Name: John Manoogian III's review of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Item: The Windup Girl
Rating: 5
Author: John Manoogian III

Paolo Bacigalupi

What Happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits? And what happens when said bio-terrorism forces humanity 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 questions.

The Windup Girl

Bo Jeanes

John Manoogian III

awesome. like the Diamond Age but better / darker.

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.

Stephen Campbell

For those who feel their climate nightmares don't have enough visual fidelity to them.

Christine Bower

I am not someone who leaves books unread. Ever. But—

Can. Not. Finish. 

If you enjoy steampunk, cyberpunk, speculative fiction, or words enjoying themselves, look elsewhere. Far, far from here. 

Imagine a humorless, totalitarian editor was given a manuscript by Neal Stephenson. Our soulless editor cuts out any whisper of glorious prose, character development, or world creation, leaving only the tedious bits. 

And those are unbearably tedious. 

If you enjoy plodding through the dullest stretches of technical manuals, you might manage to slog through more than 174 pages of The Windup Girl. But the technical flaws are really only the surface of what's wrong with this novel. It's all world; no building. Despicable characters fail to be interesting, or even distinguishable from one another. The plot fails to even plod forward. 

The only reason I marked this as "finished" was so I wouldn't have to look at it every time I opened the goodreads app.

A dark look at our near future. The imagery of a (mostly) post fossil fuel world, and particularly Thailand, was evocative and bleak without being overtly desolate. 

The thing I enjoyed most about this novel was that it was not a story of underdogs vs the mega corporations of the future, although that is in the backdrop with isolated Thailand standing tall against the calorie companies; this story follows multiple protagonists, each with their own very human, very real motivations and flaws - greed, nationalism, lust for power, paranoia. The plot is driven not by great faceless evils of the "big bad" but by the much smaller evils that all people can hold within themselves.

Liam Richardson

A dark look at our near future. The imagery of a (mostly) post fossil fuel world, and particularly Thailand, was evocative and bleak without being overtly desolate. 

The thing I enjoyed most about this novel was that it was not a story of underdogs vs the mega corporations of the future, although that is in the backdrop with isolated Thailand standing tall against the calorie companies; this story follows multiple protagonists, each with their own very human, very real motivations and flaws - greed, nationalism, lust for power, paranoia. The plot is driven not by great faceless evils of the "big bad" but by the much smaller evils that all people can hold within themselves.

Michael Springer

Try to picture a world where big corporations own the rights to the food we eat, and engineer it specifically so that the seeds can't be reused. Picture a world where the natural resources are steadily depleting, but everyone is still trying to act as if nothing is wrong. Picture a world where technology is barely managing to address the problems of the moment, and perhaps won't be able to keep up in the face of unexpected catastrophes.

That wasn't too hard now, was it? 

The best science fiction is a mirror reflecting our own image, but distorted and exaggerated. This can be done in a way that is overly preachy, but Bacigalupi avoids this, combining everything I look for in entertaining science fiction with everything I hope for in thoughtful literature. (Well, I knew I was going to end up gushing.) So here's the problem. I don't know how to review a book that I love. 

Talk about me instead of the book?

I was reading this book during my time back in Indiana, totally overwhelmed by being around my family and my wife's family all the time, trapped in the backseats of cars, forced to listen to country music, which is even worse than I remembered it. "God is great, beer is good, people are crazy." "Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses." 

I spent evenings at the kitchen table, trying to read while my wife's parents watched FOX News nearby, and I noticed how the top story on every program was the President's worse and worse poll numbers. I couldn't help thinking that had nothing to do with news, and all of the real stories were ignored in favor of political posturing. Being back in the Bible belt, I dipped into this book like it was a breath of fresh air whenever I could sneak away, relieved to feel like I wasn't alone in a world full of the willfully misinformed. 

Or should I actually discuss the book?

The Windup Girl is a novel about Thailand in the 22nd century, when global warming and resource depletion has led to the only practical energy source being manually wound springs. To wind these gigantic springs, they have these huge elephant things (picture those elephants from "The Return of the King") called megadonts. 

Anderson Lake works for a megacorporation called AgriGen. Hock Seng is an immigrant who works as a secretary for Anderson, and who is good at manipulating events to his own benefit. Emiko is a wind-up girl: a Japanese-designed human with a predisposition for serving "real" humans, and with a strange way of walking that immediately betrays her non-humanness. There are more characters, but I'm done listing them. 

The characters' lives interweave as they try to succeed in a brutal Bangkok, where political uprisings aren't uncommon, food is scarce, and disease is rampant. Like all my favorite SF and fantasy writers, Bacigalupi's characters are neither good nor bad: they linger somewhere in between, and are all surprisingly fleshed out for such a brief book. Disasters abound, tragedy strikes suddenly, the world changes, people die. . . IT'S AWESOME!

Should I go meta?

THE PRESIDENT DIDN'T GO TO CHURCH THIS SUNDAY WHAT WAS LADY GAGA WEARING DROPPING POLE NUMBERS SEVEN MEN SHOT IN FRONT OF AN APARTMENT BUILDING HOUSE BURNED DOWN WITH TWO CHILDREN INSIDE THE SPORTS TEAM COACH DIED LAST NIGHT (oil continues to pour into the gulf, political analysts are running news organizations) KFC NEW DOUBLE DOWN BURGER IS SUPER TASTY REMEMBER TO DO CARDIO THREE TIMES A WEEK 8 GLASSES OF WATER A DAY DIET SHAKE MUSCLE MILK IT'S SOCIALISM IT'S RACISM IT'S SOCIALISM IT'S RACISM IT'S (the bee population continues decreasing, we don’t know why, but increased use of pesticides and habitat destruction continue increasing) CHINA SAYS SOMETHING MEAN ABOUT THE U.S. IRAN THREATENS THE U.S. 12 AL QA'IDA MEMBERS CAUGHT SARAH PALIN SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT OIL AT A RALLY ($704 Billion spent in Iraq war, $300 billion on Afghanistan war, the terrorist threat appears unchanged) HOW TRASHY DID BRITNEY LOOK TODAY

Maybe I should drop names and lit terms to overwhelm the reader with my intellect, and detract from the shallow argument I'm making?

The Windup Girl is perhaps the most well-known example of biopunk, a genre spawned from a combination of cyberpunk's world view and ecological concerns. This book won the Nebula Award for Best Novel this year, beating down Cherie Priest's zombie steampunk tale, Boneshaker, and some other worthy contenders. Some say Bacigalupi's style is reminiscent of William Gibson and Ian McDonald, and I wouldn't argue against this. But, like Saturn's Children--Even Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye--the issue of identity, and the results of being viewed as "other," are a central theme within the novel. 

No. That's a lame way to do the review.

I don't know how to review The Windup Girl. So, if you like science fiction at all, I'll just say: read this and love it. Or maybe you won't. But if you don't, your tastes are WRONG, because IT is AWESOME. 

I already have his new book, Shipbreaker, at home on my shelf, and I'm excited to see if his first young adult novel is as good as this one. If so, I may have to add Bacigalupi to favorite authors. I can't wait to find out. . .

Jayme Bosio

I don't normally read dystopian fiction, but I was intrigued by the idea of a post-oil Thailand protecting itself from the genetically modified foods that have caused plagues and killed millions. I loved the the author's description of Thailand, and I thought he did a good job with the character development, but the story lacked...something. I don't know. While Jaidee and Hock Seng had interesting stories, I wish the author had left them out completely and had focused more on the wind-up girl. The book did pick up speed, but not until I was 250 pages into it and way beyond frustrated. If you enjoy dystopia fiction you might want to give it a try.

Hans Gerwitz

Wonderful future world, but too many questions about the Contraction go unaddressed. Maybe there will be more stories to come.

This story is a wonderful one, with characters that surprise without betraying their nature. The prose could be richer; other writers might have brought more visceral imagery, but the story is strong enough for me to forgive the telling.

Maggie Gordon

While the Windup Girl may have won many awards, it just didn't have that spark of creativity and innovation that would set it apart from the seven trillion other sad, disturbing dystopias out there. Furthermore, the treatment of Emiko, the titular windup girl, was very disturbing, and even though I am sure the author meanther story to be a critique against sex slavery, I'm not convinced he pulled it off.

Sonja H

I can't follow the story. Maybe I should get the paperback version one day.

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, the break-out science fiction debut featuring additional stories and a Q&A with the author. Anderson Lake is AgriGen’s Calorie Man, sent to work undercover as a factory manager in Thailand while combing Bangkok’s street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history’s lost calories. Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. Emiko is not human; she is an engineered being, 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 this 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 and forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? Bacigalupi delivers one of the most highly-acclaimed science fiction novels of the twenty-first century. In this brand-new edition celebrating the book’s reception into the canon of celebrated modern science fiction, accompanying the text are two novelettes exploring the dystopian world of The Windup Girl, the Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man.” Also included is an exclusive Q&A with the author describing his writing process, the political climate into which his debut novel was published, and the future of science fiction. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Fraser Simons

"We are alive. We are alive when whole kingdoms and "Countries are gone. When Malaya is a morass of killing. When Kowloon is underwater. When China is split and the Vietnamese are broken and Burma is nothing but starvation. The Empire of America is no more. The Union of the Europeans splintered and factionalized. And yet we endure, even expand. The Kingdom survives."

The Windup Girl is a cyberpunk, specifically biopunk I would say, where Thailand has arisen as a major power in the world due to foresight. When the world went to pieces because of viruses that eradicated food supplies , Thailand closed itself off and got above the curve. In this future, the oil industry has collapsed and scarcity is focused on food, so it is technically a dystopia. But decidedly there is hope, they are on a precipice yet, all is not lost. There is prosperity here. 

"The ecosystem unravelled when man first went a-seafaring. When we first lit fires on the broad savannas of Africa. We have only accelerated the phenomenon. The food web you talk about is nostalgia, nothing more. Nature." He makes a disgusted face. "We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.” 

Paolo's prose are completely beautiful and his world building is amazing. From colloquial terms, to food, to the thought processes of the various characters he inhabits as the narrative shifts. The pacing is perfect, with the climax shifting the narrative often and the beginning having long meandering thoughts that perfectly embody the characters. Every moment feels earned and the world feels real and often visceral. 

“A sudden eruption, and the surprise of realizing that the world he understands is not the one he actually inhabits.” 

While I've heard some people find the characters unlikable, which is why it took me a while to read the book in the first place unfortunately, I disagree completely! Each one could be aspects of one fully fledged in it's focus, in fact I found it impossible to dislike one because each are trapped in their own circumstance with the only truly one transcending their nature, to which they were shackled more than any other. It's a beautiful exploration of ones sense with the embodiment of each targeting a radicalized circumstance. 

"We rest in the hands of a fickle god. He plays on our behalf only for entertainment, and he will close his eyes and sleep if we fail to engage his intellect."

The narrative is careful not to assign blame and allow the reader to discern the morality here. Though, the book is hard to read at times because of it's unyielding gaze at the depravity that humanity has to offer, specially for The Windup Girl, Emiko. If you have a hard time with fiction that has abuse and rape and dehumanization of people, specifically women, there will be some very hard parts to get through. You may consider passing on it entirely in fact. 

"His words have the finality of true authority. Reflexively, Emiko starts to bow, acquiescing to his wishes. She stops short. You are not a dog, she reminds herself. You are not a servant. Service has gotten you abandoned amongst demons in a city of divine beings. If you act like a servant, you will die like a dog."

Ultimately The Windup Girl ended up specifically resonating with me because it masterfully wove a fiction that was captivating and was a significant exploration of the setting as much as the characters. This isn't all that common with cyberpunk, where the setting is a living breathing thing. There are social systems being examined but how the characters effected the city and how these systems made this unique place was interwoven in the perception of the characters, instead of the usual critical analysis of it that often comes with the genre. Usually a data dump, for example, is what establishes what we need to know about the setting. We are still learning about it until the end, more than anything I felt like the setting was a character in this story. I read slowly and savored every minute in the 500 page book. 

“All is transient. Even bo trees cannot last.” 

When you are driven from your home, or constructed by others to fit into what they think you should be. When you are owned despite coming from privilege. When you are unyielding in your views and your world was razed. What is the responsibility you have to those around you? How are you a product of your circumstances and what is freedom when we are bound by it. What responsibility do we have to ourselves despite them as well? 

“I was asleep. All along, I was asleep and never understood.

But now, as he stares at the relic bo tree, something shifts.

Nothing lasts forever. A kuti is a cell. This cell is a prison. He sits in a prison, while the ones who took Chaya live and drink and whore and laugh. Nothing is permanent. This is the central teaching of the Buddha. Not a career, not an institution, not a wife, not a tree. . . All is change; change is the only truth.” 

This is centrally what I found the story was about, a commentary on change; both the freedom of it and the restrictions. As well as the responsibility we have to ourselves and one another and the agency we think we have; and how beautiful and terrible that is throughout the course of our lives. The architect of our own agency may only be ourselves -- everything else is a truth we must accept or we may well be destroyed. 

5/5 for me. I could not put it down and I am sure I'll revisit it before the year ends. I can't think of any flaw, so, so good.

Emmett

It is always interesting to see things in speculative novels happening somewhere closer to home, and this 'dystopian' near-future Thailand threatened by floods, economic invasion and ever-mutating diseases was excitingly rendered and fascinating to read. The concepts the story takes up are very recognisable: issues of genetic tinkering and its consequences, politics, the sex trade, the uncanny valley of humanness but they intertwine in new ways that don't detract from being believable despite being fiction. The cast of characters presented a variety of races and types of individuals and kept the experience immersive and multi-dimensional, ensuring that the story-world was not limited by a perspective but continued to expand outward through others. It was beautiful to discover new things about the world at every corner. I was much taken by its speculative quirks: most prominently, the idiosyncratic advancement and ancientness of their technology (their machinery are crudely powered by human or animal forces, their radios have to be wound like watches, and yet gene-ripping, the process of recovering extinct or inventing new creatures or food sources, is a staple). This Thailand is as religiously modern as the one known to the reader, and the sense it gives is a familiar chaos, where different things can exist together, which wouldn't have been there if this had been located somewhere more insistently secular and orderly.

Tracey O’Rourke

I really wanted to like this book. It is the winner of both a Hugo and a Nebula award, so I had really high hopes. Then I started reading it. It took me about 100 pages to get absorbed into the world Bacigalupi created here, a post-apocalyptic, or rather a post-globalwarming, post-cloning world, run by the major agricultural companies, limiting the seeds and foods available, and producing infertile seeds, so that new seeds are always needed from the ag companies. There is limited available energy, having used all the easy energy, so things are powered by animal, cloned mammoths do all the heavy lifting. Everything we take for granted now is a rarity. It took a while to figure out this world, but after I did, it was fascinating. The world pulled me in. The characters, however, not so much. Not one of the major characters pulled me in, gained any sympathy from me, or any concern. I did not like any of these characters, even the titular Windup Girl, who was the most interesting of the bunch. 
 In the end, I found my interest really flagging, and found myself sludging through the last fifty pages to get it done. Overall, interesting, but not recommended.

Nat Welch

Interesting take on androids and the future.

Mircea Tara

A good book that presents a probable future raising questions that linger in your mind hours after you've finished it.

Magdalene Lim

So this is what happens in the future, when man tries to play God and makes a mess of genetics and stuff. A rather interesting book where real countries are projected into the future unlike other futuristic dystopian books that paint a picture of totally imaginary places. The most creative countries (Japan and Thailand) are portrayed to be the winners in the gene war and there is no mention of current mega economies, China, America and the UK. Quite a novel point of view.

I enjoyed the snippets of Thai and Mandarin used in the book as it gave the story more colour and I could imagine the characters speaking in their native tongues. Knowing those two languages definitely gave me a greater sense of satisfaction when I read the book.

Bo Jeanes &
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

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Bo Jeanes &The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

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The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi