The Windup Girl

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Paperback, 2015

Status

Available

Publication

Night Shade (2015), Edition: Reissue, 480 pages

Description

What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits? And what happens when this forces humanity to the cusp of post-human evolution? This is a tale of Bangkok struggling for survival in a post-oil era of rising sea levels and out-of-control mutation.

Media reviews

It is a reasonably convincing vision of a future rendered difficult and more threatening than even our troubled present.
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The Windup Girl embodies what SF does best of all: it remakes reality in compelling, absorbing and thought-provoking ways, and it lives on vividly in the mind.
But the third reason to pick up "The Windup Girl" is for its harrowing, on-the-ground portrait of power plays, destruction and civil insurrection in Bangkok. Clearly, Paolo Bacigalupi is a writer to watch for in the future. Just don't wait that long to enjoy the darkly complex pleasures of "The
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Windup Girl."
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One of the strengths of The Windup Girl, other than its intriguing characters, is Bacigalupi's world building. You can practically taste this future Thailand he's built [...] While Bacigalupi's blending of hard science and magic realism works beautifully, the novel occasionally sags under its own
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weight. At a certain point, the subplots feel like tagents that needed cutting.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50
First of all I love all things “Dystopian”, but in The Windup Girl the author took this whole concept to an entirely new level. Such amazing world building, I could smell the smells and feel the heat, and felt like I was rubbing shoulders with all manners of people on these busy streets and
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back alleys. Set in Thailand of the 22nd century after global warming and resource depletion, this is a world that has seen different bio-diseases sweep through crops and now natural food is just about impossible to find. Large, overly powerful corporations, bio-terrorism, calories as currency, all these concepts have a terrible ring of truth about them that at times made this book difficult to read.

The story is richly, deeply layered and we move between a number of characters. Each character has his own distinct voice from Anderson Lake, the American who works for the giant corporation of AgriGen, to sly Hock Seng, an immigrant that works for Anderson, to Emiko, a Japanese windup girl who has been genetically engineered with a predisposition to serve real humans, and Jaidee, Tiger of Bangkok, a leader in the White Shirts terror organization whose destiny is to become a catalyst in the ever changing political power swings by the corrupt Ministries that are meant to be protecting the Kingdom of Thailand but are, in fact, building their own power base. These characters and many more come together, interact and separate in their ongoing bribery deals, backroom politics, plots and overthrows.

I admire that author Paolo Bacigalupi never allows the story to become preachy, just as he doesn’t allow his characters to be simply good or bad, they are fully formed and real. Not an easy read, being intense, violent and grim, but a convincing and well-crafted story with a strong environmental message.
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LibraryThing member Philotera
What happens after the ice caps melt, we run out of oil, and our food supply collapses?

These are the unpleasant questions The Windup Girl concerns itself with. Famine and disease have caused "the Great Contraction." Midwest agribusinesses are loathed, and depended upon, for their sterile foodstuff.
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Strange new genetic plagues stalk the earth. You don't want to live there.

Visiting, however, is fascinating. This is a brutal book full of unpleasant people and rare kindness. I found some areas predictable, and was annoyed with the unrelenting sexual violence.

Seriously, a woman who can speak a kazillion languages and is unbelievably fast, as well as is bred for loyalty, the only use for her is as a low level prostitute? Either that was one dumb Japanese exec, or a real failure of imagination on the part of the writer.

But my quibbles aside, I found the book overall laudable. It's a new take on dystopias. As a contributor to seed banks, I appreciate the warnings about what we are doing to our food crops and farming industry. Cheap is not wise, merely convenient.

I highly recommend it for its fresh voice and new view. Great to see something different in SF. Not for the squeamish. Contains secenes of strong sexual violence.
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LibraryThing member Smiler69
Many of the bleakest predictions for the future have come true and life in the 23rd century is a constant fight for survival against pandemics, religious extremists, and the lack of adequate sources of nourishment. While many of the world's nations have fallen prey to these afflictions and ceased
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to exist as entities, the Thais have managed to survive and even prosper. They're braved bioterrorism by shutting themselves off from the rest of the world and cultivating crops from their own ancient seeds, while the rest of the world's nations were forced to buy their foodstuffs from multinationals who own the patents to all known calorie sources. Anderson Lake works for one such multinational, AgriGen, and he's in Bangkok working undercover in the guise of a factory owner, manufacturing springs (a source of energy in a post-fuel-based world) to crack the secrets of the re-emergence of what were thought to be long extinct food sources, such as nightshades (including tomatoes and tobacco) and what may be known to us as lychees. Emiko, the Windup Girl of the title used to be treated by her original Japanese owner as a queen, but she's been left behind and now is forced to work in a sex club where her utter public degradation is part of the nightly act. Windup girls originated in Japan where they were developed as an obedient workforce, and are recognizable due to their distinctive stutter motion, though they've evolved from test tubes and could otherwise pass for normal human beings, albeit much more beautiful ones. Bangkok is about to fall into the chaos of civil warfare in which Emiko and Anderson are deeply embroiled in ways neither of them could ever have predicted in this hotbed of corruption and violence .

