'Calorie' Mulls Post-Oil World

[YankeyMCC]

I just read this story in my latest issue of Asimov's. I thought you all would find this interesting.

From SciFi weekly: http://www.scifi.com/sfw/news/sfw_news_20060731.html

(snip)
Hugo Award-nominee Paolo Bacigalupi, whose story "The Calorie Man" just won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short science fiction story, told SCI FI Wire that the idea for the story came in part from his interest in post-oil economies.

"I'd been thinking for a long time that oil was a finite resource, and it was difficult for me to write an SF story that didn't somehow incorporate that likelihood into its premise," Bacigalupi said in an interview. "Anything that didn't accept a post-oil situation seemed too fantastic, even for science fiction. This was actually before the whole peak-oil thing really hit the mainstream press, and I almost gave up on the story when peak oil became a common meme. I picked up a National Geographic and saw the headline 'The End of Cheap Oil' and thought, 'Uh-oh. Now everyone's going to be writing stories about it.' And then I berated myself for taking so long to write the stupid thing. In the end, I pushed ahead with the story and was surprised when it came out over a year later that the SF community was still largely ignoring the topic."

Bacigalupi said that the other aspects of the story came from a variety of sources. "The intellectual property and patenting of grains came from news reports I'd read about an attempt by a U.S. company to patent basmati rice, even though it was historically used in India and was naturally occurring. The 'GMO' and the 'sterility controls' on grains came from discussions with friends of mine who are farmers and who are concerned about the advent of ag technologies that are designed to maintain control of corporate seedstocks. (Read about the Terminator gene if you want some background on the idea.) So 'The Calorie Man' is really a sort a mash-up of a bunch of different trends and ideas that were either interesting or worrisome or creepy to me."

"The Calorie Man" takes place on the Mississippi river in the heart of calorie-producing country, Bacigalupi said. " after genetically engineered plagues have destroyed much of the planet's agricultural capacity—all except for the plague-resistant corns and soys and beans, which the calorie companies have patented and completely control," he said. "Because the world is also post-oil, these companies are not just food companies, they also resemble today's energy monopolies, controlling every aspect of the calories that convert to the kinetic energy that the world now runs on. The story centers on a calorie smuggler who heads upriver to upset these energy monopolies."
(snip)

Calorie Man Story published in full here: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/pa01.htm