Customer Reviews

Windup Girl

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4 star:		(3)
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This is an amazing example of dystopian sci-fi! All the prices and accolades were well deserved!

The story takes place in a pretty post-apocalyptic future Thailand, after genetically engineered food led to new strains of lethal diseases that completely changed the world. The story lines of different characters are cleverly interwoven and give a veiled picture of a highly corrupt and hierarchical society that considers "clean" food items and health regulations as top priorities. The common point between the American rep of one of the big calorie companies, his accountant, a Thai police officer and other minor characters is the wind-up girl, a human-like creature that fascinates and/or repulses everyone. Her actions and the importance she takes in some of the characters lives drive the novel.

I do not want to give anything away, but this was a great read, from the first to the last page! The writing is beautiful and solid. The world created by the author is richly detailed, thought-provoking, and sometimes, creepy in an unnervingly familiar way. I love this book and highly recommend to sci-fi fans, or anyone who enjoys a good dystopian novel.

The Windup Girl -- Great scifi of a dystopia future. I won't give away details, but it is written quite well with a great vocabulary of words and is a pretty fast read. I wasn't able to put it down!

One of the finest novels published in 2009, Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" is a compelling dystopian future post-cyberpunk novel which vividly imagines a world coping with the worst effects of anthropogenic global warming and the rapid collapse of our petroleum-based civilization. His stark, quite vivid, portrait of 22nd Century Bangkok is one well steeped in realism and among the finest examples of world building published recently in science fiction. It's a near future world where humanity must rely almost exclusively on genetic engineering as a means of coping with the loss of plastics and other synthetic materials, creating not only new species of plants and animals, but also virulent diseases as deadly as Ebola virus for which cures may be nonexistent. A near future world where Thailand has become the hegemon of Southeast Asia, even if it is technologically backward compared with Japan and America. Bacigalupi weaves a most mesmerizing tale, introducing us to a compelling cast of anti-heroes, of which the most enigmatic is Emiko, the windup girl, one of the New People genetically engineered by the Japanese to become their society's domestic servants and soldiers, compelled against her will to serve the warring factions within Bangkok's Byzantine-like political elite. Her only hope of salvation is the American Anderson Lake, an AgriGen company man, who searches the food markets of Bangkok lfor fruits and vegetables from plants thought to be extinct, hoping to find new DNA to aid in his company's genetic engineering, while serving as the manager of the SpringLife factory near downtown Bangkok. His elderly assistant Hoeck Seng is among the few ethnic Chinese survivors of a Malayan genocide committed by its fundamentalist Muslim majority against the Chinese; one plotting to revive his family fortune in Bangkok by any means necessary.

Bacigalupi is a fine prose stylist in his own right, conjuring a gritty, realistic, view of a Bangkok protected by dikes and levees from the encroaching sea; a view so realistic that readers can vividly imagine the sweltering heat, the open air food markets, and the teeming masses of impoverished ordinary people whose lives differ little from those of their 20th Century ancestors. Without a doubt, Bacigalupi has written a most impressive literary achievement, a great novel of ideas and action, reaffirming science fiction's importance as a literary genre capable of producing not just great ideas but also high literary art. However, he may not be as graceful a literary stylist as William Gibson or China Mieville. For this very reason, some readers will regard his dystopian near future far less compelling than either Gibson's Sprawl or Mieville's New Crubozon, though I think his dystopian vision is as compelling as theirs. "The Windup Girl" was the 2010 recipient of both the Nebula and Hugo awards, two of the highest honors bestowed on science fiction literature. In his literary debut as a novelist, Bacigalupi has made a most auspicious start, demonstrating that he should be regarded as one of our finest contemporary American writers of science fiction.

The Windup Girl is one of the those rare novels for which a sequel is definitely warranted, the risk of course being that it wouldn't live up to its spectacular predecessor. A meticulously devised plot combines the intrigue of warring political and cultural factions with the ruthlessness of gene-modding food corporations cornering markets and eliminating their competition and biodiversity. It further incorporates a moral and ethical examination of laboratory-produced life (vegetable and animal--the latter of the which the title character is comprised), all taking place in the exotic backdrop of Thailand; fertile soil indeed for crops, be they biological, political, or theological in nature.
If the novel suffers from the lack of a clearly likable protagonist, a positive message, or a happy ending, it certainly makes up for with visual and emotional intensity; palpable realism of characters, settings, and situations; wondrous imagination; and a plethora of schemes and obstacles for the "heroes" to overcome. The Windup Girl is a well-conceived and an enthralling read.

Plot, characters, setting--awesome on all counts. A challenging read at the beginning, but the rewards are many, up until the very strong ending. This novel has been nominated for the upcoming Nebula Award. Past the first 25 pages or so, I found it extremely hard to put down. Couldn't find anything weak in it. I won't forget those characters.

Windup Girl is the first novel by Paulo Bacigalupi. After reading this book, I have become an instant fan of his work, and look forward to his follow up. Windup Girl is imaginative, and extremely well written. The Thai terms, and some sci-fi jargon make the first few chapters a bit of a challenge, but once you get into the story, it moves along quickly.

With everything that has been said regarding Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, I was certainly expecting a quality read. Yet it's much more than that. Simply put, The Windup Girl could well be the finest science fiction novel of the year.

Here's the blurb:

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.

