I started out reading Paolo Bacigalupi with his novel The Windup Girl, which I did not like at all. Not at all. I found that book to have a world that seemed to be immense and complex but very poorly explained, with thin and stock characters that did not hold my interest. After I complained about it to a friend he mentioned this book and said that the stories here would be a better introduction to Bacigalupi's universe.

Now I get it. My friend was right; the problem with the Windup Girl was that the world of the calorie men and the yellow card men was already established in the stories in this book, and it was not well explained in that book -- you are just thrown into the ocean and left to drown. This is the book to start with, because here is where you get the background.

And the background is rich and interesting and very well told. The futures in these stories are grim but realistic, dystopias born from politics and very international. Bacigalupi has a unique voice in his short fiction. A warning that most of these stories are very, very bleak indeed; after I finished this book I needed to go read light and happy books for a while.

I'm still not all that pleased with the Windup Girl, but I'm willing to give Bacigalupi much more credit as a writer after this; he obviously has much more skill than I gave him credit for.