Book: Pump Six and Other Stories

As I was reading "The Windup Girl" I ordered a used copy of Paolo Bacigalupi's short stories. A couple of the stories are set in the same world as TWG, the rest are different but similar. Near-future dystopias. Life after the collapse of the industrialized world.

In one, "Pop Squad," science has discovered the secret to living forever. It's some kind of injection you have to take every 18-months. The medicine makes you feel "fizzy" and alive and horny all at once, and the injection resets your clock to 18 months before. Those who were old when rejoo came out remain trapped in their old bodies, younger people get to live in their prime-of-life bodies.

Only one problem, it makes you sterile. This is actually a good thing, because otherwise overpopulation would suffocate the world.

But the main character's job is to track down "breeders" who have gone off rejoo, who have gotten pregnant or given birth. The mothers are bundled off to work farms, to live out the remainder of their short lives doing hard labor for the good of the citizens.

Their children are summarily executed, at point blank range, with a high-powered pistol to the head.

The main character runs across a cute youngster and his attractive mother. The child is playing with a stuffed dinosaur toy, just like he used to have as a child. He finds himself unable to complete the task.

Disturbing story.

Okay, so maybe not all stories should be published.  The one about the guy who casually kills his wife, then feels relieved and heads for a vacation in Mexico, was more than disturbing.  It reads like court evidence.

The last story in the book, "Pump Six," previously unpublished, is far and away the best. It is set in the near future, and something -- something undefined -- has caused everyone in the world to lose a lot of IQ points. Stuff is broken everywhere and nobody knows how to fix any of it. Worse, nobody cares.

The narrator, a maintenance technician for Pump Six, a massive sewage pump under the city, finds a library on the campus of Columbia University, long since closed. He steals a bunch of engineering books in the hopes of teaching himself enough engineering to get Pump Six running again.

Trump's America, in other words.