CO2 in the atmosphere in a way that is likely to raise global temperatures between .05 and 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Brian Skinner, Stephen C. Porter and Jeffrey Park, Dynamic Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology, 5th Edition, 518) While a single degree doesn't seem like a lot, and is even welcomed by some (I can't begin to say how many people I've heard say that they'll welcome Global Warming with each new snowfall each year) that sort of rise in temperature does more than just heat up the planet. With increases in temperatures, minute changes within atmospheric patterns occur - increased evaporation from water sources in turn leads to more precipitation elsewhere, which in turn has an effect on other areas, which in turn has its own effects in other areas. This is why the term Global Warming has been shifted in recent years to the more politically correct sounding Climate Change - not necessarily for politically correct reasons, but simply because Global Warming does not cover the entire story. Global Warming, in a way, is a component of Global Climate Change.

While wide-scale reporting of the weather did not really exist for much of the world prior to the Second World War, leading to only recent accurate data, other sources of information can be found within the geologic record. Global Warming and Climate Changing events are nothing new within the Earth's history, and numerous locations around the world help to pinpoint what happened in the past. On each continent, large formations of Limestone, topped with glacial deposits, point to long periods of warming periods, followed by global cooling events. Ancient ocean bed deposits littered with drop stones provide concrete and tangible evidence that these sorts of events happened time and time again, over the courses of thousands of years. With the most recent indications pointing to new elements of climate change, and with the possibility of humans speeding up what might be a natural process, the real question becomes, not what we can do about it, but what can we do next?

When looking through the geologic column, it becomes readily apparent that these sorts of changes occur often, and that the planet's climate has changed drastically throughout the billions of years of its existence. On both sides of the liberal and conservative arguments, there exists a certain stupidity and simplification to the issue at hand. I don't necessarily think that human society should be vilified for essentially doing what life generally does when left to its own devices: expand and make it easier to reproduce, or that we should blindly close our eyes to the changes that are clearly happening in the world. Where there is snowfall in Washington DC - In the middle of winter, I might add, there are countless other problems around the world as global weather patterns shift. Our atmosphere has a fickle attitude, and our memory only extends so far, but we have become comfortable with what we remember and what we are used to.

What I dislike the most is the timing of much of the arguments against Global Climate Change, with allegations towards respected scientific bodies, resignations and the recent row with the sudden weather, and the entire theory of climate change has been thrown into question, with TV pundits talking back and forth, and instant polls from viewers being broadcast as real news. The notion that human-made climate change is certainly open to debate, but there is irrefutable evidence that the planet’s temperature is rising. The idea that the polling data taken from average Americans is put toe to toe with decades of scholarly, peer reviewed evidence is just ridiculous. I would hardly expect any sort of average person to understand the science and workings behind how our climate works, not to mention the analysis of such a study, and when said viewers are fed information and doubt from the media, the comparison is even more ridiculous. I, as someone educated in geology and scientific method, can hardly understand the implications and vast nature of such science.

What scares me the most is that the television pundits who go on screen and doubt the existence of such a phenomenon or before a wide scale audience at a convention to dispute such claims most likely know that what they are doing is playing to the fears and uncertainty of the public to fulfill some larger agenda that they might have: whether it’s demonstrating climate change legislation as a sort of over-reach of the Federal Government or of elite liberalism gone wrong. And in reaction, the left overreacts, making fun or coming across as arrogant in their rebuttals, rather than explaining the background of the science involved with such a concept. In the end, it just helps to fulfill the images of both sides of political thought, all the while just adding to the hot air around the world.

The problem with all of this is the dismissal of scientific method, and it demonstrates that much of the mentality and feeling that existed under the Bush administration still exists within a large segment of the United States. There seems to be an irrational fear of academics, of learning and of knowledge, in favor of someone’s gut instincts and what they can see. The principles behind science are sound: any sort of phenomenon can be replicated and tested, but the thinking behind sciences seems to elude much of the population, something that is then exploited when something out of the ordinary occurs, such as the storms that have blanketed the United States recently.

In the meantime, I wouldn't mind if the weather patterns would shift back to normal, so I can get a proper winter back to the places where it can be appreciated.

(In the time that I wrote this last night and the time that I posted this, we got a foot of snow.)