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Title: Pump Six and Other Stories
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
Narrator: Jonathan Davis, Eileen Stevens, James Chen
Format: Unabridged
Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
Language: English
Release date: 07-06-10
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 320 votes
Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Short Stories & Anthologies
Publisher's Summary:
Paolo Bacigalupi's debut collection demonstrates the power and reach of the science-fiction short story. Social criticism, political parable, and environmental advocacy lie at the center of Paolo's work. Each of the stories herein is at once a warning and a celebration of the tragic comedy of the human experience.
The 11 stories in Pump Six represent the best of Paolo's work, including the Hugo nominee "Yellow Card Man", the Nebula-and Hugo-nominated story "The People of Sand and Slag", and the Sturgeon Award-winning story "The Calorie Man". The title story is original to this collection.
With this book, Paolo Bacigalupi takes his place alongside SF short-fiction masters Ted Chiang, Kelly Link and others, as an important young writer that directly and unabashedly tackles today's most important issues.
Editorial Reviews:
Paolo Bacigalupi is fresh off of a Nebula Award win for his first novel, The Windup Girl, and his teen novel Ship Breaker is getting rave reviews. Now we're treated to some of Bacigalupi's earlier work in the form of Pump Six and Other Stories, a collection of short stories that will certainly feel familiar to those who love the dystopian settings of his longer works. The collection is narrated by a carefully matched set of three fine actors James Chen, Eileen Stevens, and Jonathan Davis who share a natural reading style that brings the storyteller's art to the tale.
The collection opens strong with "Pocketful of Dharma", narrated by Chen, who plunges us easily into the world of future China. A tale of moral dilemma, self vs. selflessness, and uploaded consciousness, "Pocketful of Dharma" is a satisfying and comparatively light story. It serves as a good introduction to the Eastern flavor of two stories found later in the collection, "The Calorie Man" and "The Yellow Card Man", both set in the world of The Windup Girl. "The Yellow Card Man" in particular seems to be almost a prototype of the novel.
The strongest pieces in the collection may be the ones furthest from Bacigalupi's Windup milieu. "The Fluted Girl" is set in a decadent future of fiefdoms, where fame is the only currency that matters to the wealthy, and their subjects are victims of their masters' aspirations and their perversions. Stevens ranges easily between the vulnerable Lidia suspended in an eternal pre-adolescence and her cold, ambitious mistress. The author's vivid world and the complicated, horrifying relationship between possessor and possessed come together in a story that the listener will find hard to forget.
In "The People of Sand and Slag" three nearly indestructible post-human friends discover a dog in the wasteland: fragile, mortal, needy, expensive, and the only one of its kind. Bacigalupi paints an original far-future landscape and peoples it with believable, relatable characters, voiced with the authenticity that Chen brings to all of his performances.
Narrator Jonathan Davis never disappoints in anything he does, but his true gift is dialog.
