Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's calorie representative in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, he combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs long thought to be extinct. There he meets the windup girl - the beautiful and enigmatic Emiko - now abandoned to the slums. She is one of the New People, bred to suit the whims of the rich. Engineered as slaves, soldiers and toys, they are the new underclass in a chilling near future where oil has run out, calorie companies dominate nations and bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.
And as Lake becomes increasingly obsessed with Emiko, conspiracies breed in the heat and political tensions threaten to spiral out of control. Businessmen and ministry officials, wealthy foreigners and landless refugees all have their own agendas. But no one anticipates the devastating influence of the Windup Girl.
It's not a nice future
Bacigalupi's biopunk story takes place in and it's not an easy book to read.
Let me explain the second
point first.
The Windup Girl is told from the viewpoints of four to five main
characters, all deeply scarred from things in their pasts. Most of these
characters aren't really likable and have their own selfish agendas, often
contrary to those of the other characters. Somehow you still cheer for most of
them.
Having so many viewpoints to
introduce and develop makes this a very slow story to start. It practically
needs the whole book to gain momentum. So if you are looking for a lot of
physical action and usually enjoy fast paced books, you won't last long with
this one. In addition to that the book is written in present tense, which has
the tendency to throw me off from time to time.
What keeps you in is the
extremely well built and detailed world Bacigalupi has created. It's a
dystopian future where nearly everything we should be concerned about right now
went wrong.
The climate changed and the
sea level rose high enough to drown most coastal cities. Bangkok, the setting
of this book, is protected by huge dams and a pump system from the ever
threatening ocean. There are next to no fossil
fuels left and humanity has reverted to other, quite ineffective forms of
energy. Spring-power (like in windup toys) for storing energy, treadles for
computers, genetically modified elephant like creatures called Megadonts for
powering factories, and so on. If there was an explanation why they didn't use
solar power or wind energy (besides using clippers), I missed it.
Huge agri-corporations, in
everything but the name like Monsanto, have meddled a bit too much with nature,
more or less accidentally releasing new plants, animals and plagues which
completely messed up the food chains and the ecosystem of the whole planet.
Only a fracture of normal plants and animals are left and humanity has to be
really inventive to feed itself. Those agri-corporations control the whole food
market, keeping everybody dependent on their food and making calories the only
currency that counts. Wars are waged for precious seeds and Thailand, which
managed to stay independent because of a policy of isolation and their seed
bank, one of the only ones left in the world, are targeted by everybody.
The Windup Girl is full of political maneuvering and intrigue, where
violence and sex are two popular ways to gain or exercise power. Both the
violence and the sex, which is mostly violent and abusive too, are vivid and
sometimes a bit more detailed than I would have liked. Especially Emiko, the
Windup Girl the book is named after, has to endure a lot in a city that sees
her as an abomination and not a human being. Cast aside like a toy and with a
modified extra-smooth skin that is incompatible with the tropic heat of
Thailand she has to sell her body and her dignity.
Especially this aspect of the
story reads like an homage to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
the book which became the movie Blade
Runner.
In Bacigalupi's novel you are
wondering all the time how it will end. All characters are on opposing sides,
with goals so different to each other that you don't even know how you want
this book to end. I'll promise that the twist
is so surprising that you won't manage to foresee it. The Windup Girl is a complex book, which it needs to be to tell its
story adequately. It is a book worth your time – while trying to convince you
otherwise along the way.
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6 comments:
Interesting. I've nominated this one for book club at least once. Sounds like it would likely be a divisive read at best for the discussions.
I know! After reading Xi's review, I'm seriously intrigued. Sounds like it could be a really thought-provoking read, too.
As am I. Really intrigued. Plus, giant elephants always makes a good story.
This was highly recommended by a fellow author & dear friend, so I purchased it and have it sitting on the shelf. Excellent review-thanks! The different p.o.v.s sounds very interesting, and the future world amazing-a little concerned about the pace though.
Have this from the library to read for my steampunk feature but now I'm not sure it's even steampunk? Internet labels are unhelpful most of the time!
"The Windup Girl" is a fantastic read. I enjoyed the world-building of the author. It is such dynamic, desperate and vivid description of a collapsing world with a worsening environmental situation.
I really want to read a well made sequel to this because when I finished the book I wanted to keep reading. I was hooked.
Check out my blog at:
www.ink2quill.com
what a good book.
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