The year in books #20: Windup Girl

Slowly, ever so slowly, I am catching up with my backlog of books to review here. I think that actually getting through fifty books this year is entirely impossible, as I've only read twenty-five so far, and most of them were prior to the arrival of the world's cutest poop factory in my life. Today, though, I awoke at five o'clock, so I'll take the chance to jot down my thoughts on the fourth Hugo-nominated novel I read this year.

The Windup Girl is, alone among this year's Hugo nominees (with the possible exception of Wake, which I've been assured I'll be receiving in celebration of my birthday today), actually a science fiction novel. The Hugos are officially awarded for science fiction and fantasy, and there are sub-genres such as the sort of social fiction represented by The City & The City that fall under the broader category of speculative fiction which I am happy to see embraced by the awards. But I grew up reading Heinlein and Niven and Asimov, and nothing warms my heart like excellent, well constructed sci-fi. With The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (possibly the least-pronounceable author in the genre) has produced exactly that.

It behooves my to provide my definition of sci-fi - even within its own fandom, the genre's boundaries are subject to intense debate. I consider science fiction, as I believe I mentioned in another recent post, to be fiction that concerns itself with the human meaning of technological change or scientific discovery, or uses the conceit of a future or alien culture to explore the human experience from a novel perspective. Ringworld, which explores not only the Ringworld itself, but the impact of technologies as diverse as instant teleportation and direct stimulation of the brain's pleasure centers, is an excellent example of the former. Star Trek's technology is essentially magical and arbitrary, but the series are among the best science fiction of the second category, using the unique setting of a future populated by hundreds of alien races to produce allegories of modernity.

The Windup Girl is excellent science fiction of both types. It portrays a world in which the oil has run out and the energy economy has become focused instead on the efficient production, storage and transmission of kinetic energy for industry and transportation (largely in the form of genetically-engineered mastodons used to crank up nanotechnological springs with capacities in the gigajoules, which I find absolutely brilliant). In parallel to the collapse of the oil-driven industrial world, diseases engineered by warring food cartels (whose products are, of course, immune) have wiped out much of the world's food supply and left even the companies themselves scrambling to find new genes to keep their harvests a step ahead of the next mutation.

Enter Anderson Lake, a "Calorie Man" working for AgriGen, sent to Thailand in search of both genetic diversity and inroads into a nation that has kept itself independent of the food mega-corporations. And enter Emiko, member of the first generation of New Japanese, genetically engineered "windup girls" created by childless Japan to replenish their aging labor force, left behind to be exploited or destroyed in Bangkok by an owner who planned to buy the newest model upon his return. The two meet as Thailand is plunging into rebellion, and their fates, and those of the many other brilliantly realized characters that populate this novel, hang in the balance.

As you can see, The Windup Girl packs a lot of novel ideas into a few hundred pages, and it explores them in a way that is compelling and interesting, and reduces the thundering pace of the story not a single iota. This is the first book I've read in months that I found myself completely lost in, in love with the world it takes place in and the characters that populate it, and excited by the ideas within it. As if it weren't enough to pack a novel with interesting characters, a driving plot and a fascinating premise, Bacigalupi also paints the entire thing onto the backdrop of Thai history and culture with a remarkable realism.

The Windup Girl has the goods. It has four or five novels worth of the goods. And yet it's being sold for the same price as books of normal conceptual density; a bargain of which you should avail yourself at your next opportunity.

I had forgotten, until I started writing this, just how much of an impact this book had on me. I retract my previous vote for The City & The City (which is nonetheless excellent) - The Windup Girl is the speculative fiction novel of the year.