The dystopian element is not an oppressive government, but a nonexistent government, in a world of drowned cities. It's a dirty, dangerous job, yet he considers himself lucky to have it, because the alternative is worse. The main character, Nailer, is a ship breaker, a teenager who lives his life crawling around in old vessels trying to salvage anything that will earn a little coin. Although it's never explicitly stated that Ship Breaker takes place in the same world, it is similar enough that it very well could. Ship Breaker reads very much like a YA version of his Hugo and Nebula-winning The Windup Girl. His pet theme is environmental and economic catastrophe creating an impoverished, post-oil world. His books are uniformly excellent and capture perfectly the aesthetic of modern SF. Paolo Bacigalupi is destined to be one of the Grand Old Masters of science fiction in another couple of decades. * NOTE - While I'm used to Jonathan Davis reading Bacigalupi, Joshua Swanson does a great job handling the voices of men, women, children, and even dog-men. I'm sad there's no more Bacigalupi to devour at the moment, but interested in reading something like Cormac McCarthy's The Road that may give me what I'm looking for.

Still, I do leave this book thinking more about its big theme –the ties that bind people together– into families (genetic and impromptu), gangs, corporations, and the nature of loyalty, and what we do with all those things when everything else breaks down. Indeed, shorts like 'Pop Squad', 'The People of Sand and Slag' and 'Pump Six' will stick with me longer than anything in Ship Breaker. If you too are looking for more of that, you're better off reading and re-reading Bacigalupi's short story collection Pump Six. I read that Ship Breaker was set in the same dystopian future of WindUp Girl and wanted more of that.

I read WindUp Girl less than a month ago, and then proceeded to DEVOUR everything else published by the author over the last few weeks. There's too little of that here for me, but if you liked Bacigalupi's The Alchemist, I think you'll be happy with Ship Breaker. There are elements here reminiscent of RLS' Treasure Island (without being derivative), but I picked this up because I wanted to know more about the world I saw in The WindUp Girl. Also, I'm not a YA reader, for whom this book is intended. The characters in Ship Breaker are fine and appropriately likable/hatable, but Bacigalupi has engaged me more deeply with less time and words in previous work.

Ship breaker novel