The Windup Girl (Hugo Award Winner)

It’s the debut author’s dream, to write a book that springs out of nowhere and achieves the literary hat trick: killer reviews, an avalanche of awards, and (lest we forget) monstrous sales. That it happened to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, a grim, dystopic environmental sci-fi novel, surprised no one more than its author, who assumed […]

In 2009, Paolo Bacigalupi erupted onto the science fiction main stage with The Windup Girl. He had begun publishing a decade before, releasing a handful of critically acclaimed short stories, earning a number of nominations for the Nebula and Hugo awards, and helping to propel the novel into bookstores on a wave of goodwill from his peers and reviewers. In […]

tThe ability to write a great novel is some mysterious proportion of natural talent and hard-won mastery of the craft, yet the business of publishing, that eternal conflict between art and commerce, loves to celebrate the new, the untested. That is to say, there’s nothing quite like the excitement of a debut novel, even though […]

Speculative fiction often employs a deliberate vagueness when it comes to the economics of fictional universes. In fantasy novels, gold coins may serve as simple, flexible, generally ill-defined units of exchange, often found whenever convenient and obeying no known rules of economics. In science fiction, money is often handwaved or completely ignored (because building and […]