--- type: "Article" title: "The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi: When Nothing Can Hurt You, Nothing Matters" description: "Paolo Bacigalupi's \"The People of Sand and Slag\" (2004) follows three soldiers engineered past pain who find the last real dog in a ruined Montana. What they do with it is the quiet horror of the story: what happens to compassion when nothing can hurt you." resource: "https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/episode/the-people-of-sand-and-slag/" tags: ["Paolo Bacigalupi"] status: "stable" generated: by: "mg-okf/0.2" at: "2026-11-02T13:40:12+00:00" verified: - by: "human:todd-orourke" at: "2026-11-02T13:40:12+00:00" stale_after: "2028-11-02" sources: - resource: "https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/people-of-sand-and-slag/" title: "\"The People of Sand and Slag,\" on the author's website" - resource: "https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v106n02_2004-02_N625_DaisyChainsaw" title: "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 2004, at the Internet Archive" - resource: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_Sand_and_Slag" title: "Wikipedia, \"The People of Sand and Slag\"" - resource: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Bacigalupi" title: "Wikipedia, \"Paolo Bacigalupi\"" - resource: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paolo_bacigalupi_2012.jpg" title: "Wikimedia Commons, Paolo Bacigalupi, photo by Larry D. Moore" timestamp: 2026-11-02T13:40:12+00:00 --- # The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi: When Nothing Can Hurt You, Nothing Matters Most stories about the end of nature are about loss. Somebody remembers the forests, mourns the animals, and wants the world back. [Paolo Bacigalupi](/writers/paolo-bacigalupi/)'s "The People of Sand and Slag" is scarier than that, because nobody in it misses anything. Its three narrators live in a world with no animals, no clean water, and no wild places, and they're having a great time. They're soldiers guarding a strip mine in a future Montana, and they've been engineered past injury, hunger, and pain. They eat sand. They regrow lost limbs. Then one day they find a real, unmodified dog, the kind of animal Jaak has only ever seen in a zoo, and the story follows what they do with it. Here's my verdict up front. This is one of the most quietly horrifying science fiction stories of the century, and it was my introduction to Bacigalupi. It will also make you hold your animals a little closer. These three aren't cruel, and that makes it worse: the horror is what happens to the capacity to care when nothing can hurt you anymore. My reservations are small, and I'll get to them. **A note before we go on: this is a full-spoiler review, ending included, and the video above covers the same ground. The story is free to read on Bacigalupi's website (link at the bottom), so if you want to meet it cold, now's the time.** > "Cut me I won't bleed. Gas me I won't breathe. Stab me, shoot me, slash me, smash me I have swallowed science I am God. Alone." ## The lead story in a February issue Bacigalupi was born in 1972 in Paonia, Colorado, and studied East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. Before he was known for science fiction, his fiction and essays ran in *High Country News*, a newspaper that covers the environment and the American West. You can feel that beat in everything he writes. His futures are about what happens to land, water, and living things after industry has finished with them. ![Paolo Bacigalupi, smiling, with short dark hair and a beard, wearing a dark jacket.](https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/paolo-bacigalupi-portrait.webp) *Paolo Bacigalupi in 2012. Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.* "The People of Sand and Slag" was the lead story in the February 2004 issue of *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction*, starting on page six. It was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2005 and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 2006. Night Shade Books collected it in 2008 in *Pump Six and Other Stories*, which won the Locus Award for Best Collection, and the same year John Joseph Adams put it in his anthology *Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse*. Adams, as it happens, is listed on the contents page of that February 2004 issue as the magazine's editorial assistant. ![Cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 2004, with Paolo Bacigalupi's name in the cover list and a painting of two figures on a rope bridge above a giant fossil-like shell.](https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/fantasy-and-science-fiction-february-2004-cover.webp) *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 2004, where "The People of Sand and Slag" first appeared. Cover by Bob Eggleton (for Steven Utley's "Invisible Kingdoms").