Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.
Paolo BacigalupiAt some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.
Paolo BacigalupiTake three different Thai writers and ask them to extrapolate their county's future, and one hopes that you'll get three very different - but all deeply honest - versions.
Paolo BacigalupiThe problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.
Paolo BacigalupiAll life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others' lives for it.
Paolo Bacigalupi