Bacigalupi earned a lot of praise for his short story collection Pump Six, and is already getting raves for The Windup Girl (io9 review here).

io9: The Windup Girl has a lot of hard science in it related to energy and GMOs. Where do you get your ideas for that? Are you reading science journals?

Paolo Bacigalupi: 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.

I do research, but it's after stuff has percolated for a while. When I was an editor at High Country News I was reading all their stuff. There was a one-liner about checkerspots in [my short story] "The Gambler" - stuff like that, which I've absorbed elsewhere, drops in at convenient places as I'm writing. I'm always reading environmental journalism. Science writers point the way to interesting stories.

I don't think I'm unearthing any new science, though. I was just listening to Charles Stross talk about neuroeconomics and erudite concepts like that. I'm not like that. I'm working with basic science information.

I am interested in agricultural corporations and how they function. The idea that they own the genetics of our food supply is a really compelling thing to me. What will come out of that situation is a question mark in pop culture - for some reason I'm picking it up. I think it has to do with my lens. I'll see a supply chain or a sandal factory and immediately see the steps in how they've atomized a product. And I use that as the building blocks for a story. And then there's a layer of the made up, because I want that factory to feel a certain way.

Very few science fiction authors have dealt with the hard science of the environment. Do you think that's changing?

I'd like it to become more of a component that figures into SF. My fear is that it becomes window dressing - that we create lots of global warming futures where sea level has risen. Or there's a tip of the hat to various species going under – a wave of the hand saying yes this is our world – but it's not really an engagement. One way SF can go is to treat it less as a setting and more as a major component of the story.

I was just reading about a scientist down in Panama who has been rescuing these frogs from an onslaught of disease – it's like aliens coming down to Earth and rescuing humans before earth is destroyed. That's an interesting story to me. I immediately get this image of scientists parachuting into the jungle, trying to scoop up frogs to build a micro-ark of species!

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience. I'm not sure why biological science and environmental science don't inspire those same obsessions yet. I grew up in a hippie commune in Western Colorado where my parents were ineffectively trying to grow organic apples. My dad was an SF reader, but mostly a hippie commune guy. Now he's a sociologist who reads David Weber. There's a strange dichotomy. Because he was there I ended up having all these hippie values that are forced through the sieve of science fiction. I don't think many other core SF readers come up through that line.

Your work often deals with issues like peak oil and where we'll get our energy in the future. Why do you think so few other books deal with the obvious question of how we're going to rocket around everywhere when we have no more fuel?

We have a fair amount of disinterest with resource-level questions. Maybe that's because SF is an industrial literature.

I think the fact that we as writers don't engage with resource level questions is a symptom of our society where we just don't know where our stuff comes from. Industrial culture doesn't have to know – we let the market sort it out. We go to shelves in the store and get the food. When SF writers write, we've been trained not to think about where that resource comes from. We just assume somebody down there must be keeping the lights on and growing the food – that's how our world works!

But somebody needs to bring those offstage questions on stage. Where does energy come from? Where does the food come from? Where did the building block materials come from for whatever we're doing. We have a perception of post-scarcity already. And that problem is rife in SF. I'd like to SF touch on those questions – it will inform the society we'll build and the objects we'll build in the future. Or what we think of as a reasonably-designed house or computer screen. Resources define design, and we're designing worlds. So those questions need to be engaged with a lot more.

Do you feel like The Windup Girl is a political novel?

I have some political assumptions that inform the way the story's built. But the story does not have a political agenda. My short work is much more focused on having a key takeaway. That "moral of the story" - that awful killer of fiction. I would say with the novel I have values and political assumptions, though. Once you say giant agricultural corporations will stop at nothing for their profit margins – well, there are political values layered into that concept. But that's not the focus. It's not "agricorps control seedstock - bad bad bad!" The characters build their own stories.

I'd say this book has no key agenda at all. I sort of worried about that. What's the takeaway here? Actually, the takeaway was just "the end" - the characters fulfilled their arcs, and found their places in a difficult world. I always identify with my characters – it's what makes them real. You can't help but engage. I've never written a bad guy character who wasn't a part of me in some way. I don't support what they're doing but I identify with them. I have characters of four different nationalities and some part of me is threaded into that too.

Why did you decide to set this book in Thailand?

The real seed for this book happened many years ago – I was traveling in Southeast Asia and it was when SARS happened. Sudden respiratory illness was killing people like flies in Hong Kong. I traveled through there but didn't realize what was happening because the Chinese government was blacking out that information. When I crossed the border in Laos there was this explosion of information about SARS. But nobody knew how it was spreading.

Meanwhile I'm traveling in Southeast Asia in the hot season. Desperately, epically hot. By the time I arrived in Bankok these blisters were developing all over my body. I'm feeling diseased and I'm going to internet cafes googling on pictures of other people's skin diseases. I'm in this really hot building that was built like a giant solar oven. I'd turn on the fan, but the concrete walls were still radiating heat and my skin is falling off. Meanwhile all these people are coughing around you and all you can think is "SARS SARS SARS." That moment scarred me in some way. I feel like almost the whole book grew out of this miserable heat/disease/uncertainty thing.

