Despite all the truths, about our world and our place in it, that science and self-discovery have helped us to acquire, most of us still reject the essential randomness of organic life. As beings of reason and intelligence, of ambition and progress, we hunger to believe in an order greater than ourselves, a grand design that can superimpose meaning upon all our actions. After all, such belief would explain so much of what's both unfair and unknown about life. It illustrates why some are born into miserable circumstances -- these are spiritual tests of ones faith in the divine -- and it assigns an incentive to goodness -- for surely the reward of a painless peace in the afterlife will entice us into conduct more noble than our natures.
But if we are honest with ourselves, we know the truth, that life is fundamentally chaotic, that the circumstances of our birth are uncontrollable, and that the lives we wind up living are, if not predetermined, slotted into tracks that our backgrounds will not allow us to escape. This is a cruel and unsentimental worldview, hence its unpopularity, but this is what lives beyond our doors. And it is a truth Mr. Bacigalupi exemplifies in his near-future novel.
The apex of human civilization has come and gone, its jetplanes and its spaceships, its nuclear weapons and its supercomputers sucked into the depths of ever-rising oceans and consigned to the memories of the very old or the very learned. The glories of the Accelerated Age have been replaced by the ultra-utilitarian reality of the present, life on a hot, humid, environmentally unstable planet where human innovation has given way to the practicalities of economic and spiritual survival. Everything new is recycled from the old, the bones of drowned cities and beached oiltankers stripped for metal and spare parts, wires and electronics. This detritus of the old times are scavenged and sold at criminally low costs to mammoth multinationals, corporations whose boardroom battles are so far removed from life on the beaches that they might as well be taking place on another world.
In this world of humid decay, Nailer, a diminutive but wiry teenager, fights to hold on against the rising tide. Part of a light crew that strips copper out of oiltankers, he contends with both an abusive father and his own growing size to keep his job and his meager profits. For to lose either in this cutthroat world means certain death. And so, when, after a category six storm, known as a citykiller, hurls an unimaginable fortune, in the form of a fully tricked-out clipper ship, onto his little stretch of beach, he can be forgiven for exulting. His lucky strike has finally landed in the form of salvage that will net him a ticket out of this life. There's just one problem. The owner of the broken clipper, dripping with gold and silver, isn't dead. Moreover, she's wanted by powerful corporates willing to kill to get her back, proving to Nailer, once and for all, that life is neither fair or simple.
Underpinned by a potent blend of philosophy and economics, Ship Breaker harnesses the best aspects of imaginative science fiction to weave a memorable, dystopic tale about life, its pains and its pleasures. Mr. Bacigalupi, who dazzled with the atmospheric The Windup Girl, is equally effective here at envisioning a future tortured by a tragically decaying environment and unimaginable economic inequality, both of which conspire to consign all but the upperclasses to lives of hardship and toil. The social stresses that always existed beneath the surface of life in the United States have finally busted into the open, tearing rungs out of the social ladder, leaving behind cavernous gulfs that no one from the dregs can forge. The resulting despair leads to widespread criminality and lawlessness that the government is incapable of combating.
And yet, despite this grim background, Ship Breaker is not a bitter novel. Energized by the youthful vitality of its protagonist, it is buoyed by a kind of adolescent optimism. For as much as life is difficult, it takes a very great deal to separate the young from their hope. The flame can be made to flicker under a deluge of injustice and ruthlessness, but it will not out, not before the cynicism of middle age has set in. Nailer, consequently, elevates the novel on the ropey muscles of his scarred shoulders, his goodness and his enthusiasm the vehicle through which readers can judge the selfishness of all those he encounters.
But for a troublesome third act in which the author clumsily wastes 50 pages in an unnecessary effort to justify the denouement, this is lovely and thoughtful work that will be welcomed by those open to reading about an increasingly probable future. (3/5 Stars)
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