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Book Review: The Windup Girl
New submitter Hector's House writes "'Nothing is certain. Nothing is secure,' reflects one of the characters in Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl. In 23rd century Bangkok, life for many hangs by a thread. Oil has run out; rising seas threatens to engulf the city; genetically engineered diseases hover on Thailand's borders; and the threat of violence smolders as government ministries vie for power. Environmental destruction, climate change and novel plagues have wiped out many of the crop species that humanity depends on: the profits to be made from creating — or stealing — new species are potentially enormous. After a century of collapse and contraction, Western business sees hope for a new wave of globalization; Thailand's fiercely guarded seed banks may provide just the springboard needed." Keep reading for the rest of Aidan's review.
The Windup Girl
author
Paolo Bacigalupi
pages
376
publisher
Night Shade Books
rating
8
reviewer
Aidan McKeown
ISBN
978-0356500539
summary
Dystopian action thriller set in 23rd century Bangkok
In a street market, Anderson Lake—a prospector for a US agribusiness giant—comes across an entirely new fruit. Drawn by the promise that it might lead him to the Thai kingdom's seed banks, he follows a trail that leads him to the backstreet club run by dissipated expat Raleigh. Here he encounters Emiko, the "windup girl" of the title. In the club's signature live sex show, she is subjected to—quite graphically described—abuse on stage. Genetically engineered in Japan as a "New Person", to be companion, secretary and translator to wealthy patrons, Emiko—a sort of transgenic geisha—has been abandoned in Bangkok by her former patron. Having been trained since infancy to be compliant, and carrying canine DNA that makes life outside of a strict hierarchy unthinkable, Emiko is trapped both by her own nature and by her characteristic tick-tock stuttery movements, hardcoded into her to make her manufactured origins immediately apparent. Genetically "unclean", Emiko daily faces the threat of extermination by the environment police: she takes to the streets only at night, when she can more easily "pass". Lake is fascinated by the exotic Emiko; she in turn is drawn to him, not least as an escape from slavery—even possibly to the fabled north, where New People reputedly live in freedom. Their relationship is an ambiguous one. Lake is not inherently a tender character (he considers the murder of business associates who threaten his plans). Moreover, his status as an unwelcome corporate outsider already puts him at risk; a transgressive liaison with a "windup" endangers him further. Emiko herself (like the Thai authorities) doesn't feel that she is genuinely human. However, she is fully capable of experiencing pain and loss and—with devastating results—rage.
Bacigalupi's novel is not new, nor is it obscure: published in 2009, it went on to win the highly esteemed Nebula and Hugo awards for science-fiction writing in 2009 and 2010. However, it deserves a place on the pages of slashdot, both for its vision of the future, and how naturally that is embedded in a well-crafted, intelligent action thriller. The book takes a qualified view of our future technological development. Fossil fuel depletion has resulted in a retraction of progress. Now, human and animal labour wind massive crank shafts—a dramatic ramping up of the technology used in hand-cranked radios and windup lanterns. Everything is recycled: even sewage produces methane to light the city's gas lamps. Where technology has leaped forward is in genetic engineering. This has yielded startling benefits: megodonts, hybrid beasts of burden, the result of the splicing of the DNA of elephants with that their massive prehistoric ancestors. It has also imposed dire costs: laboratory-manufactured plagues have swept the planet, Thailand surviving only because of the extreme zealousness of its environmental police.
The setting of an Asian culture, the dystopian image of people crammed into a crumbling city, and the relationship between a cynical, jaded man and vulnerable, artificial woman inevitably recall Bladerunner; however, even if that story provided some inspiration, The Windup Girl doesn't feel derivative: Emiko is the leading protagonist, not a supporting character. And the book takes off from that point of comparison: it's not stuck there. Weaving in with the main plot are a number of sub narratives, the book drawing much of its momentum from this crisscrossing. Hock Seng, Lake's elderly Malaysian Chinese assistant, a refugee from bloody ethnic cleansing, plots his escape from the chaos he feels must ultimately engulf Bangkok. Fiery, ebullient environment police captain Jaidee Rojjanasukchai and his austere female lieutenant Kanya Chirathivat pursue genetic transgressions in an attempt to preserve what is left of Thailand's ravaged ecosystem. Meanwhile their Environment Ministry vies with the Ministry of Trade, which seeks to open up Thailand to resurgent Western business. Plot and counter plot wind the characters together into a climactic conflict sensed only dimly at the start of the book.
