New short story from Paolo Bacigalupi

April 27, 2016 8:52 AM

Paolo Bacigalupi's new short story "Mika Model" is available online to read.
posted by Joh (26 comments total)

Content notice for male gaze to the nines and eventually graphic violence.

FWIW, Bacigalupi is not PK Dick and he can't do noir with fembots.
posted by sukeban at 9:06 AM on April 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

Guy loves his fembots, huh?
posted by leotrotsky at 9:08 AM on April 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I tried and really wanted to like The Windup Girl because everyone kept on telling me it was worth reading, but something about his writing just felt off. Not my style I think. I'll give this a go and see if his shorter fiction is different or if his writing has changed. My attempt at The Windup Girl was more than 5 or 6 years ago. So maybe this time will be better.
posted by Fizz at 9:09 AM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

FWIW I couldn't get through The Windup Girl either, but I grudgingly enjoyed The Water Knife. It sort of annoyed me all the time but the story was good and I liked how frighteningly near future it felt. This short story was enjoyable to me, in the way that short stories just have to be a quick fun read.
posted by Joh at 9:13 AM on April 27, 2016

I thought the worldbuilding and overall plot of Windup Girl was terrific-- minus the whole, you know, Windup Girl thing. Was wondering if Water Knife was worth it. It's YA, no? Gonna go RTFSS now.
posted by gwint at 9:16 AM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I really, really liked The Water Knife. It was not YA lit (That would be his book Ship Breaker and its sequel).
posted by prozak at 9:28 AM on April 27, 2016

I didn't believe a single thing in this story except the premise. Dude would have done better to write a short essay; fiction isn't his metier.
posted by languagehat at 9:29 AM on April 27, 2016

You don't think the [x] is the best place to locate an appliance's on/off switch?
posted by sukeban at 9:31 AM on April 27, 2016

I can only read Bacigalupi's work if I pretend he is a contemporary of, you know, someone like Heinlein. I really liked The Windup Girl, and his other fiction is better (because fewer titillating sex-worker rape-bot scenes) but I have lots of practice ignoring the fact that The Writer Is A Jerk. I mean, you could have written that in the 20th century and been only a garden-variety asshole, but to write that stuff today means that you are an exceptional asshole. It's still decent disaster-porn fiction, though.

I genuinely wonder if he posts uncomplimentary rants about SJWs or rage comics about race on some __chan or other.
posted by BrunoLatourFanclub at 9:32 AM on April 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

If I were going to stir up Blade Runner and Chinatown, add a soupçon of Cherry 2000 and then try to sell it to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine circa 1981, this is exactly what I'd write.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:34 AM on April 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Circa 1981 we had Molly from Neuromancer. This is really stale.
posted by sukeban at 9:37 AM on April 27, 2016

If I were a prosecutor, and a police friend called me in the middle of the night reporting that a robot had murdered someone for apparently the first time in human history, I would be the -f- out of bed and on the scene in my pajamas if need be.

How does a woman pull a head out of a shopping bag in a police station and nobody notices but the person interviewing her?

How does the interviewer leave the station, with the woman, without telling anyone where he's going?

I think maybe he just wrote this story too quickly--plus this "jointly edited" thing probably had an impact. Too many continuity problems with little or no handwaving, not enough time suffusing the story with the stated themes instead of putting them directly in lines of dialogue.

The Windup Girl did that pretty well apart from the "explicit sexual assault on robot" scenes, which scanned, to me, more like Tarantino ("something terrible happened to her and she goes on this massive vengeance quest with her badass powers!") than George R.R. Martin ("Back Then, as I have imagined it, this sort of thing happened all of the times!").
posted by radicalawyer at 9:41 AM on April 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

We know he can do stuff other than sexbots, didn't he have a well-received short story riff on that one AD&D mechanic from Dark Sun?
posted by comealongpole at 9:43 AM on April 27, 2016

I thought the worldbuilding and overall plot of Windup Girl was terrific-- minus the whole, you know, Windup Girl thing

Yeah, I've read most of his ouvre at this point because I really, really enjoy the way he constructs his settings, the sort of Children of Men level of background detail - but the characters and often the plot with which he populates said settings tend to be second rate to gratingly awful.
posted by AdamCSnider at 10:26 AM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I thought the worldbuilding and overall plot of Windup Girl was terrific

I like my science fiction to have a shred of plausibility to hang its craziness on. Having to use mechanical springs for everything because *handwavey explanation about why solar and nuclear and batteries can't get the job done* was a bridge too far for me. The least he could have done was set it on a fantasy world where $handwavey_explanation could just be accepted as axiomatic.
posted by chimaera at 10:54 AM on April 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Huh. MeFi seems a little grumpier since this post.
posted by gwint at 11:57 AM on April 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I found Windup a little boring but with some interesting world stuff. I do not recall being bothered by the sexual exploitation issue, though how much of that is because it's not crappy versus because I am already working a little hard at not being bored & am a dude, I dunno.

The springs didn't bother me at all; is it maybe not the most nuanced way to SF a metaphor for exploiting the physical labor of a population? Okay. But I don't need my street-level characters to know why it is the way it is.
posted by phearlez at 12:10 PM on April 27, 2016

Huh. MeFi seems a little grumpier since this post.