I found myself writing stories set in hot, diseased settings. I kept writing versions of Bankok. My background is in East Asian studies and I lived in China, so part of me really wanted to set the story in China. That's the easy solution, because I have some expertise I can build on there. Whereas I knew very little about Thailand. And yet that place where I didn't understand a lot was so resonant that I couldn't get away from it.

Sometimes I worry about that choice - you do your best, and you do your fact checking, but you're always an outsider. So there's an inevitability of getting something wrong.

Sometimes people reach in and help you out. A bunch of people helped me with the book and rescued me from some solid spots of stupid. I read a bunch of Thai fiction before I stared writing, stuff in translation. And there's no agreement on how to represent Thailand in fiction. But I wanted to know how they represent their country to themselves. So that when I'm writing a Thai character I have some touchstones of understanding on how Thai literature looks at itself. The closest you'll get to being inside a Thai person's head is through Thai literature.

What's next for you?

I have a young adult novel called Shipbreaker coming out from Little, Brown next year. I'm under contract for another young adult novel after that, and I'm also working on a proposal for my next big [adult novel].

In the tradition of politically-minded hard SF writers like Iain M. Banks and Ian McDonald, Bacigalupi follows the interconnected stories of several people caught up in great social shifts. In the case of The Windup Girl, they're all caught in the genome industry's web: We have a covert "calorie man" called Anderson who tries to sniff out uncontaminated genomes for a Monsanto-esque multinational called AgriGen; a "yellow card" Chinese refugee named Hock Seng who is trying to climb to the top of the energy-generator black market in Thailand; Environment Ministry shock troops Jaidee and Kanya, whose job is to protect Thailand from contaminated genomes, foreign imports, and dirty energy; and the mysterious whore Emiko, a genetically-engineered "windup" person abandoned by her former owner in Thailand, where GMO people are illegal.

We follow these characters through every eschelon of Thai society, from backroom meetings between government officials to backroom performances at the strip club where Emiko is fetishistically degraded every night. The action takes place in the weeks leading up to a clash between the Trade Ministry - who want to open Thailand up to business with AgriGen and other multinationals - and the Environment Ministry, which has fought to keep Thailand and its ultra-valuable seed bank isolated from other nations (and ecosystems). The globe is still recovering from a series of diseases that ravaged crops and humans alike, so exposure to foreign people and objects can be deadly. Companies like PurCal and AgriGen have cornered the market on disease-free strains of rice and wheat, selling to countries where "blister rust" and GMO beetles have reduced food supplies to dust.

Thailand's seed bank, a collection of heirloom seeds from long-extinct plant species, has allowed the country to remain independent from the multinationals. The Environment Ministry's "white shirts," led by Jaidee, have burned all the contaminated fields and even recruited shady foreign gene hackers to help synthesize new, disease-resistant crops. But now times are changing. The palace is starting to support Trade, and calorie men like Anderson are secretly offering them lucrative deals to share the seed bank in exchange for military and financial support.

As these major players jockey for genome power, we watch as they miss obvious ways they could make Thailand rich again through other means. Anderson the calorie man has a cover operation to hide his real identity: He runs a factory that is trying to develop extremely efficient kink springs, or green batteries that work like watch springs - wind them up, and as they slowly unwind they release enough energy to power cars, planes, or factories. Anderson thinks the factory is great cover because the new kink springs will never work, and he can churn these useless items out perpetually without drawing attention to himself. Meanwhile his assistant Hock Seng knows the kink springs can work, and that they will revolutionize energy technology. He has plans to steal the kink spring plans and sell them to a local organized crime group to get rich. Little does he know his boss doesn't give a crap about the kink springs, and little does his boss know that he's sitting on a goldmine far more valuable than an AgriGen contract with the Thai government.

As tensions mount, Trade takes violent retribution against Environment. Violence begins bubbling up on all sides. And somehow Anderson meets Emiko, beginning a strange affair with the windup that has an unexpected effect on the future of Thailand.

One of the strengths of The Windup Girl, other than its intriguing characters, is Bacigalupi's world building. You can practically taste this future Thailand he's built, especially when Anderson discovers a newly-engineered fruit in the marketplace and tries to figure out what genes went into its construction. We're given just enough background to understand the economic and environmental factors that created this world, but Bacigalupi doesn't bog us down in endless discussions of ecosystems and fuel consumption.

And there are several moments where the hard SF here merges deftly with a magical realism that compliments it nicely. Thailand is haunted by GMO cats called "cheshires," created as souped-up pets, whose fur is designed to merge chameolon-like into the background. This has made them unstoppable predators, and they've eaten every other creature in their niche. But at certain points, it almost seems as if these creatures are seeping through walls. Which isn't surprising when you consider that Jaidee's ghost is a major character, and that Emiko has been implausibly engineered to have jerky, mechanical movements like a windup doll.

Indeed, Emiko is as much a magical realist creation as Jaidee's ghost. Created in Japan as a secretary, where windups are legal, she is impossibly beautiful and obedient due to a chunk of dog genes in her DNA. Her pores have been made miniscule to give her smooth skin, which means she overheats easily. And her jerky "stutter stop" movements, which mark her as GMO to everyone who beholds her, are pure genomic fantasy. She is half-doll, half-frankenwhore - a fabulation who nevertheless seems perfectly suited to a story set in a country where ghosts play a role in national politics.

