how technology impacts humanity and the world
Bacigalupi wants to focus on how technology impacts humanity and the world through the story. The story questions; what would happen if technology could guarantee our survival no matter what. What would happen if humans could eat anything like sand and survive on it and what would come about if any wound healed straight away? Additionally, the story also asks what would occur if humans were entirely independent of Earth’s biosphere? Bacigalupi’s answers the questions through the story; that the earth would be environmentally devastated, cold, and claustrophobic.
Technological development has placed humans into a post mortality world, and the occurrences in the plot, set out to explore the possible ramifications of such a change. Therefore, the plot of the story creates the desired effect. The plot follows three genetically modified humans that are guards for a large mining conglomeration in a far future Montana. What is fascinating about the three humans is that they are biologically engineered to no longer feel pain. One of the characters, Jaak, cuts his arm and gives it to the dog. The arm later regrows, “He wiggled his new stump where it was rapidly regrowing.”
The plot illustrates that the three humans were being called out to track down an intruder on their employer’s property. The narrator states that “I watched the intruder on the tracking screens as they displayed real-time data fed to us from SesCo’s satellites. “It’s not even a masked target. We could have dropped a mini on it from base if we’d known he wasn’t going to play hide-and-seek.” The three finally corner the intruder and discover that it is a dog. Jaak tells Lisa, “That’s not a bio-job at all,” “That’s a dog.” Interested by the fact that it could live in their day and age, they conclude that they will keep it as a pet. They were going to feed it, keep it safe, clean, and healthy.
On the other hand, the plot creates the desired effect, illustrating that the world would be cold if things happened as in the story. The dog, instead of being viewed as one that can be loved and respected, some characters view it as a curiosity. When one character teaches the dog to shake hands, others view it as a scientific reaction instead of an act of affection. Lisa asks, “it thinks” when Jaak shakes the dog’s paw. She even tells the narrator that, “It shook hands with you, Chen. You don’t worry about a centaur when it salutes.” Lisa also reached out to stroke the matted fur of the animal and then remarked, “It’s as easy to kill as the hunter.” She was not fond of the dog; she studied the dog from afar and remarked, “This is as close as I’ll ever get to it.”
The unavailability of affection is not only limited to the dog, but also among the characters. Two of the main characters are in a relationship, but we do not feel that this meant anything more than sexual. The characters even do the act of lovemaking in front of another character. The narrator says that Lisa “was beautiful, lying there on the beach, slick and excited with all of our play in the water. I licked oil opals off her skin as I sliced off her limbs, leaving her more dependent than a baby. Jaak played his harmonica and watched the Sunset, and watched as I rendered Lisa down to her core”. The act shows emotional disconnection because it is supposed to be private, and yet they perform it out in the open.
The setting of the story indeed creates the desired effect. The story is set in a distant future in which there is an enormous environmental disaster. Despite the disaster, whose cause has not been revealed, humanity has looked for means to survive by bioengineering themselves to adjust to the harsh and new environment. Other animals have become rare, and the discovery of the dog is an interesting event for humans. One of the characters, Lisa, says, “How could it live out here?” “There’s nothing to live on. It’s got to be modified.” Also, the biologist says that, he hasn’t heard of a living specimen in ten or fifteen years.
The humans in the story do not need to breathe oxygen and can eat anything. The story stated that Lisa roasted the dog on a spit, over burning plastics and petroleum skimmed from the ocean. Besides, Lisa stated that “We can eat anything. We’re the top of the food chain”. The narrator also says that it tasted okay, but in the end, it was hard to understand the big deal because he had eaten slagged centaur that tasted better.
Bacigalupi illustrates that what starts as a hunt for an enemy finishes up as a story of compassion and what it means to be human. The story is complex and, at the same time, touching because it steps far outside the box to explore our relationship with pets and nature. The characters in the story, keep the dog alive and healthy. They call for a biologist to check at the dog when it could not move after Jaak accidentally broke it while putting it inside the cage.
The biologist, Lin Musharraf, performed tests on the dog. He pulled out a sampler needle and stuck the dog whose blood was filled in a sampler’s chamber. By taking care of the dog, the characters offer hope that the part of humanity that can accept the “other” might still be present in a world that self-preservation and survival come first. Jaak was the one that took good care of the dog; he acted like Musharraf. He talked to the dog. He even offered to pay for the dog’s food and missed getting his tats. The narrator remarks that the dog slept with him all night, and it was warm, and there was something friendly about it.
Bacigalupi shows a future where humanity has adjusted itself to living in a hostile environment. He conveys the message that most of us do not know how plastic the human body is. The story illustrates the big picture that people adapt to various temperatures, beliefs, customs, deformities, and food, which is what it means to be human. Bacigalupi focuses specifically on rocks and sand, bodies that do not feel pain, metal residue, rocks, and sand and bodies that heal so fast that death is impossible. Jaak cuts of his arm, which later regrows. The narrator tugged on a length of barbed wire buried in the sand. It tore free and wrapped it around his upper arm, a tight band that bit into his skin without feeling pain. The characters feed on the sand, on the beach, the narrator fed Lisa another handful of sand. Then he asks, “If someone came from the past, to meet us here and now, what do you think they’d say about us? Would they even call us human?” Scientists say that the body grows new cells and tissues to survive, which happened to the characters in the story.
The People of Slag and Sand is told in the first-person omniscient point of view. The narrator is a character in the story and knows the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the other characters. The point of view enables the reader to comprehend the occurrences in the enormous environmental disaster fully, and the horrific ways humanity finds surviving in such a world. The narrator is privy to the thoughts and actions of other characters; he allows us to know whether it would be true that what we think today as humane still works with people who have such impervious bodies.
Bacigalupi builds a fully realized and horror-stricken world through the story. He utilizes details such as, “as delicate as a rock” and the description of a person emerging from the ocean as “body glistened with hundreds of iridescent petroleum jewels.” He describes an oppressive bleakness of the future, which makes the story disturbing. In the story, humanity has attained invulnerability and immortality; he explains the disastrous repercussions of living without weakness. The characters survive in a blasted, polluted environment, that does not allow them to consider sharing it with other less fortunate beings. When they come across the dog, the characters are initially fascinated by it but eventually get bored by its dependence and feed on it.
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