fiction by paolo bacigalupi
I’m going through the photos of the trip, mostly wedding photos and family stuff, but this was a funny moment in Ranchi. We got shaken down by an elephant on the outskirts of the city.
Through the windshield:
Looking over the roof of the SUV:
He blocked the SUV, and wouldn’t let us pass until we handed rupees to his elephant.
I’m going to be in India for the next three weeks, visiting relatives in Kolkata, Ranchi, and Mumbai. Probably checking email sporadically. And yes, I am feeling a little hesitant about this. We stopped watching CNN yesterday because it just fires up lizard-brain panic functions that aren’t really relevant to our situation. We won’t be in touristy or upscale areas for most of the time, so even though the visuals coming out of India are horrifying, they aren’t really indicative of where we’ll be in the country. Still, I can’t say it didn’t give us pause.
Thanks to Lou Anders at PYR Books, my short story “The Gambler” which appeared in the original anthology Fast Forward 2 is now available online for free reading at PYR’s website.
When I wrote “The Gambler,” I had just finished a stint as online editor of a non-profit magazine, where I worked primarily on the question of how a print publication could transition online and not die in the process. Blogs and RSS feeds, community-building tools and payment models, push and pull technologies and social networks filled my days. And along with it, always, the business pressures we faced: How to generate revenue from our online work? How to measure value? How to make sure that print and online products didn’t gut one another? We were in a constant state of experimentation.
I can’t say that I found the answers; more like found a lot of questions. Everything from our budget to our staffing to our content focus imposed limits on what we could do, or even imagine doing, and there was always more that we could have been doing. But our magazine’s struggle to transition to a world dominated by new revenue models, customer expectations, and measurement technologies — and what that might imply for news gathering and journalists — really hung with me. “The Gambler” was the result.
In light of recent events in the publishing industry, everything from the Christian Science Monitor’s decision to go electronic to the New York Times’ precarious financial state, “The Gambler” has been feeling weirdly relevant. Maybe that’s just me, because I was and remain obsessed with these technologies and the fourth estate. Thanks to Lou Anders and Fast Forward 2, though, you can now take a look at one version of journalism’s future and decide for yourself.
Read “The Gambler” in its entirety at the PYR Books website.
Last night as Anjula and Arjun and I were coming home from a school event, Arjun looked up at the sky and said, “Look at all the stars.”
The night was absolutely black, no moon, and the sky was full with them, the Milky Way clearly visible. Arjun said, “They’re like snow.”
And in that moment, I could see what he saw. And I could also see that where I struggle for simile and metaphor, to take something common and make it visible again, even to myself, let alone a reader, Arjun, at 4 and half, when everything is still new, does it effortlessly.
The Typealizer tool claims to analyze your blog and classify your type. Here’s the result for windupstories.com:
INTP - The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.
What are you?
A recent article on videogames.
I’m interested in video games and how they’re becoming one of the primary narrative delivery devices for kids, and especially boys these days.
I keep wanting to say something more, and then I have to stop myself. From AP:
Britain faces sperm shortage, calls for donors.
Britain is facing a sperm donor shortage after reversing confidentiality laws and limiting the number of women who can use sperm from one donor, fertility experts warned Wednesday…
I had a surreal feeling as I was reading about mini-nuclear power plants that I was reading an article from The Onion:
The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.
‘You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,’ said Deal. ‘You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it’s too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.’
"astute social commentary in poignant, revelatory prose." -- Publishers Weekly, Best Books of the Year