As I'm fairly new to certain types of fantasy and science fiction, it took me quite a while to fully get immersed into the story—roughly half the novel in fact. But once all main elements of the story had been established, the novel really took off from me, and it was difficult to put down. Not an easy read by any means, and I must admit a lot of it went right over my head—including the ending—but I still recommend this unusual and highly imaginative novel which completely immerses the reader in this strange and scary future world.
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LibraryThing member AHS-Wolfy
What happens when fossil fuels have been exhausted and bio-engineering has led to plagues ravaging the globe after global warming has become a reality instead of just the fear hanging over our own time? While calorie companies try to control the world's staple foods and keep up with the constantly
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mutating diseases that threaten to engulf everyone, they are constantly searching for new seed-banks to supplement their own stocks. One such seed-bank is located in the Kingdom of Thailand and this has managed to keep them from under the sway of the company men that desperately want in. The story is set during a time of political unrest in the Kingdom, almost all the officials are corrupt and the two main parties are at odds. The Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Trade want to head off in different directions and the company men see this as an opportunity for a way in.

Meanwhile, the titular Windup Girl, a genetically engineered servile creature, has been abandoned by her former master and is suffering every degradation known to man (and woman) in a pleasure house as a novelty attraction. If the wrong people find her then she will be destroyed but circumstances come to a head for her personally and the country as a whole when her previously unknown self-preservation programming is triggered after a particularly brutal night she spends in the company of an important political figure.

The world building is excellent for the microcosm of the setting. Characters are all well fleshed out and believable in their actions, no-one is truly good but all follow their own motivations for what they do. After a slightly slow start the action really hots up and I felt compelled to keep reading and fairly rushed through this book and devoured its content. I will certainly look forward to reading more from this author.
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LibraryThing member msf59
Somewhere in our dark future, most of the civilized world has collapsed, including the superpowers, due to avarice, disease and shoddy planning. Thailand, somehow, becomes the center of the world and it’s not a pretty place. Food has become king and whoever possesses it, controls the game.
We
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follow several characters through this dangerous dystopian landscape, including a crafty businessman, a couple police officers and a beautiful Windup Girl. A young woman genetically-engineered, for obedience and pleasure. She is truly an engaging creature and becomes the “soul” of the story, as she finds herself in the center of corruption and a looming revolution.
This not always an easy read. It can be violent, cold and ugly. The author doesn’t offer much hope but I found his world-building fascinating and wildly inventive. His prose is also strong and skillful.
“To the north, the distance is lost in the orange haze of dung burn and humidity, but somewhere out there, if the pale scarred farang is to be believed, windups dwell. Somewhere beyond the armies that war for shares of coal and jade and opium, her own lost tribe awaits her. She was never Japanese; she was only ever a windup. And now her true clan awaits her, if only she can find a way”.
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LibraryThing member GCPLreader
Talk about complicated! This novel is set in the distant future where the oil reserves have dried up and food blight has caused mass starvation. Anderson is an American businessman who’s traveled (travel options--dirigibles or clipper ships) to Thailand to run a factory that manufactures
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kink-springs (some sort of mechanism that can store joules of energy) and to secretly search for the Thai seedbank to secure new food sources for the most important resource to sustain life--calories. Anderson is not really the main character; the author follows the story of 4 or 5 others who must survive the madness that the world has become. And best of all is Emiko-- a genetically engineered Windup New Person who is designed to serve. Emiko’s story fascinated me as she found her inner strengths to escape her degrading life.

Did I like it? Well, it was a tough read. The author may have had the whole thing figured out, but I definitely did not (never did understand the whole algae thing, for example). And yet I couldn’t put it down. The drama builds and builds and builds to a thrilling climax. I’ll never forget Emiko and this strange, terrible, genetically altered world.
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LibraryThing member alexdallymacfarlane
I really wanted to like this book. Broken nearish-future after environmental disaster, a world still struggling to adapt and survive and progress, mostly post-carbon tech, the beginnings of posthumans - sounds like interesting scifi! And I enjoyed the scifi elements. The way that life has adapted
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to climate change and ecosystem crisis across the world is great stuff. While some of the tech is cooler than it is practical, it all worked for me.

But.

This is a condensed version of the 2,000-word review I wrote elsewhere on the internet, because while I liked the scifi elements of The Windup Girl I disliked so much more.

First of all, here's a warning for Thai readers or anyone who knows the country very well: it's not a very good depiction. Even taking into account the differences in 200 years, it doesn't feel like Bangkok. As a farang, I was noticing the aesthetic wrongs. Women wearing pha sin (clothing that got phased out in the 20th C), piles of "reeking" durians down every alley (they only reek when they're cut open, which is only done individually at a customer's request). Dubious transliterations of Thai. The kind of foreign language use that makes anyone who knows the words involved laugh so very much ("water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-fin plaa", anyone?). Based on things like this, I suspect that any Thai reader is going to notice many, many more problems. Granted, some details are really nice (lizard-noises! night-time street stalls! garland sellers and the fact that orchids and marigolds are re-engineered ahead of many other flowers! ghosts!) but, overall, it's like Bacigalupi took the place names Ploenchit, Sukhumvit, etc and applied them to some other city, and it bugged me throughout the book.

There's also a Chinese character who thinks of white people as "foreign devils" non-stop, which felt bizarre and veering into stereotype, and the only time Muslims are mentioned is in the context of a fundamentalist Muslim uprising in Malay. It is, apparently, impossible for current SF writers to imagine a future in which many Muslims are not fundamentalists.

Most egregious of all, to me, is Bacigalupi's handling of the titular character Emiko.

Emiko is one of a Japanese servant class of augmented humans who was abandoned in Bangkok and has been forced into prostitution. With her the focus is so much on how victimised she is, how terrible her life is, how her altered genes make her suffer (her pores are small to make smooth skin so she can't sweat/cool properly and overheats in Thai heat; her genes are doglike and make her subservient and she falls under this sway often). Almost all of her personality and thoughts rotate around this. There are one or two moments when you get a sense of Emiko-the-person not Emiko-the-victim, but they're fleeting. And then.

When she finally snaps and kills a roomful of men who just raped her with a champagne bottle, among other things, we're not actually shown this scene, only its after-effects. The narrative spends more time lovingly detailing the aforementioned rape (plus an earlier over-detailed rape) than showing the survivor of rape surviving, and this is all upside-down and wrong and gross.

This book had far, far too many problems for me to enjoy it, as much as I really wanted to.

I did love the ghosts though.
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LibraryThing member lkernagh
What happens when calories - foodstuffs - become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution?

If you have read and enjoyed China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, then
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there is a good chance that you will also enjoy reading Bacigalupi's novel, a page-turning adventure/social commentary of corporate greed, racial fundamentalism and political scheming set in an alternate reality Thailand. Bacigalupi's Thailand is one that struggles to survive after the global oil collapse of the Contraction and the decimation of foodstuffs and human life as bio-engineered plagues send waves of destruction over everything in their path.

The world-building here is well developed, detailed and easy to visualize. The plot is tight and even though the story has multiple narrators, it is not confusing to follow. I loved Perdido Street Station but found the world-building and the plot development in that book required more of an intellectual focus on my part as I was reading it. With The Windup Girl, I was able to sit back, easily accept the changes Bacigalupi had made to create his alternate world Thailand and allowed me to concentrate on the intricate plot and the characters.

There are no saints in this book. The characters have their flaws, their weaknesses, even the genetically created ones. For me, the book actually exceeded my expectation - which is always nice to experience! - as the premise never grabbed me as something that I would want to read. I am really glad the group read was proposed, as I don't think I would have gotten around to reading this one with out that extra nudge to do so.

Overall, a great story and one that I highly recommend.
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LibraryThing member TadAD
Imagine a world where Michael Pollan's (The Omnivore's Dilemma) nightmares have come true: through genetic engineering of crops and tailored biological attacks on biodiversity, the big food companies have managed to take almost total control of the world's food supply. Of course, they've also
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created several nasty plagues in the process. Global warming has flooded much of the world, petroleum is running out...let's just say things are a mess.

The suspense thriller that Bacigalupi has laid on top of this dystopic backdrop has somewhat of the feel of a cyberpunk novel...though the technology is decidedly too low-tech for that that sub-genre, the feeling of social breakdown is much the same.

My impression is that this is a book that will appeal to science fiction fans but isn't likely to have a strong crossover appeal. On the positive side, the themes haven't been over-mined by authors as of yet and Bacigalupi does a good job of playing on current fears about serious and irreversible damage to our environment, particularly from ill-considered hacking with genomes. On the negative side, I didn't find the characters particularly engaging and there is more than a hint of cliché in the story. Fans of the genre might find the former interesting enough to ignore the latter.
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LibraryThing member ChrisRiesbeck
My first four star book in quite a while. Solid characterization, solid world building, strong plot line, and a variety of subtexts.

The story is set in Thailand in a fairly near future (no dates given). Global warming has hit with a vengeance and only levees and constant pumping keep the capital
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(still Bangkok?) above water, but that's a lesser threat than the US midwestern agricultural firms (think Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland) that have released genetically engineered plagues to wipe out all crops except their own genetically engineered seeds. And of course you can only buy sterilized rice and grain -- no planting your own!

The details of this future contain tinges of steampunk -- human and animal power drive most things, and "kink springs" are used instead of batteries to store that power. This nicely dovetails with the story which is a series of arcs that are all about power, and how it shifts constantly from one group to the next, as pent up forces eventually break like an overwound spring.

