Paolo Bacigalupi is on a roll. During the last 12 months, the rising sci-fi star has walked away with the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and, most recently, the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature—the Young Adult Library Services Association’s top prize for prose. That’s pretty impressive for a guy who’s published only two novels—The Windup Girl (Night Shade, 2009), a gritty futuristic thriller about the dire consequences of genetic engineering, and his first YA novel, the Printz-winning Ship Breaker (Little, Brown, 2010), a postapocalyptic page-turner that was also short-listed for the National Book Award.

Although the talented Mr. B. may sound like an overnight sensation, his first short story was published more than a decade ago, in 1999. Before that, in the early ’90s, he attended Ohio’s Oberlin College, where he majored in Chinese, and then spent a few years working as a web consultant and traveling in China. Since then, he’s had his share of average-Joe jobs, including a four-year stint as an online editor and webmaster for High County News, an environmentally conscious magazine.

Many of Bacigalupi’s tales, including his much-praised short story collection, Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade, 2008), take place in Asia, but Ship Breaker is firmly rooted in North America. There, on the steamy Gulf Coast, readers meet Nailer, a skinny 17-year-old who crawls deep into the crumbling ducts of rusty oil tankers in search of copper wire and other recyclables. It’s a dirty, dangerous job, but it lets Nailer and his fellow scavengers eke out a meager existence. After a savage hurricane pounds the coast, Nailer and his friend Pima discover a battered luxury schooner that’s washed ashore, full of riches and a sole survivor—a beautiful, nearly dead girl. Should they do the smart thing—slit her throat and claim the extravagant bounty for themselves? Or could she be their risky ticket to a better life?

These days, Bacigalupi (pronounced Bag-chuh-guh-loopy) is back in his hometown of Paonia, CO, where he lives with his wife, Anjula, and son, Arjun. The thoughtful 38-year-old’s writing room looks out onto a spectacular view of Mount Lamborn and Lands End Peak (part of the West Elk Mountains), an idyllic setting that’s in stark contrast to the bleak terrain of his dystopias. I caught up with Bacigalupi in March, a week before he left for a writer’s retreat in Mexico, to talk about his Printz-winning novel, his no-nonsense take on wealth and success, and why he’s hooked on sci-fi.

In Ship Breaker, there are essentially two types of people—“swanks,” the lucky few who have most of the world’s wealth, and “rust rats,” the impoverished masses who are struggling to survive. It really struck me when Pima says, “Damn, the swanks and the rust rats are all the same at the end of the day. Everyone’s looking to get a little blood on their hands.” What’s the message behind that?

Everybody’s doing something to survive. One thing about wealth is that we don’t really think about where it comes from. When we think of having access to cheap energy, we have to remember that cheap energy comes from someplace. Around here, in Colorado, for example, we do a lot of natural gas drilling. So, you have a business that is predicated on many things. You go down and you frack the ground. That means you’re pumping diesel into the land and creating an environmental cost to extracting something that we use for our convenience. But there’s also a social cost.

What is it?

Rig workers work these insane shifts, so there’s a problem with methamphetamine addiction. They can keep going on shifts that run 12 hours, day after day after day. That’s going to break a person. And we live on top of that. The number of injuries and deaths in the natural gas industry are also on us whenever we turn on our gas stoves. I’m really interested in the idea that some of the things we take for granted—things that seem clean and pristine—are connected to long chains of things we don’t see, or don’t want to see.

Did you write Ship Breaker specifically for teens, so they’d become aware of those issues?

Yes. I see different responses from kids as they’re reading the book and they blog or tweet about it. But one of the things I’m curious about is whether or not kids are experiencing the larger ideas and themes I’m interested in or if they’re only experiencing the thrill ride.

There’s a great line when Nailer says to the rich girl, “The only reason you think you’ve got morals is because you don’t need the money the way regular people do.”

When you have nothing, you’ll do anything. I read an interesting book by a sociologist who went into the projects in the late 1990s. What struck me is both how normal and how desperate these lives are at the same time. With wealth, you’re buffered against making hard decisions. We think we’re making hard decisions when we’re wealthy, but we have no idea. It’s a shocking thing to run across.

Did living in China change how you see the world?

The time I spent living and traveling over there made me very aware of just how wealthy we are in the United States, and made me think about the collapse of society.

How so?

We tend to think of one story line of collapse, which is essentially the Mad Max version: the world falls apart and everyone is just driving around tearing everybody apart. But that’s just not what poverty looks like. We still are civil creatures, and we do best when we work together. So when I think of societal collapse, I think more in terms of what does it mean if we back off of our wealth and have less of it—but are essentially us in our character. Being in a village in southwest China, where everything is made out of mud bricks and there’s no electricity or running water, tells you a lot about that other version of life, which is still civil but also poor. I know we tend to equate our wealth with civilization, but that’s inaccurate.

Your book attacks some common misconceptions about wealth.

Nailer needs to get to a place of safety and part of that is taking care of his core needs—food, shelter, clothing, and safety—and some of those things are flat out associated with wealth. You can buy food, shelter, and safety; without those everything else is moot. But it is interesting to me that essentially the only value we have in America is that wealth is the key to everything and we aren’t very good at defining wealth. We’re really good at defining celebrity—we obsess over celebrity—and the raw buying power of cash, which is the kind of thing I’m trying to figure out: how to separate the idea of wealth from cash, because they aren’t precisely the same thing.

