Paolo Bacigalupi: Gift of Story
PAOLO TADINI BACIGALUPI was born August 6, 1972 in Colorado Springs CO, moving with his parents to rural western Colorado soon after. When his parents divorced, he split his time between them, finishing high school at the private Colorado Rocky Mountain School. He attended Oberlin College in OH, where he met his wife-to-be Anjula (they married in 1998) and majored in East Asian Studies, spending time in China for foreign-language immersion. After graduating in 1994 he worked in China as a consultant, helping foreign companies enter the Chinese market. He returned to the US, and in 1996 worked for an early web development company in Boston. He and Anjula lived in Denver before returning to the small town of Paonia in 2006. Bacigalupi worked as the online editor for High Country News, a biweekly environmental newspaper in print and online, before becoming a full-time fiction writer.
Bacigalupi was a frequent contributor to F&SF, publishing his first story there, ‘‘Pocketful of Dharma’’, in 1999, though he first came to wide attention with Sturgeon finalist ‘‘The Fluted Girl’’ (2003) and Hugo and Nebula Award nominee ‘‘The People of Sand and Slag’’ (2004). His work has also appeared in Asimov’s and other magazines and anthologies. Other stories include ‘‘The Pasho’’ (2004); Hugo nominee and Sturgeon Award winner ‘‘The Calorie Man’’ (2005); ‘‘The Tamarisk Hunter’’ (2006); Hugo and Sturgeon Award finalist and Asimov’s Award winner ‘‘Yellow Card Man’’ (2006); ‘‘Small Offerings’’ (2007); ‘‘Softer’’ (2007); Hugo, Sturgeon, and Nebula Award nominee ‘‘The Gambler’’ (2008); and Nebula Award finalist novella The Alchemist (2011). Many of his stories were collected in Locus Award winner Pump Six and Other Stories (2008). His collection The Tangled Lands (2018), co-written with Tobias S. Buckell, won a World Fantasy Award.
First novel The Windup Girl (2009) was a huge critical and commercial success, named one of the top ten fiction books of the year by Time magazine, and won Hugo, Campbell Memorial, Compton Crook, Locus, and Nebula Awards. Near-future thriller The Water Knife (2015) was a John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist.
First YA novel Ship Breaker (2010) won the Michael L. Printz Award, was nominated for the Andre Norton Award, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and made the Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults list, presented by the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association. Sequel The Drowned Cities appeared in 2012, and third volume Tool of War in 2017. Other works for young readers include middle-grade novel Zombie Baseball Beatdown (2012) and standalone SF YA The Doubt Factory (2014).
Bacigalupi took a hiatus from book publishing (for reasons discussed in the interview), but returned this year with his first fantasy novel, Navola, launching a new series set in a world inspired by Renaissance Italy.
Excerpt from the interview:
“I didn’t talk to anybody about writing Navola while it was happening. I built it very quietly and then I looked at this gigantic story I’d built, and I realized there was no way it would fit inside of a single volume. I looked to see where I could sort of shave a chunk off and make that Book One of the larger story. Then I went back and I did a full revision on that chunk, and really built out all the scenes and layers, as opposed to the initial version, which was very much a discovery pass. This pass was much more of an editorial pass with an eye toward making something not just for myself, but as if I was going to give the gift of story to somebody else to read. But even then I don’t think I really even talked about it to my wife while I was creating it. It was just something I was doing quietly, and then there was a moment where I looked at it and thought, ‘Yeah. I’m going to send this to my agent.’
“The version I sent to my agent was about 150,000 words. It was very much like, ‘Hi! I know we haven’t really talked for the last five years, but here’s this thing I made – do you think it’s sellable?’ I think at some point during my dark period I’d sent him another book that he was not excited about at all, some garbage I was generating in the 2016 period. He was right about that book; I binned it. But with this one, I was like, ‘Let’s see what happens,’ and he got back to me and said, ‘I love this.’
“Navola is set in a fantasy world that’s sort of similar to the Italian Renaissance. Navola is a wealthy trading city, and a center for merchant banking, with influence that stretches up and down the Cerulean Peninsula and across the Cerulean Ocean. It’s the story of a young boy named Davico growing up in the incredibly powerful di Regulai merchant banking family. The boy’s father, Devonaci di Regulai, manipulates not just trade and money – their family is wealthier than many kingdoms – but also the politics of Navola, and the politics of the city-states around them with trade promises, and favors, and, essentially, bribes. The boy is a very naïve and kind-hearted boy, and he’s meant to inherit the reins of power from his father. The central conflict is that Davico is not very well-suited to take on his future role, and this is very dangerous for the family. It’s the story of that boy coming of age in this Renaissance-like world.