The story follows half a dozen different players sampled from some of the major elements of this new order. There is an agent of one of the biggest agricultural firms. There is his second in command, once a wealthy businessman in China, now a refugee scraping by and planning for a return to power. There is an ambitious loose cannon in the "white shirts" who violently enforce trade laws unless you bribe them, but his goals are somewhat nobler. There is his assistant, a woman soldier with serious conflicts of interest. And there is the windup girl, a genetically engineered sex toy, made in Japan where such things are accepted, and abandoned in Thailand where she'll be composted if discovered.

This is one of the most well-balanced science fiction novels I've read in a while. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member pmwolohan
21 Words or Less: Bacigalupi's debut novel delivers on the promise of his early work with a complex portrait of an environmentally influenced future Thailand.

Rating: 5/5 stars

The Good: Bleak but believable future setting that begs for further exploration; a diverse set of interesting characters
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that are human, sympathetic, and unique; Prose conveys complex technological and cultural details in an elegant manner that reads amazingly well.

The Bad: A fair bit of Thai words had me running to Google on a frequent basis; there aren't any more Bacigalupi novels to read offhand.

There's a reason Paolo Bacigalupi's name came up the most when discussing promising new authors. To understand why, you don't need to look any further than The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi's debut novel. Set in a future Thailand that struggles to survive in a world devastated by pandemic and crop failure, The Windup Girl depicts five characters who are poised to influence the country's future whether they realize it or not. As their actions weave together through the complex tapestry of the future setting, Bacigalupi creates a story that both excites and frightens.

The Windup Girl is part of the new wave of environmentally influenced science fiction that places one foot in the future and the other squarely in the past. Anticipating the end of cheap energy and global resource shortages, these novels are equally recognizeable and difficult to accept. In The Windup Girl, the advancements of genetic manipulation of viruses and seedstock, hyper-evolved animals built for performance, and even humans scientifically engineered for beauty and obediance are balanced out by the regressions resulting from the end of cheap energy. A return to animal labor, the expense of communication or computation, the financial power represented by dependable electricity, and even subtle touches like a scarcity of ice. One especially poignant scene shows a team of poor workers running up flight after flight of stairs only to serve as ballast weight for the rich man's elevator. All of these details taken together makes the world feel exceedingly real, moving into the future while retaining the links to the past.

My only complaint about Bacigalupi's constructed world is that I want to see more of it. I want to travel Europe's great cities to see what they've become, return to an America originally built upon bottomless wells of oil that have since run dry, and see if the pristine jungles of South America still survive. This setting begs for more stories, and I hope we get them particularly if they are as expertly crafted as The Windup Girl.

It's not only Bacigalupi's setting that impresses, it's his characters. He expertly maintains half a dozen points of view characters without resorting to anything that feels overly stereotypical on contrived. There is more (and better) characterization in The Windup Girl than some books twice as long with half the number of characters. Each character is fully realized with their own motivations, history and failings. I would warn you that if you are looking for black-and-white conflict, this isn't a book for you. These are realistic people, not comic-book characters. They aren't perfect but they are human (even the ones that aren't). I'm tempted to get into more specific details but I'd rather let you get into the characters yourself.

The one thing I think that would benefit the book would be the inclusion of an index for the many Thai words. A lot of them you could guess at but the early chapters were a little jarring as you tried to suss out the meaning of the Thai slang. I would draw comparisons to Ian McDonald's Brasyl in terms of cultural details. The Windup Girl is full of them, from big picture regional politics and religious conflicts to more subtle details like clothing choices and food items. Similar to the little touches that connect the present to the future, these cultural details link the words on the page to a real place.

In fact, I would say that Ian McDonald's Brasyl is the closest thing to The Windup Girl in the last few years. Except that this book is better. Where Brasyl and similar books focus on the cultural details or the delightful little world they've built, they often do so in a way that's a little bit too much infodump or not quite enough plot structure. Bacigalupi wraps all of these brilliant pieces into a cohesive package that reads effortlessly and with a literary style uncommon in genre fiction. It's got all of the complexity you would expect from genre fiction but without any of the heavy reading. It's hard to describe exactly what Bacigalupi does, or how exactly he does it (if I knew I'd be writing right now) but it works.

If it isn't clear to you by now (or the 3 week wait after I finished the book), I had a incredibly hard time writing this review. I simply can't exactly illustrated why The Windup Girl resonated the way it did with me. The simpliest way I can put it is that Paolo Bacigalupi has written a novel that delivers everything I look for in science fiction and more.

Go read this book.
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LibraryThing member clfisha
Food is rare, oil ran out long ago and the genetic wars wiped out most of the food and countries have to go begging to the all powerful GM companies. Thailand stands out, independent and food rich it watches its borders and its seed bank closely but there are spies coming on the new airships and
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the country is starting to tear itself apart as international trade beckons.

Ok this book has been hyped all over the place and many people love but I have no idea what the fuss was all about.

Although I have a long list of faults but what’s frustrating is that parts of this book I found very very good. When it kicks into the dramatic action it becomes gripping: the clash of cultures, the description of civil war and different ethical and spiritual viewpoints come alive whilst the characters become less important. Which is a good thing because I really found the characters dull as dishwater and as you know a book is never going to work for me if I find the characters flat.

