Hi folks - R.A. Keen here, rejoined the fray, happy to stumble across a troupe of old writng buddies, alive, still kicking, still musing. Has anyone heard of Paolo Bacigalupi? No, not Abbott and Costello's neighborhood vendor in the 50's TV series. Mr. Bacigalupi is one hell of a writer, style and character-development wise, not to mention plot-wise.
I just finished his "The Water Knife" (Alfred A. Knopf), a terrific read, set in the not too far future when Climate Change has wrecked havoc on the just-about-Dis-United States, in particular the western states, cornered into playing a zero-sum game over dwindling water resources. The writing has a Cormack McCarthy feel, not style, rather that Big Picture sense of a Universe that shows little mercy, if any, to the players strutting their lives across the novel's stage in that particular place and time; the question of survival for any of the main protagomists is a heart-breaking game.
Below are the opening paragraphs, which, unknown to the Gentle Reader, foreshadow events deep within the novel:
"There were stories in sweat.
The sweat of a woman bent double in an onion field, working fifteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren't on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing. The sweat of a ten-year-old boy staring into the barrel of a SIG Sauer was different from the sweat of a woman strggling across the desert and praying to the Virgin that a water cache was going to turn out to be exactly where her coyote's map told her it would be.
Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person ended up in the right place but at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day."
I really, really want to write like Mr. Bacigalupi. mis-placed modifiers or not!
:-)
