Some of the short stories in Pump Six and Other Stories are set in the same post-peak-oil-global-warming world as The Windup Girl and Ship Breaker. Others are just set in vaguely post-technology-breakdown futures. All of which is to say that it’s probably not the set of short stories you should be reading when you’re flying across the Atlantic and an engine on the jet fails. Ah ha!, your brain will exclaim, Paolo Bacigalupi is right and this is how the decline of our civilization begins and soon everything will fall apart.

FuzzyCo grade: A