The Redemption of - Paolo Bacigalupi

"One of the things you think about reading is that you want books to be worthwhile—you want them to have lots of interesting ideas, you want them to be socializing influences, all those kinds of things. But on some other level, you’re just—and this is more from my wife’s perspective—as a school teacher she just wants boys to start thinking that reading is fun. You take them where they are, you get them involved with books, you make them think that books are enjoyable, that things that are there that are going to blow their brains, and are going to be really great. And then you’ve got time to introduce them to more stuff. The idea is it’s not the last book that they’re going to read, it’s the first book that they’re going to read. If there’s anything I’d like to see it’s actually more trashy boys’ fiction in the YA space, on the assumption that much like Gossip Girl in the girls’ space, it’s not going to be the last book they read, it’s going to be the first one. I personally haven’t seen a lot of that yet, but I’m not the best read in the genre so I could be wrong."

...

"It’s interesting because I feel like that’s the book where I took lots of risks. I mean, I pretty much took every risk I possibly could in The Windup Girl. So when you’re taking lots of risks, you know, your failure opportunities are big. You’ve huge failure opportunities. I suppose that’s the thing that made it good in other people’s eyes was that it was risky—I mean, it was as big and as ambitious as I could make it, whether it was setting it in a foreign country where I needed to do so much research, whether it was having so many characters on the page or whether it was just being so unapologetic about the violence in it or what. It was all risky. And so you feel exposed. I think with Ship Breaker there’s actually very little that’s truly risky about it"


5 out of 5

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/the-redemption-of-paolo-bacigalupi/