Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi is a collection of short stories all with a type of social consciousness wrapped into the fantastical stories. While I enjoy a heavy story with a message from time to time, this collection was simply too much for me all at once. I should maybe have read one here and one there in between other books and stories. Every single story in this book is depressing and makes you fear for the state of the world.
The first story, "Pocket Full of Dharma" is a fascinating story about a boy in futuristic China who comes across the Dalai Lama in a most unusual way.
"The Fluted Girl" is a tale about our obsession with perfect bodies and celebrity set in a world at once futuristic (in it's upper class and medical procedures) yet also medieval (in it's serf system).
These are easily the best stories in the book. When I got to ... I had to skip it. The soldiers in the story who are able to regenerate body parts and are simply fascinated by a stray dog who can't turned my stomach. Maybe it has a happy ending, I'll never know.
Maybe one day I'll revisit some of these stories individually and see if they strike me differently. Right now, I guess I'm simply not in the right frame of mind for them.
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