It is perhaps here where the book, not falls down, but stumbles. The complexity of the plot towards the end of the book becomes dense and – for me, on first reading – slowed the book's momentum. This complexity might, however, also be a strength. For the purposes of the review I came back to the book, which I had read some eight or nine months previously; it bears rereading, and the largely tight structure is rewarding, as is the plot development. The sense of place is very strong—the press of street markets, the stench and press of humanity in the crumbling high-rise apartment buildings, the tropical setting ("[the] night was black and sticky, a jungle filled with the squawks of night birds and the pulse and whir of insect life"), as is the sense of—literally—the daily grind, as men and animals wind the cranks that keep the city powered. And many of the ideas have the power to jolt: the "cheshires", cats with chameleon DNA that recall Lewis Carroll's fictional creation by changing color to melt into their surroundings, the better to exterminate already-threatened bird populations; the Dung Lord, a mafia don who controls the trade in human waste, a vital part of the city's economy. While not all the characters remain with you afterwards, fittingly, Emiko, the lonely and conflicted protagonist does. Interestingly, hers is also the character for whom the greatest leap of imagination is required—the genetically altered outsider, who makes a journey from abject slavery to a realization of her potential.
Science fiction often suffers because while much attention may have been paid to the technological aspects, the author fails to capture the complexities of the new society or convincingly grasp the characters. Bacigalupi – largely – succeeds because he recognizes that human nature doesn't change over time: elites are only too willing to exercise control with force; the outsiders and those are who different are always vulnerable; human culture, in all its strangeness and mundanity, continues. A key strength of the book is that the subjective portrayal of the characters' inner lives and thoughts means that we feel them to be inhabiting their own present, exactly as we are. They look back of course, as do we. In their case, wonderingly to a time known as "The Expansion", when Thailand was allegedly the "Land of smiles", quite unlike the misery that has become the lot of its average citizen.
If you'd like to sample Bacigalupi's writing, some of his short stories are available on his Pump Six website.
Aidan McKeown is an editor and writer living in the Netherlands. He can be contacted at aidanmckeown@gmail.com.
You can purchase The Windup Girl from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Bacigalupi's novel is not new, nor is it obscure: published in 2009, it went on to win the highly esteemed Nebula and Hugo awards for science-fiction writing in 2009 and 2010. However, it deserves a place on the pages of slashdot, both for its vision of the future, and how naturally that is embedded in a well-crafted, intelligent action thriller. The book takes a qualified view of our future technological development. Fossil fuel depletion has resulted in a retraction of progress. Now, human and animal labour wind massive crank shafts—a dramatic ramping up of the technology used in hand-cranked radios and windup lanterns. Everything is recycled: even sewage produces methane to light the city's gas lamps. Where technology has leaped forward is in genetic engineering. This has yielded startling benefits: megodonts, hybrid beasts of burden, the result of the splicing of the DNA of elephants with that their massive prehistoric ancestors. It has also imposed dire costs: laboratory-manufactured plagues have swept the planet, Thailand surviving only because of the extreme zealousness of its environmental police.
The setting of an Asian culture, the dystopian image of people crammed into a crumbling city, and the relationship between a cynical, jaded man and vulnerable, artificial woman inevitably recall Bladerunner; however, even if that story provided some inspiration, The Windup Girl doesn't feel derivative: Emiko is the leading protagonist, not a supporting character. And the book takes off from that point of comparison: it's not stuck there. Weaving in with the main plot are a number of sub narratives, the book drawing much of its momentum from this crisscrossing. Hock Seng, Lake's elderly Malaysian Chinese assistant, a refugee from bloody ethnic cleansing, plots his escape from the chaos he feels must ultimately engulf Bangkok. Fiery, ebullient environment police captain Jaidee Rojjanasukchai and his austere female lieutenant Kanya Chirathivat pursue genetic transgressions in an attempt to preserve what is left of Thailand's ravaged ecosystem. Meanwhile their Environment Ministry vies with the Ministry of Trade, which seeks to open up Thailand to resurgent Western business. Plot and counter plot wind the characters together into a climactic conflict sensed only dimly at the start of the book.
