Environmental Crisis and Images of Desire in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories

Abstract

In the wake of mounting warnings from ecologists and other scientists, contemporary fiction writers have been alerting their readers to the environmental crisis as manifested in droughts, floods, wildfires, polar ice cap melting, rising sea levels, air, water, and soil pollution, species extinction, and a host of other ills. Within the realm of contemporary science fiction, Paolo Bacigalupi, a highly acclaimed American author, describes a world in the throes of catastrophic ecological change. Through his meticulously crafted narratives, Bacigalupi delivers a prophetic message, delineating environmental crises within the context of a posthuman world.

Employing pertinent concepts derived from object-oriented ecological theory, this paper employs Jane Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter”, Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobjects”, Stacy Alaimo’s theory of “trans-corporeality”, and Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence” to see how Bacigalupi engages in current discourses on the environmental crisis and images of desire in The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories. Bacigalupi presents grotesqueries against a background of multiple, post-apocalyptic disasters. While societal elites indulge in hedonistic experimentation, mega-corporations engage in genetic manipulation on humans, plants, and animals in pursuit of progress, aesthetic trends, profit, or survival. Humanity’s ongoing destruction of the planet in service to a consumer culture, along with the disastrous results of attempting scientific “fixes” without understanding the interconnecting causes or the scale of the phenomenon they are trying to “fix”, beg the question of whether science and technology will be able to prevent or ameliorate future ecological crises, or inadvertently precipitate even graver predicaments. Bacigalupi’s critique, illustrated through grim narratives replete with macabre examples, serves as a poignant exhortation, urging humans to meditate on and then prevent or mitigate the impending disasters of our own making.