Correlations, the blog of the PBS series WIRED Science, has part one of an interview with Pump Six author (and frequent F&SF contributor) Paolo Bacigalupi today as their "Science Fiction Friday" feature. (And stay tuned throughout the weekend for more of the interview.)

What made you make the decision to start writing science fiction specifically?

I grew up reading science fiction and I think that was probably the biggest thing.  I grew up on Heinlein and my father’s science fiction collection.  My father was a big SF reader and those were really the first books that I read.  They were science fiction and fantasy.  Heinlein’s CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY.  It was STARMAN JONES.  It was things like THE HOBBIT by Tolkien.  Those were the first books that I read where I actually remembered what I’d read afterwards and actually cared about the characters enough to want to run home and finish reading whatever book I was reading.  So I’ve always had a connection to the genre because of that– those big adventure stories that science fiction and fantasy provided.

I think when I first sat down to write a book – when I was first sort of testing out the idea of being a writer – I just naturally gravitated to the idea that I would write science fiction.  I read so much of it, I was familiar with it, and I liked it, and so that was where I started out thinking that if I was definitely going to write a book, it was definitely going to be science fiction.  This original book that I was going to write, it was all set in the future China world, sort of the version that you see in "Pocketful of Dharma," and it was entertainment–it was pretty fun to write.  It was interesting in it’s own way, but science fiction was just sort the thing that seemed like it was the natural thing.  
 

Read the whole interview, and be sure to leave some comments to encourage WIRED Science to continue this series of SF author spotlights!