It is perhaps here where the book, not falls down, but stumbles. The complexity of the plot towards the end of the book becomes dense and – for me, on first reading – slowed the book's momentum. This complexity might, however, also be a strength. For the purposes of the review I came back to the book, which I had read some eight or nine months previously; it bears rereading, and the largely tight structure is rewarding, as is the plot development. The sense of place is very strong—the press of street markets, the stench and press of humanity in the crumbling high-rise apartment buildings, the tropical setting ("[the] night was black and sticky, a jungle filled with the squawks of night birds and the pulse and whir of insect life"), as is the sense of—literally—the daily grind, as men and animals wind the cranks that keep the city powered. And many of the ideas have the power to jolt: the "cheshires", cats with chameleon DNA that recall Lewis Carroll's fictional creation by changing color to melt into their surroundings, the better to exterminate already-threatened bird populations; the Dung Lord, a mafia don who controls the trade in human waste, a vital part of the city's economy. While not all the characters remain with you afterwards, fittingly, Emiko, the lonely and conflicted protagonist does. Interestingly, hers is also the character for whom the greatest leap of imagination is required—the genetically altered outsider, who makes a journey from abject slavery to a realization of her potential.
Science fiction often suffers because while much attention may have been paid to the technological aspects, the author fails to capture the complexities of the new society or convincingly grasp the characters. Bacigalupi – largely – succeeds because he recognizes that human nature doesn't change over time: elites are only too willing to exercise control with force; the outsiders and those are who different are always vulnerable; human culture, in all its strangeness and mundanity, continues. A key strength of the book is that the subjective portrayal of the characters' inner lives and thoughts means that we feel them to be inhabiting their own present, exactly as we are. They look back of course, as do we. In their case, wonderingly to a time known as "The Expansion", when Thailand was allegedly the "Land of smiles", quite unlike the misery that has become the lot of its average citizen.
If you'd like to sample Bacigalupi's writing, some of his short stories are available on his Pump Six website.
Aidan McKeown is an editor and writer living in the Netherlands. He can be contacted at aidanmckeown@gmail.com.
You can purchase The Windup Girl from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
such an indepth review i feel like there is no need to get it now.
...since it's 8/10, rather than the Packt-standard 9/10 :)
There were a lot of interesting ideas discussed in the book, but it fails to really explain why things like solar power were not used... at all... not to mention any other form of green energy that is available even today. It seemed a pretty big hole to me.
The Windup Girl came out in September 2009 and now you're getting around to reviewing it?
Let me tell ya, there's an awesome book by this guy named Bob Heinlein. He named it "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and I heard it's pretty good. I'd better get cracking on that review before it's too late!
News for Nerd. Stuff that matters. Reviews of fiction published two years ago.
Is rubbish like this book.
Of ever so many DNC "Chicken Little", fear mongering talking points. Is there no originality or creativity left anywhere?
Sequel to Coin Operated Boy?
Unfortunately, it bogs down after a while and things move glacially and in circles. I did not finish the book and stopped somewhere in the middle. Pretty rare for me. For me that makes is more a 3/10.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Cheeky reference aside, if you want to learn more about the author, a local alt-weekly I read sometimes did a fairly good article on him.
And I had to take pills for a week!
Is this science fiction? That's disgusting! I don't want to read about that; I want technology, not fiction! Fiction makes me sick and sad. Reality is bad enough.
While I like "classic sf" (meaning technology and adventure), this was a very good read. It has enough stuff to cause some thinking, not just the entertainment value. I highly recommend it to anyone who's getting a little bored with current SF.
Yes there were some minor plot holes, but overall it was a wonderful book(my review). Bacigalupi is one of my new favorite writers.
My company home page
So, for a dystopian novel (and if you read it closely it is VERY dystopian with what's left of mankind scavenging for what few "calories" they can) I thought is was a "fun" read. Maybe that's because I've been to BKK many many times (I live in Vietnam) and it is the preferred destination for most expats R&R. (In addition to being a "Disneyland for adults", Bangkok consistently is rated the world's top tourist destination for being cheap AND fun! ;). The author gets many details about Bangkok right while projecting it into the despairing future; I especially like the abandoned skyscrapers that are today the icons of the city.
