Review: "Ship Breaker," by Paolo Bacigalupi
Why is it that teenagers seem to like dystopian fiction so much? The answer is obvious: consider the dystopia: a world where polite society has vanished, where you have to fend for yourself against impossible tyranny, where you have all the responsibilities of being an adult but almost none of the privileges. Sound familiar? Teenagers don't see dystopias as dystopias; they see them as barely fictional representations of their day-to-day lives.
Ship Breaker, for example, is dystopia at its grittiest and least fantastical. Roughly a hundred years from now, the ice caps have melted, causing sea levels to rise, particularly on the old southern coast of America, near what used to be New Orleans. Government has broken down, and the world consists of economically driven clans. Nailer is a ship breaker, still small enough, for now, to be on "light crew" – pulling valuable copper wire out of the now-obsolete oil tankers that litter the coast. His future is bleak. He is unlikely to grow strong enough to be taken on to "heavy crew" when he gets older, and his father, Richard Lopez, is a terrifying, murderous, drug-addled nightmare.
Nailer dreams of a lucky strike: a forgotten barrel of crude oil or stash of gold in the bowels of a wreck that will allow him to buy his way out of his own serfdom, and possibly also the indentures of his friend Pima and her mother Sadna, who are more family to him than his father is. One day, a hurricane brings what could be a lucky strike beyond Nailer's wildest dreams. He and Pima happen upon a newly wrecked "clipper", a ship of the super-rich that should never have come this close to shore. Nailer and Pima find enough treasure inside to free them for ever. But they find something else, too. The body of the beautiful young owner, who turns out to not be quite so dead after all. Nita is in terrible danger from rival clans who want to use her to control her powerful father. Pima wants to humanely finish her off, because the cataclysm Nita could bring down on them is all too terrible. But Nailer hesitates. Unlike his father, he can't bring himself to kill for callous reasons. His hesitation will have ever-expanding consequences for everyone. Which is what every decision feels like as a teenager, where every choice is life or death against impossible, entirely unfair odds. Teenagers care less, I find, about the set-up of a dystopic world (though it has to be cool, naturally) than for the hero within it and how they have to act against it. With Ship Breaker, they're in luck. Bacigalupi is a highly acclaimed adult sci-fi writer, and Ship Breaker won last year's prestigious Printz award for young-adult fiction in the US. It's a taut, disciplined novel, moving with tremendous coiled energy and urgency. I found it a tad colourless in places, but Nailer is a fine hero, complicated and questioning, always wondering whether he's doomed to inherit his father's failings or whether he can make his own destiny. Which is, of course, the essential question of every dystopia. And basically the essential question of every teenager, too. Why do we teenagers like dystopias? Simple. We're looking for proof that there's a way to survive the one in which we're already living.
