Ship Breaker, pgs 1-32

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Nailer, a teenage boy, is part of a crew of people in the future who scavenge for copper wire in grounded oil tankers. They are called the light crew and Nailer crawls through ducts in an old ship searching for copper wire so it can be sold. After Nailer collected some copper wire he headed back through the duct and made it to the deck of the ship. The crew then spent time to take the insulation of the copper wire so that just copper wire was left over. Their boss then shows up, Bapi who is smug and only cares about himself, and informs the crew that a storm is coming soon and that they need to take as much wire as possible from the ship.

Nailer is forced to go back deeper inside the duct to get more wire. As he gets deeper he started to panic and when he tried to head back out of the duct it started to creak. Suddenly the duct collapsed and Nailer fell far into a liquid. He struggled to swim and found out that he was swimming in oil. He started to panic but eventually he was able to reach the side of the room that he fell in to. After a while another person of the crew, Sloth, came and found Nailer. Sloth did not really do much to help Nailer because she need to get more wire to get quota and she was complicating if she should let Nailer die and later take the oil for herself since oil was extremely valuable.

As Sloth left, Nailer had to make the decision to either find a way out or to wait and hope that Sloth goes to get help. Nailer figures that their may be a door below in the oil and decides to dive down. If there is not a door then Nailer will die.

So far I have found this book very interesting. It makes you wonder if people will be making a living taking apart things like old oil tankers in the future. Of course I expect that Nailer will find a way out of the room full of oil considering it is the very beginning of the book. He might even be able to make a huge profit from the secret oil stash and better his life. I find it very cruel that Sloth would not immediately help Nailer but it shows the desperation that these people have to make some money.