I’ve read a couple of Paolo Bacigalupi’s short stories, which I enjoyed, and was intrigued by the praised heaped on his first novel,The Windup Girl, a science fiction novel taking place in a future Thailand where petroleum is long gone and uncontrollable genetic plagues sweep the planet. (It’s not every first novel that Time Magazine considers to be one of the top ten fiction titles of the year).
This future world is not shiny and sleek and digital. It is hot and squalid and poor. Fossil fuels are a thing of the distant past. Wealth is measured in carbon counts and calories — calories produced by springs and coils and muscle.
This is a world where calorie companies in the United States control the planet’s food supply. The “calorie men” of companies like AgriGen dole out sterile seedlines to other countries (that is, crops that will grow only once), which helps them maintain their monopolies.
The Kingdom of Thailand has produced its own seedlines in defiance of the calorie companies, and keeps itself relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Calorie man Anderson is a Westerner in charge of a factory that makes kink-springs, which are used as a power source. But what he’s really after are Thailand’s seedlines.
Emiko is the Windup Girl of the title, a New Person genetically created by the Japanese to serve as a living pleasure doll, bred to obey. Forgotten on the streets of Bangkok, she slowly learns to overcome her genetic programming and will do anything to survive, even if that means starting a revolution.
The Windup Girl is a marvelous novel that portrays a bleak but very believable future. Beautifully written, as unique in its way as Neuromancer was thirty years ago, it’s not to be missed. Highly recommended.
