Writing Science Fiction Thrillers in the Age of Climate Change

Paolo Bacigalupi

Tuesday, 17 Apr 2018 at 7:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union

Paolo Bacigalupi is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer and author of several popular dystopian novels for young adults, including Ship Breaker and, most recently, Tool of War. His debut novel, The Windup Girl, received Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named one of the ten best novels of 2009 by TIME Magazine. A work of environmental science fiction, it explores the unintended effects of bioengineering and a future world in which fossil fuels are no longer viable. Bacigalupi’s latest novel for adults, The Water Knife, is a near-future thriller about climate change and drought in the southwestern United States. Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writers Series
Paolo Bacigalupi’s work has appeared in WIRED, Slate, Salon.com, High Country News, OnEarth Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. His debut young adult novel, Ship Breaker, was a National Book Award finalist, and its sequel, The Drowned Cities, received Kirkus Review’s Best of YA Book Award in 2012.

His short fiction been nominated for three Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story of the year. It is collected in Pump Six and Other Stories, a Locus Award winner for Best Collection and also a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly.

Read an interview with Paolo Bacigalupi: Looking at Morality through Science Fiction

ADDITIONAL EVENT
Writing Brave: A Discussion on the Craft of Writing with Paolo Bacigalupi
Tuesday, April 17, 2018, 2:10-3:00pm
Gallery, Memorial Union
Join us for an informal moderated craft talk. Writers will have the opportunity to ask questions and hear Paolo Bacigalupi discuss his own writing process.

“One thing stands out to me: I like writers. I like those people who struggle to say something with fiction. Those people who struggle to shape an idea, or a character or a scene, struggle to get a voice and hold on to it through the whole of a long project. I like those people who do not gaggle about with theoretical abstractions of what a book should be, or could be, or might be, but instead dare to face the thing that they actually can create, and that will never come close to the platonic ideal of whatever some outsider will say is good. I like the people who dare the messy complexity of hundreds of thousands of words, tangled, all connected, all influenced by one another, lace webworks, painstakingly and messily constructed. Those webs of story might shake in the wind, and might come apart when people prod them, might barely manage to cling to a shape, but I love them for their bravery.”
Paulo Bacigalupi, “A Thought About Writers”

Cosponsored By:
  • Ames Public Library Friends Foundation
  • ISU Writers' Guild
  • MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
  • Pearl Hogrefe Fund
  • Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
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