* It's also a preview of what came next. Five years later, Bacigalupi's debut novel, *The Windup Girl*, a story of bioengineered crops and plague in a future Bangkok, won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The same preoccupations run through both: a world remade by corporations, bodies redesigned to survive what's been done to the planet, and the question of what's lost along the way. ![Cover of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, a hazy future city with airships overhead and a giant elephant-like beast in the street below.](https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/the-windup-girl-cover.webp) *The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books, 2009), Bacigalupi's Hugo- and Nebula-winning first novel.* ## What "The People of Sand and Slag" is about Chen, who narrates, Lisa, and Jaak work security for a mining company called SesCo. Their stretch of Montana has been torn apart by mining robots, turned into tailings mountains, acid lakes, and yellow mud. The three of them like it there: > "It was comforting to hear those machines cruising back and forth all day. Just you and the bots and the profits, and if nothing got bombed while you were on duty, there was always a nice bonus." One night their sensors pick up an intruder in the tailings. They chase it down expecting a bioengineered weapon, and it turns out to be a dog: starving, burned by chemicals, and completely unmodified. They bring it back to their bunker. A biologist comes out, takes a blood sample, confirms it's real, and leaves it with them. So they keep it for a while, take it on vacation to Hawaii, and then, after it gets tangled in barbed wire on the beach, they eat it. ## Bodies that can't break Bacigalupi spends the opening pages making sure you understand what these people are. Their bodies are full of weeviltech, microscopic worms that turn whatever they eat into energy, so dinner is a bowl of sand or tailings mud. When they jump out of their aircraft and hit the ground, their exoskeletons shatter and their bones break, and they get up. Lisa lands with "her femur rammed through her thigh like a bright white exclamation mark." For fun, they implant blades along each other's skin. When the dog bites Jaak and won't let go, he laughs, and his bleeding stops almost instantly. He lifts his arm with the dog hanging off it and says, "I got me a pet." Then he cuts off his own arm and leaves it in the dog's mouth. The dog eats it and throws it up. Their flesh, full of everything that used to be poison, is no longer food for a living animal. They've become alien to it, and it's alien to them. That's the first thing that makes the story so unsettling: the soldiers are likable. They joke with each other, they're loyal, and they're curious about the dog. Lisa's first thought, watching it dangle from Jaak's arm, is a joke at its expense: "Must be a bummer to wake up and find out you're at the end of your evolutionary curve." ## The last fragile thing The biologist, Musharraf, comes from the Pau Foundation, and the soldiers think his job is a dead end. In a world with almost no animals, who needs someone who studies them? He's an odd figure in the story, gentle and a little absurd, and he's the one who says the quiet part out loud: > "Did you know that in the past, people believed that we should have compassion for all things on Earth? Not just for ourselves, but for all living things?" But he doesn't take the dog. He has the DNA, and a live animal is expensive. It would need clean rooms, filtered air, and specially manufactured food, and if it were released, the weeviltech worms that now fill the whole environment would eat it alive. As he puts it, "Recreating the web of life isn't easy. Far more simple to release oneself from it completely than to attempt to recreate it." Asked what they should do with the dog, he suggests they eat it: "I understand that it was a real delicacy." So they keep it, and it's a disaster. It gets sick. It messes the floor. When it's hurt, it heals over weeks instead of minutes. Lisa cuts it just to watch it bleed, fascinated that the blood takes minutes to clot: > "It's as delicate as rock. You break it, and it never comes back together." Then Jaak reads up on old dog training and teaches it to shake. When it holds out its paw to Chen, "Its amber eyes stared up at me, solemn." Chen backs away shivering. He can't name what he's seeing, because nothing in his world prepares him for an animal that does things for its own reasons. Later that night he tries to explain it to Lisa: "That dog's different from a bio-job. It looks at us, and there's something there, and it's not us." Every engineered creature in their world is basically them in another shape. The dog is the only other mind they've ever met. ## Yearly, the last mortal poet That same night, Chen is reading "Dead Man" by a poet named Yearly, the poem at the top of this page. Yearly was humanity's last mortal poet. He refused every modification and refused the drugs that would have cured his cancer, and he died. Lisa learned about him in school and thinks it was a stunt. Chen has been reading about him: > "He thought being human meant having animals. The whole web of life thing. I've been reading about him. . . . He didn't want to live without them." Yearly and the soldiers are the two ends of the story. He