Abstract
Excerpt: With many of his stories, Paolo Bacigalupi instigates a reconsideration of dominant ways of thinking in response to ecological degradation and its related social consequences. As such, the author is an environmentalist and a utopian, an ecotopian whose environmental concerns influence his participation in a literary form that articulates “the desire for a better way of being.”1 In utopian literature, the gap between the actual world and the narrative world encourages readers to think about alternatives that would bring about a future better than the present or would prevent a future that is worse than the present . Because the gaps that Bacigalupi highlights are the results of a number of existing and identifiable social and cultural forces, his stories participate in what Tom Moylan calls the critical utopian tradition.