Fans of the extreme physical action—violent, visceral, and
wrenching—of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy now have something in common
with fans of Philip K. Dick’s philosophical, alt-future ruminations about the
nature of humanity.
It’s a strange mix, but the way Paolo Bacigalupi does it, it
feels natural. The child protagonists of Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities leave hooks deep in the willing reader. The world falls apart, and yet
the kids are still kids underneath their adaptation to their environment.
The natural environment is only the first of the changes
affecting the characters. In the wake of extreme climate change, the political
unity and economic base of the United States have vanished. Scavengers and
soldiers prey on the dead and the living, respectively. Bacigalupi writes child
protagonists entirely native to this post-apocalyptic world. They adapt or die,
and many die despite adapting. For the survivors, characteristics we think of
as childlike are a luxury that could get them killed.
Bacigalupi also introduces adults also shaped in varied ways
by the environment. Some are hard, cruel, and outwardly strong. Others are
kind, generous, and outwardly weak. There is a fairly strong valuation of adult
behaviors in Bacigalupi’s two books, but nothing so uninteresting as judgement.
The cruel, hard adults are neither excused flatly for their circumstances, or
blamed flatly for their actions. When doing right gets people killed, how are
we to judge those who do wrong to survive? There are distinctions—cruelty for
entertainment versus extreme violence for survival—that teenagers and adults
will be better able to parse than kids. These books are definitely for those
readers.
There’s an interesting structure to these books. Whereas
Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy has one protagonist and a fixed set of support
characters, Bacigalupi’s Drowned Cities trilogy (only 2/3 published with the
title book of the series coming second) has different protagonists in each of
the first two books.
At times, reading the second book, I felt that Nailer, the
protagonist of Ship Breaker, would show
up in a few pages. In a sense, he is the ideal companion of Malia, the second
book’s protagonist. Bacigalupi kept me anticipating his reappearance for most
of the book. However, Ship Breaker
shares only one character with the sequel, and the discovery was so unexpected,
I’ll leave it to readers to discover.
All of these characters—the culled and calloused children,
the scarred and scary adults, and the human-animal hybrids Bacigalupi
invents—explore some of the same ground where Philip K. Dick left tracks. What
counts as human? It’s not easy to answer. Like Dick, Bacigalupi leaves the
argument (for now) inconclusive. The answers aren’t simple, and having opened
the can of worms, the humans of Philip Dick’s worlds with their un-welf-aware
androids and diembodied intelligences, those of Bacigalupi’s with their hybrids
and “nasty, brutish, and short” lives imposed by constant war argue it out
inconclusively, through words and deeds.
One difference to note: as much as I like Philip K.
Dick’s books, Bacigalupi is the more polished writer of dialogue and character.
The standards of science fiction writing have changed. Challenged by Dick’s
generation and their successors to come up with better ideas and smoother prose,
Bacigalupi’s antecedents and peers created stronger and more literary works.
For some reason or reasons, the science fiction I’m reading this decade or so
features more young people, whereas the sci-fi I grew up with featured mainly adults.
