The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl

 By Paolo Bacigalupi

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand.  Undercover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of  a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned on the streets of Bangkok.  Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a 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, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution?

As interesting as those questions are, the actual book was something very different from the one described in the blurb.  Okay, well, the description is technically accurate, but it manages to completely elide much of the book's plot and characters.  In fact, the Windup Girl is only one of about six main characters, who all sort of loosely interact and engage each other.  It's hard to say whether she's even a main character.  Her plotline serves mostly for titillation until she finally ends up murdering a bunch of politicians after a grotesque rape. Which, totally deserved, but still oddly unfulfilling. I know that Emiko has been "engineered" to be obedient (apparently by including Labrador DNA? Like, what the F? Are we not content to use her as a figurative and somewhat literal whipping boy, but now she's also part-dog?) but having Anderson use her the way he does (first by fucking her, then by effectively selling her to the aforementioned rapist politician) and then be rewarded by her continuous attention and care even up to his death is gross. 

Aside from my aversion to the whole sex-worker aspect of the book, the whole thing is also entirely misleading.  We spend the first two-thirds to three-quarters of the book following the characters as they engage in various plots:

• Anderson, who is supposedly undercover looking for seeds or new plants, or a geneticist, but whom we never see actually doing any of those things, just thinking about them while he flits in and out of the factory for his cover story;
• Hock Seng, the "yellow-card" Chinese factory manager who is trying to steal the plans of whatever gizmo the factory is actually making;
• Carlyle, Anderson's white friend who has a plot to unplug the city's levees unless they let him import shit;
• Jaidee, aka "the Tiger", who is an enforcer for the Environment Ministry, apparently hell bent on eliminating all foreign imports and feuding with the Trade Ministry (which is obviously hell bent on increasing imports);
• Kanya, Jaidee's subordinate, who is a mole at the Environment Ministry for the Trade Ministry; and, of course:
• Emiko, who really just wants to get the hell out of Dodge.

Like, NONE of that is relevant to the climax of the book, which happens when aforesaid rapist politician (who happens to be the regent for the child queen) is murdered, and the Trade Ministry decides it's a good time to take out the Environment Ministry. Even the parts which you would think would concern such a coup, like Anderson and Carlyle's bargain with the Trade Ministry to supply military and pumps, end up meaning absolutely nothing, since the pushed-up timing of the coup means that none of that arrives in time for the action.  Or Kanya's double agent-ness, which we find out only after Jaidee has died, and which apparently didn't impact why Jaidee (or his wife) died either, and none of the coup.

It's a little frustrating, to spend so much time with each person's squalid concerns, only to realize that none of that impacts anything that happens in the end.  Anderson dies from the plague the factory inadvertently created (which by the way, uh, we never really find out if it's actually spreading or not), Hock Seng gets robbed of the gizmo plans just as he breaks into the safe, and we also do not find out what importance, if any, the gizmos have to any other thing in the book, Carlyle's pumps are worthless, since Kanya deliberately floods the city anyway, Jaidee is dead, having gone on a revenge-spree that went literally nowhere, Kanya ends up facing like no consequences either of her double agent activity or her flooding the city, and Emiko ends up just like, living in New Venice, talking to this old geneticist who says he can make her clones fertile.  Honestly just disappointing.  It really feels like this was the first in a planned series, rather than a stand-alone, since it just, like, drops all these threads in the end of the book.

I did select this as my "cli-fi" book to read, although I'll be reading more cli-fi for another prompt later.  On that level, I would also say that some sort of introductory lead-in about how and why we're at the point we are when we start the book (genetic plagues, engineered fruit, megadonts, etc) would go a long way towards smoothing the first, mmm, quarter of the book.  I think Bacigalupi's written some short stories that were also set in this same world, and I don't know if he felt that those were enough of an introduction, but a lot of this just was just very non-intuitive.  Particularly with all the plots going on, I was having trouble figuring out whose side the "White Shirts" were on, why we even cared if there was a new fruit which was actually an old fruit introduced into the market, what calories had to do with anything, since, despite the book's description, no one was actually being paid in calories, money still worked perfectly fine.

And some background about the particular geographic setting would have helped a lot too. Considering how important the Trade and Environment Ministries are, Jaidee's introductory chapter is incredibly confusing.  He's taking bribes, he's not taking bribes, he's inspecting Customs, which I would have thought would have been Trade's purview, he's setting things on fire.  There's just a lot of moving parts that don't coalesce until much much later in the book, almost too late for me to develop interest in the factions. A lot gets introduced and without background, I just can't tell how much of it is important.  There's a bunch of stuff about Megadont unions that's never really relevant, for example. Maybe it's world building, and I'm not saying spoon-feed us, but a gentler easing-in, even just focusing on one person for more than one chapter at a time, would have probably given me a much better attitude about having to finish this.

I don't regret reading this, and it was well written, but without the incentive of the reading challenge, I don't think I would have kept going after the initial rape scene with Emiko, in the third chapter. I think the book would have benefitted from focus - are we a book about a political upheaval caused by famine, plague, and foreign interests? If so, we can eliminate Hock Seng, and most of Anderson and Emiko.  Or are we a book about the ethics of manufactured, but illegal, people? In which case, let's get rid of Jaidee and Kanya (and also Hock Seng, sorry HS, you had nothing to do with any of the other plots, you just served as a sort of naysaying Cassandra).  Or are we going to expand everyone's stories into more books? In which case, where are they? There was just too much going on. 

However, the world that was created was fascinating - the idea that bio-engineered food famines and plagues are now how wars are fought (although not, apparently, in Thailand, which still uses good old fashioned tanks and missiles) is worth exploring.  I mean, there's a lot to unpack, what with oil wars, the Malaya uprising against the non-native Chinese, whatever the hell happened in Finland, all of which is just, like, alluded to.  Again, if I need to read a short story to get context for a stand-alone book, then I don't think the books succeeds on its own as it needs to. 


41: A "Cli-Fi" Book