Maybe I was too familiar with the genetically modified/AI 'slave' but the wind-up girls polite only invokes horror (it's quite explicit), the amoral company spy was dire although his tortuous reasoning could have been interesting. I could go on. There
was some hope in the conflicted customs official and her leader in the latter half of the book but that was all.

Being un-engaged in the story means verisimilitude gets dropped and I started picking at the story rather than believing in it. So inattention might have led me to miss bits but kept wondering what was happening in the rest of world. Why hasn't the old world international politics changed? Why was China mentioned so briefly?
Why wouldn't everyone fly around in airships and not just sail? Why is the company so damn useless?

So sci-fi/dystopia fans its probably worth your time (although lets face it you have probably already read it). Everyone else it depends on your tolerences; if you have patience and a preference for the more world building/idea driven plots go for it
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LibraryThing member Unkletom
The key element that drives Wind-up Girl is its environment, no pun intended. If you were to ask someone who has read most any book what it was about they would likely tell you it’s about a person who did so-and-so or had such-and-such happen to them. With 'The Wind-up Girl' they would say it's
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about a dystopian society that has suffered a series of environmental disasters and how that society responds. The doings of the characters unfortunate enough to live in Bacigalupi's Thailand are seemingly secondary in importance to the setting itself. While there is a plot, it takes an interminable length of time to get moving and much longer before things start to come together. The bottom line is that this is not a book for the impatient.

I listened to the unabridged audio version read by Jonathan Davis. Davis did an excellent job but I don’t thing audio books are the best way to experience 'The Wind-up Girl'. It is a pretty involved story with lots of characters and alternating points of view and requires more attention than I can usually afford it while driving, dog-walking or otherwise multi-tasking.

I need to add a final warning. The book has a graphic rape scene that, while some may argue is an integral part of the plot, is extremely difficult to read. I don’t consider myself at all squeamish when it comes to sexual content but the level of violence and degradation in the scene in question made me skip over much it.
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LibraryThing member Bibliotropic
Where a good deal of futuristic settings are largely Western in origin, Bacigalupi breaks the mold and sets The Windup Girl in Thailand, exposing readers to a new culture, language, and set of experiences and values. My own compehension of Thai being limited to "sawatdi kha" and "mai pen rai," I
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managed to expand my vocabulary a little simply by reading this book. It was, I must say, a welcome change from the white-bread, Western-dominated culture often expressed in futuristic settings.

Also interestingly, while still being science fiction this book takes us back a few steps in terms of technology. The level of power that we enjoy even today is gone. Computers are run by treadles. It's borderline steampunk in that more things are made of cogs and gears, simply out of necessity. Humanity's control over the world has been decimated by crop failures, advanced disease, climate change. The whole Monsanto controvery is ramped up to 11 here by corporations taking control of all things edible, cracking the genetic code to make it resistant to all the blights and ills that killed crops previously, and making all the crops sterile so that people have to rely on them for food. Nobody can just take a handful of apple seeds and some land and start their own orchard.

Almost makes you wish for the kind of future where we're just off exploring alien planets, doesn't it?

The titular character of the novel, Emiko the windup girl, is interesting in that she's not the main character (though we do see a fair amount from her viewpoint, so it's fair to say that she's a protagonist) but more of a catalyst. Resigned at first to spending her life being degraded in the sex trade, Emiko's journey of self-discovery and -realization not only free her from sexual slavery but also serves as the jumping-off point for an entire political revolution in Thailand. And they say one person can't make a difference...

Bacigalupi's chilling version of the future is one that could all too easily become reality, which is, of course, the most terrifying part of speculative fiction. The future he creates is not dystopian; it doesn't pretend to be perfect or tightly-controlled, though it does bear a few of the earmarks of a dystopian society in the making. The skill at which the author weaves the fine detail of culture and speculative future together makes for a fascinating tapestry, one which I'm very pleased to have glimpsed, even if it comes with a disturbing ending. Bacigalupi is one author you simply can't afford to miss.
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LibraryThing member drachenbraut23
Set in the 23rd Century, after major environmental disaster all over the world, the story unfolds in Thailand. Calorie companies control the food production through “genehacked seeds” and try through private armies and bioterrorism to rule the world market. Power Resources have run out, and
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bioengineered mammoths and humans are used for manual labor to produce electricity. Hand-cranked radios and windup lanterns are used as alternatives and everything is recycled. Actually, I thought the concept of the story with people still struggling to survive and to adapt to the new rules of the world is great Sci-fi stuff, but Bacigalupi did not quite fulfill my expectations.