“I’ve never been able to concisely describe this story. I cannot thumbnail it very well. Partly it’s a coming-of-age story, partly it’s an exploration of this entire fictional world of Navola and its politics and its people and their language and how they think about one another, and it’s also an exploration of all of these different people who surround the boy’s life, the Regulai family, all of his different advisors, and their philosophies. The book is also philosophical in certain weird ways.
“There are lots of different layers, histories, myths, cultures, and there’s also a layer of magic in it: There’s a huge fossilized dragon eye on the father’s desk, and it’s calling to the boy in some strange way. This is another part of Davico’s life, that there’s this strange ancient magical artifact calling to him that’s sort of malevolent in itself.
“The dragon came right from the beginning, because I’d been looking for some new angle to write about a dragon for Strahan’s anthology. Dragons are pretty well-trodden ground. I came up with the first line of the book: ‘My father kept a dragon eye upon his desk.’ I liked this idea of this fossilized eye being there, and the idea that a dragon’s soul was contained within it, trapped inside for all time. That was right on the page, right away. Then, as part of the larger exploration, it became this idea of, ‘What does the dragon represent?’ It became a representation of the idea of wildness and nature and all the things that are very different from the boy’s upbringing in a city surrounded by the machinations of his father and the difficulties of sorting through the complexities of trade and banking and loans and risk and things like that – all the activities of humanity.
“Outside of the city is a wilderness, a mountainous area called the Romiglia, a wild area where human beings don’t really go, and the dragon kind of represents an aspect of that wildness. Part of the book is about the split between human life and striving, which philosophically they call Cambios, and the natural world, which philosophically they describe as Firmos. Eh. That’s another rabbit hole – I cannot describe this whole book!
“I definitely did research. I was reading a lot about the period of the Renaissance, the people who populated it, the Medici family, the Borgias, the warring city-states, the history of the mercenary companies during that period. The art too – it’s an amazingly colorful period because you’ve got the Medici, the Borgias, Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, all these people simultaneously, so there are a lot of threads to kind of follow. There’s all of this architectural stuff, Brunelleschi, it’s an embarrassment of riches. The pleasure of writing a world that’s not Italy is that you get to rob from all of it. You get to take everything that’s interesting, all the details you think are fun, but you can toss away all the parts you don’t care about.
“I didn’t want to write a monotheistic world, I didn’t want to write about Catholicism – great, I can chuck it. I don’t like how the Medici family rose and fell – great, I can chuck that, but keep merchant banking. I’m fascinated by how bankers influenced and were intertwined with politics, and how the mechanisms of banking became these engines of wealth for the Italian city-states, and how phenomenal it was. The idea of capital was really getting going during this period, and suddenly you’re seeing just how powerful it could be. So those parts I kept, and the architecture, all the domes and porticos and columns and stuff – yay!
“I was over in Italy, so some of that becomes research – the best research is the stuff you didn’t even know you were looking for, but then you see it and think, ‘I could totally use that.’ I was staying in Bologna, and one of the things about Bologna was all these rival families in the city would build these towers, and they were defensive towers for their families, but they were also statements of wealth and importance. At one point, Bologna was just spiked with these towers. But it’s also this really interesting architectural thing where the landscape is telling you something about politics, saying, ‘Oh, this city is not a cohesive political unit, even though you’ve got a wall that goes around the whole city – inside it, there are armed factions who war with each other, and retreat into their towers when they’re unsafe, then come out and attack each other. They’d imprison one another in their towers, all sorts of stuff. You can see this layer of anarchy clearly established in the architecture, and that’s not something that I would have organically thought of, but it’s something that I could observe and then steal and bring into my own world.
“There are things like that – and then language, of course. When I was studying Italian, I started to see how I could create an offshoot, a dialect of a Romance language, and I could spin out my own cultural language alongside Italian, and play with that new language to make Navola even more specific than it was already.
“All of that was a delight. The moment when you come up with a new word, or a new curse, all of that is just so good. When I came up with the idea of sfaccire, that people would mark their cheeks on one another’s boots to show obeisance to somebody, that made me think, ‘Oh, now they’ve got a marked cheek, I can use that as an insult, or as an indicator of someone being owned by another person – it can be used in so many ways.’ I love that I made up this word and now I get to play with it.
“I don’t know how big the series is going to be. That’s something I’m trying to sort out right now, actually. I sold two books, explicitly, to Knopf. Right now I’ve probably got 60,000 to 80,000 words of the next book written. A lot of the old stuff that I wrote I’m setting aside or recasting because I thought up more stuff as I reworked the initial book. I’ve got a ton of material, and I’m going to let the story be as long as it wants to be. If I need to go back to Knopf and offer another book, I’ll do that. If I can wrap it up elegantly in two, I’ll do that. I’m trying to be as loose as I can with it and allow the thing to take on the shape that it wants.
Interview design by Francesca Myman
Read the full interview in the December 2024 issue of Locus.
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