Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Book Review – Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

By Ben Kuhlman

Since 1980, when the science fiction community went through relative upheaval with novels like Ender’s Game and Neuromancer, it is rare for the Hugo and Nebula Award voters to agree on a single title.  (If you think about this, it makes sense – one group, the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America, gives its award to the best sci-fi/fantasy novel published in the United States, while the other gives the award to the best sci-fi/fantasy novel published in English.  Unless the author is an American, it is difficult to win both.)  When they do, it is usually for monumental achievements that these disparate voting blocs can agree on, such as The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon’s foray into alternate history, or American Gods, Neil Gaiman’s brilliant fantasy about faded deities skulking around the corners of the United States, reminiscing about past glories.  Paolo Bacigalupi recently joined this club with The Windup Girl, a complex and convincing sci-fi imagining of the world after catastrophic climate change, out-of-control genetically-engineered plants and animals, and corporate colonialism. 

Bacigalupi’s recent YA venture, Ship Breaker, echoes some of the structures of his earlier, larger, grown-up work.  Both are “post-apocalyptic.”  Both also seem to agree on the nature of the apocalypse – global warming, rising sea levels, increased scarcity of resources, much more pronounced separation among socioeconomic classes.  (A key difference between the two is that Ship Breaker is much less stuffed with scientific speculation about causes and effects.  Readers of The Windup Girl want to understand the main character’s personality, but they also want to understand why her skin has no pores, and why she moves in a telltale, jerky manner.)  Yet both books also call into question the permanence of social class, while simultaneously reiterating how strongly determined most characters’ (and most peoples’) lives really are.  This is a complex project for any novel, let alone a YA novel with an audience famous for its low tolerance of BS. 

At this point, I think I should take a step back, smile, and admit that I loved the book.  It was a gut-wrenching, thrilling, sometimes painful ride through a difficult and completely convincing world, with people who seemed to forget that they weren’t real.  I loved almost every inch of it, with the possible exception of the moment when Richard Lopez and his crew catch them with Nita the first time, and it sees like there is no escape.  I almost gave up on the book, because I was worried that something bad was going to happen to Nita, Pima, or Nailer.  That alone says something.

In the beginning of the book, fate – especially luck – seems all-powerful.  There are dozens of references: Lucky Strike, an important minor character, who is famous in the area for finding a hidden pocket of oil during a salvage job, and managing to sell it and pocket the money; Nailer’s unlucky slip through an air duct into a similar pocket of oil, and his lucky escape; all of the gifts Nailer receives from people hoping to share his good luck; the luck of finding Nita’s ship; her bad luck in wrecking in the storm; even the nicknames that Nailer (Lucky Boy) and Nita (Lucky Girl) get.  The importance that the culture of the ship-breakers places on luck stems from their sense of powerlessness.  Nailer constantly struggles with the injustice of Pima’s, and even Sedna’s, likely future, knowing that they have little hope of escaping early death and abuse.  Luck is the only way out.

Over the course of the book, Nailer begins to change this perception.  By the end of the book, his choices become more important than his fate or his “luck.”  His first choice – preserving Nita’s life – changes his life in complex ways, and the decisions he makes as the story unfolds become more and more important in determining his future.  He decides to use the train to flee the beach, and his decision proves wise; he decides to seek the help of the captain of the Dauntless, and it works in his favor.  The end of the book (which I will not ruin) comes about because of Nailer’s choices. 

Apart from this intriguing shift in Nailer’s perceptions about his fate, Ship Breaker is crowded with strange and interesting characters.  Nita doesn’t readily fall into the role of “love-interest,” nor does she immediately become bosom buddies with Pima and Nailer.    Richard Lopez is a frightening villain who seems ready to explode at any moment, but his connection to his son seems to restrain him in unpredictable ways.  Nailer sings Pima’s praises, and Pima saves his job (and his life) many times, but she is ready to kill Nita without really thinking about it.  Perhaps most interesting – more interesting even than Nailer, the conflicted hero – is Tool, the intelligent and coldly rational genetically-engineered “half-man” or “dog face.”  Other half-men (like Knot, a crewmember from the Dauntless, who ironically teaches Nailer to read) are designed to be unquestioningly loyal.  Tool seems to lack this genetic mandate – to the confusion of almost everyone.  Yet he also possesses the super-human strength, senses, and reflexes of the half-man.  Tool surprised me when he decided to join Nailer and Nita on the trip north; he surprised me again a few more times before the book ended.  Bacigalupi has managed to create characters that can surprise you, but whose choices still seem in harmony with what you are told. 