Unfortunately for the novel (but very fortunately for us!) there is no way the world will turn out that bad at least not due to the overwhelming shortage of energy he predicts. Even if we completely run out of fossil fuels (unlikely) or have their use almost completely prohibited worldwide to stop climate change (a bit less unlikely), it looks like renewables will save our energy butts. Even now solar and wind are *only* a factor of two or three times more expensive than fossil fuels; we may be headed for a poorer world (and one in which air travel will again be a luxury only for the rich) but we won't be so desperately scavenging for energy as to make genetically engineered animals (and people!) a necessary substitute. Of course he did this partly to play up the "wind up" aspects of a society which requires this animal energy to be stored up somehow but I'm very glad it won't come to pass.
His climate change predictions, on the other hand, are much more spot on and do foretell a world where the major coastal cities of the world are under constant threat of inundation. :(. As well as it being very hot and humid. :( :(
I recently read the Jump 225 Trilogy by David Louis Edelman consisting of Infoquake , Multireal, and Geosynchron. and found them more interesting, but think the author was uncertain how to wrap up the series, which left me a little unsatisfied at the end.
If you want hardcore sci-fi, try Alastair Reynolds and his Revelation Space series.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
We can splice canine DNA into human DNA and make a "clockwork" girl, but we can't modify algea to create fossil fuels efficiently? This story has some pretty major flaws from the sounds of it.
I was fine with the dystopian energy-crisis food-shortage spy-novel paranoid stuff - it was creative, and some of it was well-written, and I wasn't bothered by the cartoon-physics use of genetically engineered elephants to wind fancy springs that seems to annoy a lot of engineers. But the genetically-engineered-women-just-deserve-sex-slavery-and-killing theme that makes up about half the book was really vile. I found it far more squicky and offensive than when a bad imitation Conan the Barbarian character rapes his conquests, and IMHO that part was almost as badly written.
I didn't see how it rated a Hugo award, in spite of the creativity and the complexity of the plot.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Everything is recycled: even sewage produces methane to light the city's gas lamps.
Wouldn't it be way esier to burn the methane at a power generation station and ship electricity to the lights rather than create a gas distribution network and burn gas for.. light (and waste all the heat it generates). This book was not well thought out.
xkcd recently covered this kind of presumption of current trends continuing forever.
A friend told me the book was great. It won Hugo and Nebula awards, more evidence that it's great. But I am stopped reading it and I'm finding it difficult to make myself pick it up again.
My main complaint is that I'm around ten chapters in, and so far I don't like anyone. Maybe I should like Emiko, but I haven't seen much of her. But the business exec is harsh, people around him are plotting to stab him in the back, the union that controls the matodonts is corrupt and obnoxious, Thai government officials are corrupt and obnoxious... I find the book unpleasant to read.
Reading this book made me think: in any story you need to make a connection with at least one of the major characters. Usually it should be a positive connection: you are rooting for the hero and want him/her to triumph. Sometimes it can be a negative connection: you start to really want to see the character's plans foiled.
In my favorite stories, there is not just one but several characters I connect with, and usually right from the first chapter. Not so this book.
And, like another Slashdotter commented, I have to wonder why solar power doesn't seem important. The concept of treadle-operated office computers is kind of cool, but it doesn't really make sense to me. Business desktop computers of the 90's were less powerful than today's ARM or SOC computers, so you ought to be able to run business computers 100 years from now on sunlight. Especially in Thailand!
If you love steampunk sort of stuff, then the "bio-punk" in this novel might capture your imagination. I certainly found the background and the technology more interesting than the characters. Global warming has made the seas rise, and fossil fuels are depleted, so the technology is all different. They use "mastodonts" to wind "kink-springs", and these "kink-springs" are sold to anyone who needs portable power without putting carbon emissions into the atmosphere. So airships run on kink-spring power, and sailing ships ply the oceans, and nobody can afford to operate airplanes or motorized ships anymore. (You might think the Internet would be hugely important, since it is so much cheaper to ship bits through a cable than to move humans around, but it doesn't figure much into the chapters I read.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I thought it was very entertaining. However, it had some very glaring holes. For example, why the fixation on batteries? Why were they manufactured in such an absurdly complex manner? Why no solar power? Wind power? Tidal? Clearly, some of those decisions were made for the sake of the establishing a plot.
I did feel he did a good job of establishing tension, especially when the uprising began. I also thought he did a reasonably good job of conveying ex-pat culture from the perspective of the ex-pat. But he also overdid that, suffering too much from the noble savage mindset. Westerners were all exploitive and evil, Thai were uniformly noble to a fault and the Japanese, despite doing everything the Westerners did, somehow came off as neutral.