The worldbuilding was impeccable. I was fascinated with the way Bacigalupi portrayed a dystopian Bangkok and the rest of Southeast Asia. How the entire world is in a desperate struggle for survival against rising sea levels and climate changes, as well as the devastation caused by deadly crop mutations forcing millions of people to starve and die of hunger or disease. The author paints a very grim picture concerning the inevitable bleak future that our corporate and mass-consumption world will lead us to. The post-oil worl was another engrossing aspect of The Windup Girl, with power being provided by human labor and genetically engineered animals. Thailand, the main environment in which the story occurs, has remained more or less independent by maintaining an unflagging isolationist policy, which has so far enabled the country to stay ahead of the global agricultural corporations that control the worldwide economy.

The characterization is top notch with three-dimensional characters throughout. The Windup Girl is comprised of several POV characters, thus allowing the reader to see events unfold through the eyes of a number of disparate characters with conflicting agendas. Though Emiko, the titular character, often takes center stage, various others such as Hock Seng, Anderson Lake, Jaidee, and Kanya play major roles throughout the book. Witnessing the conflict between the Environmental Ministry and the Trade Ministry through the eyes of protagonists on both sides of the problem was quite interesting.

Although the pace of the novel is never brisk, Paolo Bacigalupi's sucks you right into this disconcerting dystopian tale from the very beginning. Enthralling, The Windup Girl doesn't let up till you reach the end, which should make you beg for more.

If you are looking for an intelligent and thought-provoking read, enter this post-globalisation world in which calorie companies control the economy with their manufactured sterile crops. But Thailand possesses a priceless resource that Western interests will stop at nothing to find: a secret genebank composed of countless strains of crops that could be used to combat the numerous plagues and perhaps help put an end to world hunger. And at the heart of this story lie an American calorie man, a Japanese genetically engineered young woman, and an old Yellow Card Man who lost everything when Muslim fundamentalists overran his country.

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl is an absorbing read. It does for Southeast Asia what Ian McDonald's River of God did to a not-so-distant in the future India.

One of the top SFF reads of 2009!

Loved this book. It's a very convincing recreation of what a post-oil world might look like in the tropics, and for anyone who's ever seen and loved Blade Runner, some of this is going to feel right at home. The characters are complicated enough to keep you interested, as are some of the plot twists. I can see why it's been nominated for those awards, and Time Magazine, of all people, had it on their best books of the year list.

I think this book is a vision of a possible future where the world is undergoing a process of entropy, systems failing everywhere, and there are people who have been displaced through outbreaks of genetically modified plagues of diseases and pests. In this scenario how would we survive, how would we live? And it follows the adventures of this one man seeking opportunity in the exotic east, Thailand. I wish the book had been a little more technological, otherwise it was a good read, with gripping dialogue.

Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" is a biopunk novel, featuring a dystopic future world where biotech corporations battle for power and money. In this novel, the scene is Thailand, with its government, culture and religion currently controlling the resources that the biotech corporations desire. Bacigalupi has created, in this novel, a detailed and plausible future, though certainly not a future we would like to have, but all too plausible none the less. In this future, mankind seems to be locked in an eternal fight to save itself from the damage it has caused the planet.

In Bacigalupi's dark vision of the future, the biotech companies, or calorie companies as they are called, control the food production and use their power and influence to try to force politicians and agencies to do their bidding. One of these companies is AgriGen, and its representative is Anderson Lake, one of the key characters of the novel. Lake is in charge of a factory, but that is a cover for his real mission, which is to gain access to the Thai seedbank. Another key character is the title character, i.e. The Windup Girl, who is known by the name Emiko. She is one of those beings referred to as "New People" that were developed by the Japanese, in her case for sex.

The Thai society is also a key element in this story, as the politics surrounding the current child monarch queen shape everything that occurs in the story. There are the Trade Ministry and the Environment Ministry battling for power, and groups like the White Shirts who are a constant threat to anyone and anything which is perceived to be a corrupting foreign influence is a potential target for them. There are also the Green Headbands who never make an appearance in the novel, but who are referred to. Paolo Bacigalupi also provides some understanding of the rest of the world of the 23rd Century and how his Thailand fits into it, is influenced by it, and fights against its influence.

I certainly cannot do justice to the intricate plot of the story, or attempt to cover all its many plots and subplots in a review, but Anderson Lake's infatuation with Emiko and the effects from his interactions with her is the catalyst for much of what happens in this novel. While there is a lot to take in from the start of the book, the reader will pick up on the terms used in the novel, such as blister rust, Yellow cards, etc. fairly quickly, and be engrossed in the story as well. Lastly, but far from least, are the characters. Far beyond the two I have mentioned, this novel is filled with distinct characters who are multi-dimensioned and believable because they suffer from the same flaws and motivations that people do today.

This novel tied in winning the 2010 Hugo, won the 2010 Nebula, and the Campbell Memorial award. It also placed 15th on the 2010 Locus awards for SF Novels, and won the 2010 Locus award for first novel, also winning the 2010 Compton Crook / Stephen Tall Memorial award and finished 2nd on the SF Site Readers' Poll. Even Time named it one of the best novels of the year. "The Windup Girl" is a tremendous work, and one can only hope that Bacigalupi continues to develop stories like this for the future he has created. If you don't like biopunk/cyberpunk, then perhaps this isn't a book you would enjoy, but on the other hand, this may be a good book to give the genre another chance.