Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
I enjoyed The Windup Girl sufficiently that when LT kindly loaned
me a copy of Mr. Bacigalupi’s newest, I eagerly gobbled it up over a quiet
weekend on the Third Coast.
Ship Breaker is set in a not-so-distant future Earth in which the
petrol has run out, the seas have risen, and the delta between the rich and
poor has continued to increase to near third-world levels everywhere. In the
ruined beaches near the wreckage of Orleans, Nailer and his friends work as
ship breakers, stripping valuable copper and metals from the carcasses of
derelict ancient tankers. Their existence is a hard, cruel one, where the
strong take what they can from the weak and only the lucky or clever survive
for long. Many cyberpunk staples appear, from rampant amphetamine abuse to
organ harvesting syndicates, though the networks and AI that likely exist
somewhere out there are far beyond the reach of Nailer and his illiterate
village of scavengers.
When a massive “City Killer” storm deposits a strange bit of
scavenge int.Nailer’s world, he is propelled into an adventure. The novel has a
bit of young adult bildungsroman learning and growing, and likely has only
about a PG-13 rating, but is still sufficiently violent to feel gritty.
Good world creation, good sci-fi. I’m looking forward to his next
novel, The Drowned Cities.
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