Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors

It’s safe to say that multiple award winner Paolo Bacigalupi has reserved a solid space in speculative fiction for himself. His 2009 debut novel The Windup Girl was an incredible feat of imaginative world building and solid storytelling skills, so it was with great anticipation that his next novel, a Young Adult story called Ship Breaker was received. Fortunately, Ship Breaker does not disappoint. Set in a future ravaged by massive climate changes and the depletion of energy sources, it is the story of a teenage boy who works at a ship breaking yard in what was onceAmerica’s oil richGulfCoast. Nailer’s life offers very little respite: he spends long days at a dangerous job crawling though the remains of giant beached tankers looking for copper wiring to strip and sell, and at the end of a long, laborious day, Nailer is forced to deal with his abusive drunk of a father. But somehow, amidst all the desolation he has seen his entire life, Nailer is able to find hope in the sight of the progressive high powered clipper ships that sail across the seas.

It is one of these ships that Nailer and his friend Pima find washed up off the coast, after a ‘city killer’ of a storm that destroys most of the shanty style homes the ship scavengers live in. Finding the storm wrecked clipper is a huge windfall for the teenagers, who imagine this to be their ‘Lucky Strike’, a chance that may free their lives of dangerous daily labour thanks to the money they could make selling what they can salvage off the vessel. Once on board the wreck, they are astounded to find a ‘swank’: the owner of the clipper, a young girl on the run from corporate enemies of her father’s company somehow still alive in her bedroom on the sailing ship. Nailer, with his true hero’s heart is unable to kill her and steal from her, but instead helps her recover. He realizes of course, that this will complicate matters far more than he can control, and true enough, it does.

Ship Breaker is, at the core of it, a rollicking adventure story. While Nailer is a scrappy, scarred and half-starved ‘rust rat’ of a hero, he is, like any true hero, incapable of any true selfishness. He is unable to let any harm come to the Nita, the poor little rich girl he has rescued, even though giving her up to his father may be the key to a safer, more comfortable future. In trying to keep Nita from harm and help unite her with her family, Nailer enrages his father and is forced to run away with Nita to a drownedNew Orleans with a human-hyena-tiger-dog hybrid called Tool. And this is all just as fantastic and imaginative as it sounds - and it works.

Along with the premise of a future destroyed by immense climate change, genetically altered humans are another similarity between The Windup Girl and Ship Breaker. While it isn’t fair to compare the two books, Bacigalupi’s concern with both environmental damage and human genetic modification is clear in all of his writing. Each of his two novels is written for a very specific audience – Ship Breaker is very obviously for younger readers and even though its tone is a lot less ferocious than that of The Windup Girl, it is everything a dystopic YA novel should be: Bacigalupi offers up a grim and gritty future, but Ship Breaker is informative and its speculations are firmly based in current reality. This does not, however, cause this to be a depressing book. In fact, it - and Nailer - are rather charming. Besides being a well paced story full of drama, intrigue, chases and frights, Ship Breaker leaves its readers with the hope of a clear, bright future, as wide and as open with possibilities as the sea.