The People of Sand and Slag {novelette}

Bacigalupi writes in this short story about a militarised and corporatised trans-human world where we have been engineered to feed off anything and so do not really care very much for nature. Into this world, a rare thing - a real animal, a dog - appears unaccountably to a small squad.

The story is about the responses of this squad to the animal. It is perhaps the best story I have come across about what transhumanism might come to mean in terms of the loss of what makes us human now. The squad are trans-human but also post-human.

The author writes well and imaginatively. The irony of their near post-human status is that he manages to present them so that they are recognisably still human in most of their attributes and yet, by the end, show more we know that humanity crossed some line although we are not sure where.

There seems to be an intuitive truth in this. The trans-human process is more likely to be evolutionary and not revolutionary. The passing from our human state to the next non-human state is likely to be slow and Bacigalupi manages to chronicle this process as it happens. show less

NOTE: There's a spoiler at the end of this review, so if you don't want to know how it ends, do NOT read it.

I half wish I'd never read this. The visceral reason is because I love dogs, and hate to see them in peril. The intellectual reason is that in Bacigalupi's dystopian vision, the future is bleak because human beings are, by nature, monsters.

I might be forgiven for guessing, at first, that I was reading about artificial people. Their seeming indifference to pain, their ability to regrow amputated limbs, their diet of sand and rock, and their immortality all suggested that the characters in this story couldn't possibly be human. And then I realized that they were a step in human evolution, people living in a symbiotic relationship show more with creatures called "weevils" that give them the ability to recover from any injury, and to live, presumably, forever.

And in the end, though they've become like gods, they still have all the faults of humans but magnified now that there are no consequences. As a result they're casually cruel and thoughtless. They seem to have lost the ability to care about anything, to value traits like love and loyalty. They wonder, at one point, why the last mortal poet (nice play on the idea of an "immortal" poet) refused immortality. They love his work, but don't get what it is he's telling them.

I wish I'd never met them, and yet the power of this story is undeniable.

*SPOILER* They kill the dog. show less

I've read this one at least a couple of times before, and have shoved it into people's faces and insisted that they sit down right there and read it. It's a 'Boy and His Dog' story. It's a scathing rant against what humanity's doing to the world. It's possibly an extension of the same future hinted as being to-come in 'The Wind-Up Girl.' And it will make you cry.

Interesting but slightly predictable tale about a world where we've adapted to massive pollution by abandoning a lot of our humanity.

Soldiers in a post-apocolyptic bunker find a dog. This is an extremely disturbing story, but one that makes you think about who we are as humans and where we're headed.