As I have already said, I enjoyed the book a great deal.  Bacigalupi is a gifted writer, with uncommon talent for character and vision.  Ship Breaker is a complex image of a bleak future, and it should be read for the almost enveloping completeness of its imaginary world.  More important, Bacigalupi tells a good story.  Either way, you should read it.  

Street Pharm

I finished this book last week, and I thought it would be interesting to review it. It's a book that some of my students are reading for literature circles, and I think that it's a pretty good book. I should say, though, that some of the material in the book is pretty grown-up, and this book probably deserves at least a PG-13 rating, if not an R rating. There are no explicit sex scenes, and not a lot of violence. But there are some suggestive details, and some drug use.

The book is about a Brooklyn drug dealer. He lives with his mother, who works nights, and whose husband is in prison for drug dealing. The main character, Ty Johnson, is 17 years old (and turns 18 before the end of the book), and has inherited his father's drug dealing business. He works with his father's ex-partner, Sonny. Of course, Ty is the brains behind the operation, and Sonny is merely a loyal partner who helps give Ty some legitimacy. The basics of the plot are simple: Ty gets thrown out of his high school and is sent to a strict alternative high school. He isn't able to sneak around at this new school like he could at the old, and he finds a brainy young woman that he eventually falls in love with. While this is happening, a new drug dealer moves into his territory from Miami and tries to force him out.

Ty visits his father in prison every few weeks, and his father is a cold, dedicated businessman who tells his son to use a hired killer to get rid of Darkman, the new dealer who wants to push Ty out of business. Ty doesn't want to go that far.

The conflict comes from the tension between his desire to be a wholesome, normal boyfriend for the young woman that he has recently fallen in love with, and from his dedication to his father's business and the competition that tries to kill him.

Eventually, Ty makes the predictable decision. I enjoyed the beginning of the book because Ty seemed to be pleasantly naughty, and his cynical views on business and society were both interesting and powerful. But I didn't quite believe the ending. I'm not sure that the ending captured the complexity of the situation - it's not easy to dump one career and choose something more honest but far less lucrative and powerful. It's even more difficult to stay that way.

I think this book - Street Pharm by Alison van Diepen - is worth reading because of its mostly believable depiction of the life of a drug dealer. But it doesn't do justice to the complicated network of factors that create drug dealers, or create crowds of people who admire drug dealers. That would have made it more than a good book - that woudl have made it a great book.

Opening

I'm not working hard enough on the other blogs, so I thought I would throw this one out there. Since I do a lot of reading of books for this age group. As a middle-level reading teacher, I feel obliged to read as much material as I can. It doesn't hurt that I love reading this stuff.

In recent months, I've read all of the His Dark Materials series, the Septimus Heap series, and the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (or whatever that one is called). I've really enjoyed the first two books of the Ranger's Apprentice, and I've read the first books in the Dark is Rising series, the Pendragon series, and the Artemis Fowl series. I wasn't able to finish Gregor the Overlander, Cirque du Freak, or Into the Mist. I read Fever, Maniac Magee, Hoot, Among the Hidden, Don't Look Behind You, Wanted, and The Outsiders.

I've been a lifelong reader of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and several science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. I've read a little Grisham and Tom Clancy. I've recently fallen in love with Ursula Le Guin, Jim Butcher, and especially Michael Chabon. I've read The Chronicles of Narnia, all of the Harry Potter series (several times), The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, the Foundation series by Asimov, quite a bit of L. Ron Hubbard's "dekology" (before I knew anything about scientology, and without any connection with that religion before or since). John Irving is an old favorite, as are Nabokov (I don't usually think of his work as a scholarly interest - it's too weird for that) and Philip Roth. I read a little Salman Rushdie to shock people, and enjoyed his prose despite that.

Apart from these, I'm also a grad student working on a dissertation on Faulkner. As a scholar, I've studied Faulkner (of course), quite a bit of regional fiction, Hemingway, Cather, Henry James, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Poe, Whitman, Dreiser, Chesnutt, and lots of others. I've done a good amount of work on Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and some medieval texts such as Piers Plowman, and, of course, Beowulf. I've read a little classical literature - Utopia, some Greek tragedies (especially Sophocles), the Iliad and the Odyssey, some of the Divine Comedy. I've read a lot of Plato and Aristotle for my philosophy double-major.

I also think it's important to mention that I've recently become a connoisseur of classic film, especially film noir. I've dabbled in some foreign film and fallen in love with Godard, Kurosawa, and Bergman. I think it helps to see the connections between film and fiction, especially insofar as one informs the other, artists in one medium often work in the other, and movements in one medium cross to the other. It's an interesting intertextual relationship that I would like to spend more time studying.

I suppose I'm trying to give my credentials, not merely try to brag and sound pedantic.