Paolo Bacigalupi is a Hugo, Nebula, Compton Crook Award and Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer from Colorado. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the environmental journal High Country News. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated into numerous western newspapers including the Idaho Statesman, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Salt Lake Tribune. He was a webmaster for High Country News starting in 2003. He is currently working on a novel in his home state of Colorado, where he lives with his wife and son.
His short fiction has recently been collected in Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2008). His debut novel The Windup Girl, published by Night Shade Books in September 2009, won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards in 2010. The Windup Girl was also named by Time Magazine as one of the Top 10 Books of 2009.
In July 2010 he published an audiobook The Alchemist and The Executioness with Tobias Buckell.
The Windup Girl, along with many of his short stories, explores the effects of bioengineering and a world in which fossil fuels are no longer viable. Bioengineering has ravaged the world with food-borne plagues, produced tailored organisms as mimics to both cats and humans, and replaced today's fossil-fuel reliant engines with megodonts (an elephant-like beast), which convert food energy into work. Energy storage is accomplished through the use of high-capacity springs, as well as simply transporting food to feed either megodonts or human laborers.