chose death over a world without animals. They live in that world and don't feel the lack. Chen gets as close as anyone to seeing it. "We used to be like that dog," he says. Lisa answers with one word, "Pathetic." Chen answers with another: "Scary." It's the most honest thing he says in the story, and Lisa tells him to forget the dog. ## Vacation in Hawaii Then they take the dog to Hawaii. The ocean is black and slick with petroleum, and Lisa comes out of it glistening. The beach is full of barbed wire and rusting scrap. At sunset Jaak sets the ocean on fire with his weapon, and they watch the sun go down through the smoke while flaming waves roll onto the sand. Bacigalupi writes all of this as a lovely vacation, and that's the horror of it: nobody in the story sees anything wrong with the view. Chen amputates Lisa's limbs as part of their lovemaking, "a new thing in L.A., an experiment in vulnerability." Lying on the sand, limbless and already regrowing, Lisa looks at the dog: > "It can't swim in the ocean. It can't eat anything. We have to fly its food to it. We have to scrub its water. Dead end of an evolutionary chain. Without science, we'd be as vulnerable as it." She looked up at me. "As vulnerable as I am now." She grinned. "This is as close to death as I've ever been. At least, not in combat." Vulnerability has become a game, something you try for a weekend. And then Chen asks the question I think the whole story turns on: > "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?" > > Lisa looked at me seriously. "No, they'd call us gods." Yearly's poem said the same thing from the other side: "I am God. Alone." These people really are something like gods. Nothing can hurt them. And the story's argument is that a god who can't be hurt can't understand what it means for something else to be hurt. ## The dinner On the last day, the dog gets tangled in barbed wire. Its legs are broken and it has chewed one of its own paws half off trying to get free. Chen and Lisa kneel to cut it loose, and its tail wags feebly. Then Jaak, the one who wanted to keep it and taught it to shake, says they should eat it. He's spending half his pay on its food, and he wants things for himself: more tattoos, more upgrades. When Chen says the dog makes you smile, Jaak has an answer ready: > "Immersive Response makes you smile. And you don't have to clean up after its crap." Immersive Response is their video game. The story opens with Chen pulling off its goggles to answer the intruder alarm, and it closes with the dog traded for the new version. They look at each other, then down at the dog, and that's the whole debate. > "Lisa roasted the dog on a spit, over burning plastics and petroleum skimmed from the ocean. It tasted okay, but in the end it was hard to understand the big deal. I've eaten slagged centaur that tasted better." The story ends a few lines later, with Chen walking the shoreline, relieved that he doesn't have to watch the dog step in acid anymore: > "Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled its shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it." That last line is what makes the story so hard to shake. Chen feels something. It just isn't enough. It wasn't enough to save the dog, and it isn't enough to haunt him. He misses it the way you'd miss a good meal on vacation. Yearly chose to die rather than live in a world without animals, and Chen, Jaak, and Lisa ate the last dog they'd ever meet rather than wait on a video game upgrade. Whatever part of them would have felt that loss was engineered out, or wasted away from disuse, or was never compatible with what they've become. I think the story connects to something real. Our world keeps making things easier, more convenient, and more frictionless, and most of that is good. Bacigalupi imagines the far end of it: a life with nothing left that can hurt you, and nothing left that you know how to protect. ## Where it stumbles My complaints are small. The body-modification scenes, the skin blades and especially the amputation on the beach, push hard, and on a first read some of it can feel like provocation for its own sake. On a reread I think most of it earns its place, because every scene of casual self-mutilation is one more way of showing that pain means nothing to these people. But the beach scene is the one moment where the shock pulls focus from the dog. The characters are also thin, and Musharraf in particular says the theme a little too plainly. That's mostly deliberate. Chen, Lisa, and Jaak are flattened people living in a flattened world, and the dog is the only character with an inner life none of them can reach. It works, but it means the story runs on idea and atmosphere more than on people. ## Should you read it? Yes, and especially if you love animals, though be warned that it will hurt. It's a short read, free on Bacigalupi's own website, and it does in a few pages what most environmental fiction can't: it makes you feel the loss through people who can't feel it at all. If it hooks you, the rest of *Pump Six and Other Stories* is the natural next step, and *The Windup Girl* takes the same ideas to