…Ship Breaker
After having read (and been quite impressed by) Paolo Bacigalupi’s Nebula Award- and Hugo Award-winning debut novel The Windup Girl, I was curious to see how he hoped to expand the world of young adult dystopian fiction. The genre has grown in popularity in recent years, with the City of Ember series from Jeanne Duprau and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games both achieving enough fame to attract Hollywood’s attention. While Bacigalupi doesn’t explicitly identify this as the same setting as The Windup Girl, it seems likely; the world is starved of resources and reckless use of fossil fuels is a memory of the past. In addition, climate change has changed the face of the planet: enormous hurricanes, called “city-killers” sweep across the coastline. After 100 pages of Ship Breaker, I’ve seen Bacigalupi’s vision, even darker than the ominous setting described in The Windup Girl, but I’m not certain how well this story will connect with its target audience of junior high and high school students.
Ship Breaker follows Nailer, an underfed and undersized teenager living on the shoreline of the Gulf Coast, working as a shipbreaker, trapped in a life of unimaginable poverty. Nailer works with a tough crew of laborers, scrabbling out a meager life by diving into the bowels of derelict vessels (the “Old World’s” oil tankers and cargo ships) to retrieve electrical cabling for salvage. Unfortunately, this part of the novel is not science fiction. Ship breaking, once centered in industrialized nations, has moved to poorer countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, where cheap labor and lax environmental protection laws make an attractive combination. Working as a shipbreaker means constant exposure to lead, asbestos, oil, and other toxic substances; shipbreakers don’t tend to live long lives.
The writing pulls no punches. In addition to the brutal hazards of shipbreaking, other threats encroach on Nailer’s survival, including a dangerously abusive father and violent death at the hands of stronger workers. The violence can be merciless, and graphic. Nailer shares this everyone-for-themselves mentality; when confronted by a survivor in the wreckage of a luxury clipper, Nailer’s first choice is whether to slit the throat of the unlucky owner so he can claim the ship’s salvage for himself. While much of young adult fiction continues to grow darker and more adult, Ship Breaker feels like a drastic escalation. But this world might be worth showing to our youth; how many wrong decisions lie between our children and this life?
Thank you to Adam Cohn for his vivid images of a shipbreaking yard in Bangladesh.