However, I found it hard at first to get engaged with this story. The story is told from the viewpoint of four different characters. First we have Anderson Lake, a calorie man “Farang”, who comes to Bangkok undercover to find the secret location of the Thai seed bank and to discover new blight-resisting food. Second we have Emiko a bioengineered genetically modified human “Windup Girl”, fashioned by the Japanese to function as Geisha and pleasure girl - she gets abandoned in Bangkok and ends up in a Thai brothel. The focus on her story lies in her being constantly sexually victimized, until she snaps. How her genetically altered genes make it almost impossible for her to survive the Thai heat and how her doglike genes make her subservient to anyone who commands her. Third we have Tan Hock Seng an aging Chinese “Yellow Card” who tries to find a way back again into his former secure life style. Last and fourth we have Jaidee an environmental officer “White Shirt” of the ministry, who is also a revolutionary, trying to free his country from the grip of the foreigners.

This all sounds so exciting, and it should have been brilliant, but unfortunately that was not the case. Too many plots and sub plots, sometimes crossing each other, but never reaching their full potential. The first ½ of the book was quite dragging, but eventually the story picked up to a more engaging pace, although I did not care for the brutal and victimizing rape scenes done to Emiko.
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LibraryThing member R3dH00d
I'm more impressed by the concepts of the novel than the execution. The works created here is fascinating, but something about the story falls flat. Part if the problem is that it is too obviously a set up for future books. The pacing is also off. The first two-thirds drag rather slowly; the last
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third flies by much too quickly to satisfy.
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LibraryThing member LitReact
A lot of science fiction is based on recognizing a trait of human development (cultural, societal or personal) and taking this quality to its most extreme, tortured state. The trait Windup Girl plays with is the human talent/urge/curse to manipulate things around us to suit our benefit. Thus the
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genomic hacking of agricultural companies is brought to its most horrific possibility with diseases and animals (originally created by man) spreading and killing across the globe, displacing the natural world. Aside from genetic manipulation, the novel also revolves around political manipulation as all the major characters attempt to wheedle and subvert one another. All this manipulation leads to a compelling premise and a fascinating setting.

Where the novel’s world is original though, its characters, plot and dialogue are stock. There is the old canny refugee who ultimately turns out to have a heart of gold, the helpless girl who realizes that she has the ability to defend herself, the incorruptible honest man who serves as an example to the people and the Judas who betrays him for (what else?) money, the sinister agent of foreign interests who (you guessed it) also happens to have a heart of gold, the corrupt and debased regent who control the strings of an invisible and mute monarch, the brilliant scientist who demands to be worshipped as a god, etc. (Note to all mad scientists: no matter how smart you are it is impossible to come up with a believable, decent speech saying you’re a god. Plus, since your legs have been crippled by disease I don’t know if it’s the brightest idea in the world to be hanging out in a boat in the middle of a sunken city.)

You’d think if we’d gotten so ace at cracking the genome that we’d be able to manipulate the DNA of these characters so they’d have some life in them.

Perhaps even more painful than the characters is the clumsy irony that the novel deals to them. Yes, it is sort of ironic that an agri man, he of the masterful knowledge of genehacks and genetic origins, falls prey to a new illness he never anticipated. Yes, it is a twist of irony that at the end of Windup Girl it is Emiko who is cool while Anderson burns with heat he cannot dispel. These are all as ironic as that old Alanis Morisette song which quite frankly was, ironically, not too ironic at all.

If you’re looking for the definitive vision of an emaciated future, stick with Neuromancer; The Windup Girl reads like a cheap (spring powered) knock off of Molly, Case, Armitage, Wintermute and the rest of the cyberspace gang.
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LibraryThing member Black_samvara
Biopunk dystopic science fiction. Brutal, ugly and atmospheric depiction of a rising civil war in post-global warming Bangkok. Thai isolationist policies have buffered them and their precious genebank from ecological disaster but pressures are mounting. Anderson from the Western 'calorie companies'
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is seeking access and Jaidee from the local Environmental Ministry is the last line of defence.

I wanted to like this more than I did. I'm not sure why the book is named after Emiko the Windup girl, she's the character with the least agency. She exists more as a symbol through which other stories are told then as a person in her own right which is normal when men tell stories but makes reading man-stories rather alienating. I'm afraid the ugliness overwhelmed me.

I also think there is a fine line that writers walk when writing about evil / ugliness / suffering and that if it isn't balanced in some way with redemption / insight / growth then the former is not justified. For me, the brutality, sexual assault and sheer ugliness was not redeemed.
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LibraryThing member Erinys
The writer did not put enough soul into any of his characters. The book reads like a short story that was stretched out beyond its scope.
LibraryThing member santhony
This science fiction novel, set in the not too distant future, has as its backdrop an environmentally ravaged, highly dystopian Thailand. In this future, biogenetics have run wild, unleashing a plague of viruses and biological scourges, leading to worldwide famine and a breakdown in societies.
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Carbon based fuels have run their course and energy is largely based upon power generated by human beings and beasts of burden (for example, treadle powered computers).

In this world, generators and distributors of nourishment hold all the power (calorie companies). Biogenetics is key to developing new food strains that are resistant to the many plagues that have destroyed most of the known crop sources.

