Tom's Reviews > The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut novel The Wind-Up Girl is a futuristic science-fiction novel that won the 2009 Nebula award and the 2010 Hugo Award among other prizes. The novel is set in a richly described Thailand in an unspecified point in the future. In the world Bacigalupi imagines, Carbon-based technologies have floundered and global warming is in full swing, but genetic technologies have advanced considerably, with “gene-rippers” and “gene-hackers” having created a variety of new creatures, including “megodonts,” elephant-like creatures known for their efficiency in converting calories into energy, and “New People” or "wind-ups", genetically engineered humans created for specialized tasks. Bacigalupi has also imagined how a technically advanced civilization might handle the loss of carbon-based power, with a world full of hand-crank computers, spring-powered scooters (for reasons I’m not sure I understand, he assumes springs will replace chemical batteries as energy storage devices) and a range of unusual lighting sources, including, improbably, “glow worm cages.”

The Thailand that Bacigalupi imagines is unique in having resisted genetically engineered crops and clung to its biodiversity, the rest of the world having been ravaged by the dangers of monoculture (think of the worse things you’ve ever read about Monsanto, only much much worse). The key plot elements of the novel revolve around a variety of characters who have found themselves in Thailand: a zealous defender of Thailand’s traditions and resistence to the outside world, an executive eager to gain access to Thailand’s unique seed-banks for his own AgriGen company, a shrewd refugee of genocide trying to create a new life for himself, and a Japanese “wind-up” girl, the title character, a futuristic sex worker who overcomes her genetically programmed need to obey and fights for her independence.

Bacigalupi’s writing has features that, common enough though they are, are pet peeves for me. He sometimes begins new sections with bare, unattributed quotations, a technique meant to create suspense but that I find simply disorienting and annoying. He is also prone to other overdramatizing effects, such as narrating thoughts in italics (which I consider inelegant) and painting the language on over-heavy in a dramatic moment (One of many examples, plucked more or less at random: “The falcon dangles dead. She is dead. Mulch for composters. Meat for the city, rot for gaslights... The falcon lies dead.” — So, we wonder, is the falcon dead?). Also, in his strict adherence to the writing dictum to use strong, vivid verbs, a dictum which in his case has sometimes pushed him to newly verbify nouns, his sentences sometimes include dense clusters where it takes a second reading to parse out verb from noun -- sentences which do indeed have the kind of cutting masculine style he is going for but which nonetheless interrupt the flow of reading. What’s more, though the plot centers largely around humanizing the windup-girl, it is hard not to read the sections about her — a creature designed for obedience and pleasure — as vaguely pornographic, and some of these sections of the book, in spite of the author’s humanizing intentions, read as a more self-serious Weird Science.

As with many futuristic plots, the risk this book runs is being too transparently moralistic, but Bacigalupi has done a good job sticking to his primary task of immersing us in the world he has created and resisting on all but a few occasions wagging his finger too obviously at his 21st century readers. Where the book is strongest is where it immerses us in the lives of characters on all sides of issues: we go into the head not just of the white shirt martyr of biodiversity but also of the AgriGen exec and the New Person, two figures who are anathema to the “white shirts” who, as staunch defenders of biodiversity and carbon rationing, would seem the most obvious moral heroes of the book. The plot also includes engaging twists — intrigue, plotting, backstabbing — and ends on a surprising and uncertain note, a saving grace.

I should admit to my readers that I read this book as a sort of experiment: I am not by nature the least bit interested in Science Fiction. Nonetheless, after forcing myself through the first third of the book, I was able to get immersed in the world Bacigalupi had created and able to begin ignoring what I see as the flaws in his writing. The basic task Bacigalupi has set for himself, of imagining a world where we’ve used up nearly all our carbon-based fuels and pushed global warming to the disaster point, is one that we might all do well to engage in, given that all indicators seem to point in that direction. For readers interested in global warming or in genetic engineering, the book may hold interest as a rich morality tale. More compelling, though, is the degree to which Bacigalupi has taken material that feels drolly moralistic and fleshed out from it a complete, complex, sensory world. My guess is those people who would have no interest in this book will already know it by the end of this review: if you flinch at Science Fiction in general, or turn your nose up at over-dramatic writing, there are probably (as I have learned) better entry points to the genre than this one.