March 27, 2011

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi












Paperback, 361 pages
Published May 15th 2010 by Night Shade Books (first published September 1st 2009)
ISBN 1597801585 (ISBN13: 9781597801584)
Primary Language: English
Source: Purchased from Amazon.com

The blurb (www.goodreads.com):

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko. Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe. What happens when calories 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? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of "The Calorie Man" (Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and "Yellow Card Man" (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these poignant questions.


I finished reading The Windup Girl a couple of weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since, which says a lot about the quality of the work. Part of the problem is that I can't decide whether or not I like it. I really like my day job, and this book kind of makes me out to be the bad guy, and I can't really get over that.

That being said, it is an interesting concept. What would happen if genetic engineering were completely unregulated? Would it be possible for a custom-designed pet to get loose and cause the extinction of multiple species on the planet within a few decades? Could biotech companies design plagues to wipe-out food sources to ensure entire countries are dependent on their product for simple survival? In the world of The Windup Girl, all those questions are answered, and not always in the way you would expect.

Honestly, I think the world-building is the most interesting part of this book. I didn't really relate to most of the characters, not because they were shallow or one-dimensional, because they weren't, but because they were so very uninteresting. Anderson Lake is a scheming puss-nugget, but I can't even get up the energy to dislike him. There were three characters I liked. The first one died, the second one was a child we only see in passing, and the third one was a crochety old man trying to get back the fortunes he'd lost in a religious war. And I only like him because of his backstory and his care for the child.

So to sum up, I can't recommend this book. I think it's a good book to have read, but if you're looking for some lighthearted fun or for an intense thriller with a plot that sums up at the end, this isn't it.

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