novel length. For another story about a dog and an indifferent world, read my review of Stephen King's [*Cujo*](/episode/cujo/), whose Saint Bernard "had always tried to be a good dog." And for another story where something drains the reasons out of living until nothing seems to matter, read my review of Leonid Andreyev's ["Lazarus"](/episode/lazarus/). Did the ending get to you? And do you think Chen's "sometimes, I miss it" is a crack of humanity, or proof that there's none left? Tell me in the comments. ## Read or hear The People of Sand and Slag yourself You can [read the story free on Bacigalupi's website](https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/people-of-sand-and-slag/). It's collected in *Pump Six and Other Stories*, and the audiobook is in the anthology *Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse*, edited by John Joseph Adams. ![Cover of Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, a rusted, gear-filled industrial scene with a skeletal mammoth-like creature.](https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/pump-six-and-other-stories-cover.webp) *Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2008), which collects "The People of Sand and Slag."* *Mysterious Galaxies is a Libro.fm and Bookshop.org affiliate. If you buy the audiobook or physical book through the links below, the channel earns a small commission at no extra cost to you.* [![A white button with Libro.fm's logo.](https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/lirbofm-button-white.png)](https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=25361&awinaffid=2925189&ued=https%3A%2F%2Flibro.fm%2Faudiobooks%2F9781482999723) [![bookshop.org's icon with a transparent background.](https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/bookshop-icon-purple-name.webp)](https://bookshop.org/a/125910/9781597802024) ## FAQs **What is "The People of Sand and Slag" about?** Three genetically modified soldiers guard a strip mine in a ruined future Montana. They eat sand, regrow lost limbs, and can't be hurt. When they find a real, unmodified dog in the tailings, they keep it as a pet, take it on vacation to a polluted Hawaii, and finally eat it when caring for it becomes too expensive and inconvenient. Paolo Bacigalupi's 2004 story is about what happens to compassion when nothing can hurt you. **Why do they eat the dog?** For practical reasons. The dog needs specially manufactured food and clean water, it keeps getting sick and hurt, and Jaak is spending half his pay on it when he'd rather buy upgrades and the new version of their video game, Immersive Response. After it's mangled in barbed wire, they decide it isn't worth the trouble. The story's point is that they don't feel bad about it, because they've lost the capacity to. **Who is Yearly in "The People of Sand and Slag"?** Yearly is a poet in the story's world, "our last mortal poet," who refused all modifications and the drugs that would have cured his cancer, because he believed being human meant living among animals. His poem "Dead Man" ("I have swallowed science I am God. Alone.") opens and frames the story, and his choice is the opposite of the soldiers'. **What is weeviltech?** Microscopic engineered worms that live inside people's bodies and convert whatever they eat, including sand and mud, into usable energy. Weeviltech lets the soldiers survive in a poisoned environment, but it has also spread through the whole ecosystem, which is why the dog couldn't survive if it were released. **Did "The People of Sand and Slag" win any awards?** It was a finalist for the 2005 Hugo Award and the 2006 Nebula Award, both for best novelette. It first appeared in the February 2004 issue of *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction* and is collected in *Pump Six and Other Stories* (Night Shade, 2008), which won the Locus Award for best collection. **Where can I read "The People of Sand and Slag"?** Bacigalupi has posted it free on his website. It's also collected in *Pump Six and Other Stories* and in the anthology *Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse*, edited by John Joseph Adams, which is also available as an audiobook. **Sources** - Paolo Bacigalupi, ["The People of Sand and Slag," on the author's website](https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/people-of-sand-and-slag/) (all quotations checked against the text) - [*The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction*, February 2004, at the Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v106n02_2004-02_N625_DaisyChainsaw) (contents page: the story's position, the Bob Eggleton cover credit, and John J. Adams as editorial assistant) - [Wikipedia, "The People of Sand and Slag"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_of_Sand_and_Slag) (Hugo and Nebula nominations) - [Wikipedia, "Paolo Bacigalupi"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Bacigalupi) (life, *High Country News*, *Pump Six*, and *The Windup Girl*) - [Wikimedia Commons, Paolo Bacigalupi, photo by Larry D. Moore](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paolo_bacigalupi_2012.jpg) (CC BY 4.0)