While Bacigalupi's blending of hard science and magic realism works beautifully, the novel occasionally sags under its own weight. At a certain point, the subplots feel like tagents that needed cutting. And many of the military action sequences are drawn out far too long: We feel like we're watching an endless battle in slow-motion, which destroys the sense of urgency at the heart of this novel. But this is Bacigalupi's first published novel, and a lot of these problems feel like the narrative thoat-clearing of somebody whose next work will be more polished and well-paced.

Like all science fiction, The Windup Girl is obviously about the geopolitics of the present, where Monsanto tries to supplant local seedstocks with its own, and many governments teeter between the politics of isolationism and global capital. And yet Bacigalupi never slides into moralism or judgement. All his characters have their flaws and heroic moments. Nobody is clean, and there are no heroes who want to save the environment or bad guys who want to destroy it. Ultimately that's what makes this debut novel so exciting. It's rare to find a writer who can create such well-shaded characters while also building a weird new future world.

The Windup Girl (buy it!) comes out this month from Night Shade Books.

Image from the cover of The Windup Girl, by Raphael Lacoste.

"As environmental ideas have entered the zeigeist, mostly thanks to global warming—and still mostly focused on that issue—plenty of technology companies are lining up to tell us how they're helping green/save/clean the environment. Advertising agencies and PR firms are delighted to sell us any number of "green" gizmos and they're throwing in some nice self-esteem blowjobs for all of us, using their persuasive talents to assure us that we're enlightened and forward thinking because we just stuffed a green X into our Prius.

"But green blowjobs aren't really my gig. I'm not interested in PV cells, or solar paint, or zero emissions cars, or any of a zillion other objects that companies want to sell us so that we can feel good about ourselves while we roar off the cliff. If I had to think of a couple technologies that I greatly admire, I would say... wool sweaters and long underwear are fabulous. They have a low manufacturing cost and are far more efficient than burning coal for electric heat, or burning heating oil, and they might even obviate the need for a better-insulated house. I remain enamored with bicycles and their gears. These technologies are so wonderfully elegant and do so much while asking so little that I like them quite a lot. And certainly I like the hat and gloves I wear so that I can ride my bike to work in the winter, instead of being tempted to drive my car.

"But the one—the most absolutely key, the rock star green technology—that I champion over all others is birth control: vasectomies, IUDs, the pill, condoms. I don't care which kind you or your family prefers or finds most appropriate, I love them all. Any technology that reduces the absolute number of consumers (and particularly Americans and Europeans who consume the most) now that's a TECHNOLOGY!" — Pump Six And Other Stories author Paolo Bacigalupi, interviewed at EcoGeek.org.

Here's a great scene where Ong talks to his editor, who is upset because our hero refuses to write about celebrities and "news you can use." Instead, he focuses entirely on environmental issues:

I try to protest. “But you hired me to write the important stories. The stories about politics and the government, to continue the traditions of the old newspapers. I remember what you said when you hired me.”

“Yeah, well.” She looks away. “I was thinking more about a good scandal.”

“The checkerspot is a scandal. That butterfly is now gone.”

She sighs. “No, it’s not a scandal. It’s just a depressing story. No one reads a depressing story, at least, not more than once. And no one subscribes to a depressing byline feed.”

“A thousand people do.”

“A thousand people.” She laughs. “We aren’t some Laotian community weblog, we’re Milestone, and we’re competing for clicks with them.” She waves outside, indicating the maelstrom. “Your stories don’t last longer than half a day; they never get social-poked by anyone except a fringe.” She shakes her head. “Christ, I don’t even know who your demographic is. Centenarian hippies? Some federal bureaucrats? The numbers just don’t justify the amount of time you spend on stories.”

“What stories do you wish me to write?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Product reviews. News you can use. Just not any more of this ‘we regret to inform you of bad news’ stuff. If there isn’t something a reader can do about the damn butterfly, then there’s no point in telling them about it. It just depresses people, and it depresses your numbers.”

There's a lot of good stuff in Bacigalupi's story, and he offers a pretty accurate sense of how it feels to try to write good stories while tracking audience attention at a micro-level. Interestingly he doesn't take the easy route and set up the Gawker-esque new media companies as the bad guys. The celebrity stalkers and gadget hounds aren't craven idiots - they're good reporters, too, in their own way. One even tries to help Ong get his numbers back up.

But Ong only wants to focus on stories that are beloved by scientists and policy wonks, and they don't represent a demographic the advertisers care about. Interwoven throughout Ong's tale of his struggle to stay competitive in the newsroom are his memories of his father, kidnapped by the secret police during a future Laotian revolution that puts a conservative monarchy in power. Ong's past and political interests are about to propel him into the biggest celebrity gossip news story to hit the feeds in hours . . .

You can now read "The Gambler" for free online here, or pick up a copy of the awesome anthology Fast Forward 2 where it first appeared in print.