This novel bears a striking resemblance to Ian Macdonald’s River of Gods, though I found this to be quite a bit easier and more enjoyable to follow. Both feature a dystopian society set in a third world environment (Macdonald in India). Where River of Gods foresaw a society rich in technology, particularly in the area of bioengineered life forms, the society in The Windup Girl has virtually collapsed. Any technology found in this novel is in the bioengineering needed to ensure an adequate and safe food supply.

As power sources have largely disappeared, and nourishment is dangerously scarce, the balance between the energy necessary to physically produce power, and the energy available from the scarce food supply is the key to survival. As a result, the calorie is largely the measure of wealth and power.

The characters in the novel are rich and well developed. The “calorie company” agent, the windup girl (an archaic, crèche grown life form), the yellow card man (Chinese refugee), the Dung King (think Master Blaster from Thunderdome) all play pivotal roles within the framework of the story. Particularly interesting is the tension and conflict present between the Thai kingdom’s ministries of Environment and Trade. In the face of worldwide epidemics and famine, the Environmental ministry (the white shirts) held absolute sway and were rabid and uncompromising in their isolation and protection of the Thai sovereignty. Now, however, international trade has reemerged and the moneyed interests have begun to reopen the borders to immigration and the import of potentially dangerous goods and food stuffs.

This is a fantastic novel. It is highly original in its vision of what environmental degradation and unrestricted bio-engineering could bring in the near future, without being overly “preachy” or pedantic. It simply provides the resulting landscape, peoples it with fascinating characters and tells an engaging story. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member grizzly.anderson
When you set your novel in the struggling world after the collapse of civilization as we know it, there are really only two ways to go: the heroic epic of rebuilding and rebirth or the dystopia of continued struggle and collapse. The Windup Girl is far more the later than the former.

Paolo
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Bacigalupi has set his story in Thailand after the oil crash, and after most of the world's population is wiped out and nations destroyed by a series of plagues engineered and unleashed by bio-agriculture companies. The names are Monsanto, Cargil but they might as well be. And they would rather see the world in ruins than not be in control of the only viable food supplies.

The story is a cautionary tale about greed as the basis for most human endeavors. Greed powers the AgriGen agent Anderson, who is looking for new genetic stock to pillage and burn, after getting it the wrong way around in a previous endeavor. Greed powers the Thai Environmental Ministry, the police known as White Shirts, who are more interested in taking bribes and exploiting their position than in protecting the Kingdom (with one exception of near-saintly purity). It powers the Akarrat and the Trade Ministry who wish to control the government and will deal with any Devil and sacrifice any number of their countrymen in pursuit of that goal. It drives the Chinese refugee Hok Seng, always seeking to cheat, steal, connive and graft his way up the ladder. The only character not driven by greed is Emiko, the Windup Girl, a genetic chimera that has the looks of an idealized Japanese girl, and has been created subservient and sterile, just like the white and rice from AgriGen.

And in the end, freely mutating plague, civil war, and politics bring down nearly every character you've been introduced to. In this kind of parable none of the characters are particularly sympathetic, reduced to either villains or at best, survivors.

The Windup Girl is well written and the characters have enough dimension to keep the story interesting and engaging as long as you aren't holiding out for a hero. As a cautionary tale it is far from an off-putting screed. Did it deserve a Hugo? I'm not sure. But comparisons to A Canticle for Leibowitz or Silent Spring are almost inevitable given its subject, timing, and quality or writing.
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LibraryThing member suetu
Cal*o*rie (kal-uh-ree)
n.
A unit of energy equal to the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. One calorie is equivalent to 4.1868 joules.

The biggest problem with Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl is me, the reader. I'm not a big fan of
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science fiction due to my own failure of imagination. The further away from reality as I know it, the harder it is for me to get involved in and follow a story.

Bacigalupi's much-lauded and honored debut is set in our world--in Thailand, a few hundred years in the future. But it's a much-changed world. Specifically, it's a post-petroleum world. I started this review with a definition of the word "calorie." In this weight-obsessed time, people have forgotten that a calorie is actually a measure of energy. That point isn't commented upon in the text, but it seems relevant as much of the novel revolves around the Kingdom of Thailand's need to feed its people and power its nation and economy.

It seems a variety of plagues have beset the agricultural world. Some may have been natural, some engineered, and surely climate change has taken its toll. Unfortunately, commerce may have played an even larger role, with sterile, disease-resistant seed stocks being owned by huge multi-national "calorie companies." The powers that be in Thailand seek independence from these monopolies, even as central character Anderson Lake, a "calorie man," investigates the available food sources cropping up outside of Agrigen's control.

This description barely scratches the surface of this complex novel. It is an intriguing exploration of a post-petroleum society with regard to the science, industry, and politics of the time. Internal Thai politics are a big part of the story, as are crime and punishment, social mores, and the often clashing cultures which have been thrust together in a volatile environment. Finally, it is a novel of relationships, human and not-quite-human...