I found that previous post sufficiently grumpy past the first bit. Not a fan of PB myself.
posted by ovvl at 12:29 PM on April 27, 2016

I love Bacigalupi's world building but I can't take the torture and sexual violence and extreme bullying he seems to be obsessed with.
posted by Bee'sWing at 1:48 PM on April 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I quite enjoyed Windup, mostly due to the world building (I liked the springs - they heightened the importance of food and calories in that future world) but the sexual violence really grated. I can see how he needed to build up some sort of pressure point where she snaps, so she could be the pivotal event in the story at that point, but to me he just seemed to revel in it. It felt like he enjoyed writing those sections too much. I've not read his other work but based on this short story, I won't. It makes me feel sleazy.
posted by dowcrag at 2:04 PM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I read The Windup Girl, and its persistent and inappropriate* male gaze convinced me that I didn't want to read more works by him. It really undermined my respect for his writing because of what a huge, hypocritical, glaring blindspot it was.

At least not unless I was reassured that he got better. The first comment in this thread does not reassure me.

(I would never have given that novel a Hugo. Actually, the older I get, the more I realize it's not radical to say that this is a major flaw that seriously harms the quality of a work, to the point that it doesn't deserve awards. Maybe that will get people to start paying attention to how bad this stuff is. It's only perceived as radical because of how acceptable commonplace sexism of this kind is.)

* I say "inappropriate" because it was so frequently directed at the female sex slave android, which--given he probably thought he was writing something "empowering" because she got "revenge"--made it all the more frustrating.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:16 PM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

It felt like he enjoyed writing those sections too much. I've not read his other work but based on this short story, I won't. It makes me feel sleazy.

I've read The Windup Girl and Ship Breaker and Drowned Cities and there is much to admire. The world he built is terrifyingly plausible and bleak. But the violence made me swear off buying or reading anything more.
posted by Bee'sWing at 2:37 PM on April 27, 2016

I liked Windup Girl quite a lot, mostly for the world building, which I thought was great. Felt the same way about Ship Breaker, but it was so jarringly violent that I had trouble getting through it. The sequel was worse and I gave up. The Water Knife - not so much, too techno thrillery and again, too violent for me. I'm getting soft in my old age. However. If you predicate that sexbots are likely to be a thing - and I think they probably are - then violence against them is also going to be a thing. And if you are writing about sexbots than you're defacto writing about the male gaze. I kind of appreciate his frankness, really. The futures he constructs aren't pleasant ones but I think that the questions he's raising are interesting ones. That said, this story doesn't hold together for the reasons radicallawyer has summed up, above. It feels like a first draft and not a very interesting one at that.
posted by mygothlaundry at 2:41 PM on April 27, 2016

And if you are writing about sexbots than you're defacto writing about the male gaze.

Hold up.

There is a big difference between writing about the male gaze and writing with the male gaze. No one is saying that you can't write about the male gaze.

No one is saying that sexbots are unrealistic, either. Hell, we already have them in a less sophisticated form. But the way that Bacigalupi approaches the topic is almost masturbatory; he's preoccupied with their sexuality, which he portrays in a manner that panders to the male gaze.

Let me put it this way: Reading The Wind-Up Girl, I had the distinct impression that sexbots are a personal sexual fantasy of Bacigalupi. I wouldn't have gotten that impression from an author who had managed to break outside of his male gaze. Given the subject matter that is an uncomfortable feeling to have while reading the book, and it really undermines any credibility he has to write that plotline.

I think that there are authors who could tackle the concept well, but I'm tired of (primarily male) authors thinking that they can excuse their preoccupation with beautiful, subservient, overly-sexualised, abused sexbots with "but it's realistic."

What about writing about issues of artificial sentience, consent, and free will about a female android that has a different job than fucking people for once? And if you really need to explore these issues in the context of sex (though at this point I would ask why), what about doing something really radical, like not lingering on her sexuality, her beauty, or graphic descriptions of the sexual violence that is done against her?

Bacigalupi is not "being frank." The more I write, the more I would like to see an actual frank treatment of it. Does anyone know if this idea has been done well, or if it's been too poisoned by sleazy, horny men for anyone to want to touch it? It would probably look more like The Handmaid's Tale than what Bacigalupi writes.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 4:29 PM on April 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

I was quite unsatisfied with the fundamental ... mechanics ... of the story.

I'll accept his amazingly-realistic robots in a world that apparently doesn't have self-driving cars. But since when would any police officer drive a killer to a murder site, alone and unannounced, and merely wonder if he might have told her to sit in the back seat? Bacigalupi does imply that Mika is messing with Rivera's mind, but still. And then he lets a civilian enter the crime scene and interfere with the prime piece of evidence! This isn't implasible SF; it's a failure of basic plausible world building.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:02 PM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's interesting to compare this story with Elizabeth Bear's Dolly (March 2016; 6,000 words), which starts at a sexbot crime scene, but moves in a different direction.
posted by kurumi at 8:58 PM on April 27, 2016 [1 favorite]