Have you reached any conclusions?

There’s an overlap in the Venn diagram where you need to be able to buy a certain amount of stuff to be happy, but there’s this other aspect where it’s about figuring out what your needs are versus what your wants are. If I return to Nailer again, that’s a theme I want to explore more: where wealth is valuable and where wealth is actually trivialized or in itself destructive.

Your stories also have a lot to say about the tricky relationship between fate and luck.

I think about this in terms of my own career. There’s a certain amount of sweating it out. You have some control over some of the variables, but you don’t have control over the outcome. The variables you can control are that you keep writing books and submitting them. The idea that the book gets bought and becomes wildly successful and wins an award—that’s out of your hands. This was something I was trying to get into the book. But there are all these things in your head as an author and you don’t know if you’re successful in translating them onto the page. We never talk about the amount of sweat equity we put into things. I know it’s one of the things I keep emphasizing with my son—it’s less about the outcome and more about the work.

We routinely breed animals for certain qualities. But in Ship Breaker, you’ve taken things to a whole new level with Tool, a genetically designed creature who’s half man and half dog.

Science fiction lets us look at technology and how we may misjudge the way it’s going to get used. We’re continually surprised as the world finds its own use for whatever technologies we come up with. We think we’ve opened up a reasonable gate, and then there’s all of a sudden this Pandora’s box of other possibilities that come out of it. Take something as simple as cell phones. We think, “Hey look, we’ve got this portable communication device.” And then, all of a sudden, we have teens sexting with each other. We didn’t see that coming.

Having a vicious drug addict for a father leaves Nailer constantly questioning the true definition of family: Is it a matter of shared blood or is it really the good-hearted friends who always have our backs? Is that something you wondered about as a teen?

I went to a school at one point in Pueblo, CO. And a lot of the kids were in pretty bad circumstances, because their parents were unreliable or dangerous or cruel or neglectful. It struck me that all of these kids were dealing with some very grown-up things. There was a moment when everyone was trying to figure out how to get housing for this young girl. If she went home, her parents were going to beat her up. The kids were working in concert to organize help because the parents were the problem, not the solution. Things like that have stuck with me. I think about the conditional nature of human relations—that if people are good to you that’s far more important than blood. I didn’t intend for that to find its way into the book, but as I was writing, it became more and more important for me to lay it out because there are a lot of clichés about family being a support.

It seems like you left the door wide open to write about Nailer again.

The next book isn’t about Nailer, although it’s for young adults. There’s another set of kids living near the drowned cities on the Eastern Coast. The only character from Ship Breaker who shows up again is Tool. He has a much bigger role in this book. Thematically, it’s more about politics and violence. Once I wrap that book up, I’m going to look again at whether or not there’s something more I want to do with Nailer.

Originally, I wanted to do a direct sequel, but when I was writing Ship Breaker, I came to this point of closure with Nailer. When I tried to write a direct sequel, it seemed like an unutterable cruelty to open him up again and drag him through anything else. If I do anything with Nailer, it will be a couple of years on and a stand-alone more than a sequel.

Clipper ships play a big role in some of your earliest stories and in the post-fossil-fuel world of Ship Breaker . Why are you so interested in them?

Tobias Buckell, a good friend of mine, and I kick technology ideas around, talking about hydrofoils and that kind of thing. I started thinking about what it looks like when you move from a low-energy society to a high-technology society. Just because we don’t have energy, we don’t automatically get stupid. We’re still innovative, creative people and we still have certain puzzles we want to sort out: How do we do global transport? How do we move goods and services and people around the world? And there’s an answer. We had an age of sail and a global economy before coal. And that was the clipper ship. There was this race for technology during the 1700s to make sail faster and more effective. Then coal took over, and we went in another direction. But if you take carbon out of the equation, then that innovation is still there. Today, we understand more about how fluid dynamics works than we did then. A hydrofoil sailboat just broke the 50-knot barrier a little while ago. The idea that you can make a boat sail at 50 knots with just the wind is amazing stuff.

Wow! That’s nearly 60 miles an hour.

We’re talking fast ships. Given the amount of interesting innovation with sail, there are gains to be realized with research and development dollars. But we don’t fund the research and don’t care about it because we’ve got all this oil to burn. What’s really interesting to me about technology is that the moment we suddenly put our attention on it and say this is really important to us, we have some great developments.

Such as?

You can see the difference between a Model T and a car today, because we were willing to put the investment and know-how into the idea of a car. And that’s something about science fiction that I really like, the idea that science fiction can be really inspirational. It goes back to the NASA scientists who used to read about rocket ships when they were young and that made them want to build rocket ships.

Is that why you write for young people?

Science fiction has the capacity to inspire technologies that don’t exist yet, but could. It’s happened a lot in the IT industry. William Gibson wrote about cyberspace and inspired a whole layer of programmers. Neal Stephenson wrote about the metaverse, and then somebody goes out and builds Second Life in order to mirror Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. That’s a really fun space to be working with. It would be so pleasing to be able to look back in 30 years and know that you had inspired somebody to look at engineering or hydrodynamics as something that was interesting to study, and that something good would come out of that. And that’s definitely part of my save-the-world, change-the-world makeup.