The People of Sand and Slag

In “The People of Sand and Slag,” a Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated short story, Paolo Bacigalupi weaves a tale about the lives of three technologically modified guards, their barren, heavily mined landscape, and a chance encounter with a creature rare for their time period – a dog.  What starts off as a hunt for an enemy ends up as a story of empathy, and what it means to be human.

“The People of Sand and Slag” was nominated for the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, and the 2006 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.  It was featured in Gardner Dozois’s “Year’s Best SF” Twenty-Second Edition, Jonathan Strahan’s “Best SF of the Year” 2004 Edition, and in John Joseph Adams’ “Wastelands” Anthology in 2008.

Reviews:

“A difficult and touching story, which steps pretty far outside the box to examine our relationship to pets, and to nature. At every stage, Bacigalupi gets it right.”  --- Internet Review of Science Fiction

“Bacigalupi posits a future where humanity has adapted itself to living in a hostile environment. ... There is plenty of techie stuff entwined with the premise itself to satisfy the hardest of hard sf readers, but the main attraction of this story is the faint hope that those parts of us that can accept the "other" might still exist in a world where self-preservation and survival come first.” --- Tangent Online