Narrator Jonathan Davies does a good job with the unabridged audiobook. I won't swear that his Asian accents are authentic or even culturally sensitive, but my American ears could understand the dialogue clearly. In fact, I had an easier time discerning the huge cast of characters from the distinct voices he created than I did from the unfamiliar foreign names.

The Windup Girl wasn't exactly my cup of tea, but I'm glad to have read it. It's left me with more than a little food for thought.
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LibraryThing member TomVeal
For some time, Paolo Bacigalupi has been writing stories set in an environmentalist worst case scenario: rising oceans, exhausted oil reserves, out-of-control genetic modifications - a world where human and animal muscle power is again the major source of energy, where plagues mutate freely and
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crops regularly succumb to disease, and where the luxuries of "the Expansion" - the period we live in now - are a utopian memory. Several of these tales have been Hugo Award nominees. So is The Windup Girl, Mr. Bacigalupi's debut novel. To summarize briefly, it tells of political intrigues in a faction-ridden future Thailand and of the people (or almost-people) caught between the Scylla of globalization (full of risk and pushed by forces defined auctorially as villains) and the Charybdis of isolation (also risky, though its advocates are portrayed as somewhat like saints).

The eponymous female, the most sympathetic major character in the book, is an artificial human, created to serve as a substitute for the children that modern nations no longer have. The "New People" furnish labor and, in Emiko's case, titillation to the unmodified humans whom they are trained to serve. The insulting term "windup" derives from their clockwork-like motions, a defect (along with subservience, sterility and faulty temperature regulation) engineered into the genotype to ensure that its superior qualities, such as lightning reflexes, fast healing and resistance to diseases, don't outcompete its creator.

Previously owned by a Japanese businessman, Emiko is abandoned when her patron is called back to the home islands and won't pay the cost of her shipment. (Buying a new model in Tokyo will be cheaper.) In the normal course of things, an ownerless windup would be "mulched", which means just what you imagine. Through dubious luck, this one becomes a performer in a Bangkok dive, subjected to humiliation nightly for the amusement of the sadistically curious. Less unfortunately, she finds a new, unofficial patron in the person of a mysterious foreigner at the heart of Thailand's undeclared civil war.

The struggle either to open the country to the outside world or to close it off more tightly is the framework of the plot. Superficially, the reader is encouraged to root for the isolationists, who aren't without flaws but appear idealistic and environmentally pure next to the callous greed of the "calorie company" imperialists. Beneath the appearances, though, the course of events suggests that xenophobia, obscurantism, fanaticism and paranoia are roads to destruction, no matter how high-minded their practitioners. Whether the author intended to provoke any such reflections, I don't know, and it hardly matters. He has, wittingly or not, limned the character of ecological extremism, including moderately explicit parallels to contemporary Islamofascism.

The Windup Girl is a remarkably well-made novel. The plot never gets lost in its own twists; the characters stay in character; the ending flows naturally from what went before but isn't dully predictable. Nonetheless, it is not a very likable work. Mostly unpleasant people do mostly foul deeds in a literally toxic setting. After 350 pages, the reader may feel that he has trudged too long and too far for too little enjoyment.
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LibraryThing member sturlington
It is the far future, in the time of the Contraction, after the world has mostly run out of oil, sea levels have risen, and most crops have been destroyed by genetically engineered pests. The world’s food supply is provided by a few mega-companies, and engineered elephant-like creatures called
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megadonts supply the heavy labor. In the Bangkok of this future, dikes and pumps are all that keep the ocean out, and the Environmental Ministry rules absolutely to prevent breakouts of the never-ending plagues.

This is the world that Bacigalupi has created in The Windup Girl, and it is a fascinating one. His Bangkok is a bizarre mixture of past and future, of steampunk and biopunk — steamy, hot, crowded and desperate. Then he sets into motion a convoluted, sprawling plot that starts with a “windup girl” — a genetically engineered Japanese geisha abandoned illegally in Thailand — discovering that she possesses extraordinary, unsuspected abilities. The story then proceeds into quite unexpected directions, including a coup and a civil war. The plot is so sprawling that I had a hard time sometimes keeping straight exactly what was happening, but I really didn’t care, as I was so enthralled by Bacigalupi’s vision.

The Windup Girl is Bacigalupi’s first novel. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and it was named one of the top 10 books of 2009 by Time magazine.
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LibraryThing member gilag
I picked up this book after it tied for the Hugo award for best novel. And I must say I was not disappointed.

Awards

Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 2010)
Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 2009)
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2011)
Locus Award (Finalist — First Novel — 2010)
RUSA CODES Reading List (Winner — Science Fiction — 2010)
British Science Fiction Association Award (Shortlist — Novel — 2010)
Compton Crook Award (Winner — 2010)
Seiun Award (Nominee — 2012)
Digital Book World Awards (Finalist — Science Fiction — 2018)
Kurd Laßwitz Preis (Winner — 2012)
Ignotus Award (Winner — Foreign Novel 2012)
Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (Winner — 2013)
Locus Recommended Reading (First Novel — 2009)

Language

Original language

English

Barcode

9129
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