I really liked the world Bacigalupi created, but I couldn't get past a lot of those nagging details.
Did they manage to wide-scale convert to IPv6 by the 23rd century?
Reviewing old books is perhaps not that bad an idea. Many people haven't read The Windup Girl, or even The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Especially with RAH, with no new books coming out, there are no big advertising pushes for his works, even though they're republished periodically. Moon isn't even available in Kindle format for some bizarre reason. (I'm about to scan one of my copies so I can have it on my Kindle. If it's ever available in Kindle format, I'll buy it.)
I was at a sci-fi con a couple of years ago, and the _only_ author who had a discussion panel dedicated to their works - was Robert Heinlein. Sadly, the average age of the people there was quite high. I can't help but wonder if some new reviews on a site like Slashdot might encourage the young'uns to pick up some RAH and give it a go. Maybe some even older stuff like E.E. Doc Smith.
Sloppy, bereft of morals. Anyone notice how the author changed a character's gender partway through? I guess he was too busy getting off on his sexual sadism to pay attention to such minor details.
What sucks most is that I picked this up looking forward to a gritty, compelling page-turner. Filth is not the same as grit.
Save your money - go watch Blade Runner again The movie tells a better story.
Al Bore's fav bedside reading (besides Moby Dick)
I'm surprised this wasn't linked from either the review of the comments so far, but the wonderful lads at Baen have the DRM-free ebook edition.
Depends on how much of a priority the mid- to long-term survival of those humans and animals is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sounds like the author was definitely no engineer. You're absolutely right; if you already have an electric distribution network, why would you go backwards to a 19th century gas distribution network? And a central power station can get far higher efficiency that simply burning a hydrocarbon for light, especially if you use LED lights. An energy shortage would drive people to use more efficient technologies, not go backwards to horribly inefficient ones.
Old school version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=m7KPpfTr6PE#t=394s
At least, that's my recommendation. It feels like yet another Neal Stephenson wannabe. Much like "The Unincorporated Man" there's a ton of futuristic stuff being explained all the time. But just like that novel, and unlike Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, or Anathem none of the actual futuristic stuff feels all that plausible, nor is it really explained, nor even terribly interesting. I couldn't get past the third chapter, at which point I'd already picked out what felt like a hundred something engineering and scientific faults and impossibilities.
I just started reading it this morning! haha
having just lived through the 'girl with the dragon tattoo' i can go another 5 years without an extended anal rape scene
The Unincorporated Man is another great, recently written, dystopian future kind of book. The underlying premise to the book is that in the future, every person is a corporation unto themselves. People's stock is bought and sold on the market. In effect, people become investors in each other. Obviously the majority of people end up being owned by others. The greatest accomplishment for a person is to reach "majority", to have the controlling stake in themselves.
All in all, it is a well written and entertaining book. I will probably appeal to most /. readers.
gibson wrote it
Amazing how it focuses on the "negative" side of human progress. A world full of greedy corp types but the smart people are held back?
I read The WIndup Girl about two years ago. Part of the backround is is that the "expansion" , the 250 year run of expanding economies, has come to a horrible end, with famine, wars, genocide and ethnic cleansing. In spite of the technical holes in the book, it rings true to me and I have been reading science fictiion since 1954.
Every time I walk into a supermarket and observe the incredible plenty around me I think "The Expansion". I hope my worries do not come true.
Yes, this all sounds fine, but did they get around to any chess in the book?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
With this book Bacigalupi managed to rekindle my ten-years-dorman love for science fiction. Rich characters and wonderful prose.
I still don't see the point of reviewing it now, though. By this time everyone interested in reading it has probably already read it.
This is one of them.
I read a lot, but remember only few books that make it into this category, perhaps "The Medicus" by Gordon is another.
What makes this book this good? Probably a combination of things:
The theme: exhaustion of fossil fuels leads to a contraction of globalisation, the return to local societies, the realisation of how our world of today is characterised by an endless supply of energy and ubiquitous access to it and how life would be if we had none of it any more.
The characters: rich palette of characters, most interesting a female hero with porcelain like skin.
The plot: an average plot driven by greed, power and politics with a prise of love.
The gadgets: a set of interesting, but constructed wide arrangement of gadgets, last but not least in the form of a woman (!)
...named "The Calorie Man" appears in "The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Third Annual Collection; edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin's Griffin, ISBN 0-312-35334-0)".
Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend.