Paolo Bacigalupi
2009
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
The Windup Girl takes
place in near-future Bangkok after several environmental nightmares
have come true. Worldwide oil supplies are completely depleted, so all
machines and vehicles are wind, hydrogen, solar, coil-spring, pressure,
human, animal, or coal-powered. Global warming has made temperatures
soar and sea levels rise dramatically, so Bangkok has to be protected
from complete inundation by a system of pumps and levees. And nearly all
plants and animals have been wiped out by diseases and have been
replaced with genetically engineered variants.
This last is not
an accident. Agribusiness corporations deliberately hoarded stores of
seeds and then manufactured the diseases, pests, and plagues that wiped
out the naturally-occurring plants and animals, so they could profit by
selling the starving world their own genetically-modified,
disease-resistant, but sterile products. They now basically rule the
world economy.
Thailand has held their own against the
agribusiness corporations relatively well because they sealed their
borders to imports and hired their own secret, illegal “gene-ripper” to
develop new, fertile varieties of their own native plants and distribute
them on the black market. One of the major agribusiness companies has
sent in a secret agent, a “calorie man,” Anderson Lake, to try to
discover who the gene hacker is and where his seed bank is stored. Along
the way, he meets and (sort of) falls in love with Emiko, a Japanese
windup girl – a genetically modified, semi-robotic human conditioned to
obey and to serve.
Thailand is ruled nominally by a child queen,
and in reality by her regent, the Somdet Chaopraya. Two of her
ministries – Trade and Environment – are led by strong, ambitious men
who vie against each other to be the next regent. The story is a little
confusing and doesn’t really have any one central plot, but essentially
what happens is that Emiko and the calorie man get mixed up in the
escalating power struggle and eventually serve as catalysts leading to
the death of the Somdet Chaopraya and bringing on an all-out civil war.
After
I finished this book, I went back and forth for a long time deciding
whether I liked it or not. On balance, I decided on a somewhat lukewarm
yes.
The near-future Bangkok that Bacigalupi presents is rich and
multi-layered and easily pictured. He has unique inventions – the
windup girl herself, the calorie men, the genetically engineered animals
that populate the city, and the types of energy and propulsion that
people have to use in a petroleum-depleted world.
On the other hand, there are a couple major things that are either too disturbing or too annoying to ignore.
First:
language. For one thing, this book is written in the present tense,
which I’m realizing I generally don’t like in a novel (although I have
to admit that it isn’t nearly as annoying here as it is in the Yiddish Policemen’s Union). But the primary irritant in this one is the use of hyperbole.
Everything is described so dramatically.
This over-emphasizes the minor events and makes them seem cataclysmic,
so that you get desensitized to the drama, and then the parts that
really are cataclysmic have less of an impact than they should.
Also,
his hyperbolic phrases are pleasing and catchy at first, but after they
are used for the fourth or fifth time, they begin to seem formulaic.
After a while, I started writing down the particularly obvious repeats:
- Alleys running thick with blood
- Light spearing eyes
- Scalding skin / skin on fire (with heat)
- Ribs exploding with pain / ribs screaming (after beatings)
- Blossoming (e.g. Blood blossoming red after person is shot; a blossom of pain; legs blossoming with hurt)
Second,
and more importantly: there are two major rape scenes, both involving
Emiko. I’m not sure how to judge the necessity of a graphic rape scene,
but these certainly were very disturbing and seemed to go on well past
the point where the point was made. I really started to bridle
viscerally at how much Bacigalupi felt he had to do to prove how Emiko’s
conditioning made her obey even at the cost of her total shame and
extreme physical pain.
I did particularly like one of the first
scenes in the book, though, where Anderson Lake has to shoot a megodont
(a genetically engineered elephant) who has gone rogue in his factory.
It reminded me a lot (perhaps intentionally so) of George Orwell’s great
essay Shooting an Elephant.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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