The Windup Girl is a darkly pleasing mix of science fiction and magical realism, replete with gene-hacked food, color-molting Cheshire cats, and stalking ancestral ghosts.
In the 22nd century, megacorporations known as “calorie companies” have contaminated the world’s natural food supply and successfully monopolized global food production by providing genetically modified, disease-resistant, and sterile foodstuffs. Fossil fuels have failed, sea levels have risen and the world is on the brink of environmental collapse.
Due to a mysterious generipper, a cache of pristine heirloom seeds, and draconian security measures regarding immigration and the import of goods, Thailand has remained independent, which has made it a target for infiltration by corporate calorie agents. But Thailand is also fighting a war within, as the Trade and Environment Ministries bribe, backstab and struggle for control of the kingdom. Tumultuous and volatile, this intricately detailed future Thailand is as fetid and corrupt as it is exuberant.
The story centers around the fate of several characters. Anderson Lake, an AgriGen calorie agent masquerading as a factory owner; Jaidee and Kanya, Environment Ministry shock troopers whose job is to protect Thailand from contaminated genomes and foreign trade; and Emiko, an illegal windup girl on the run from the Environment Ministry.
Crèche-grown and genetically engineered in Japan as an obedient Geisha, Emiko has been abandoned in Thailand. Her ultra smooth skin makes her impossibly alluring, but the stuttering, jerky movements — like a windup doll — encoded into her DNA keeps her painfully apart from the rest of the population. She embodies an otherness, an outcast existence. Emiko is a curio, but like Bacigalupi’s Bangkok awash each night in the emerald glow of methane burners, a hauntingly beautiful and strange creation.
Unfortunately, Emiko — more specifically, her inability to adequately reflect on her situation — also becomes one of the novel’s blemishes. Emiko’s attempts to reconcile her need to obey with her desire for freedom, more often than not, result in apathy and self-pity, rather than an interesting investigation of human nature or a challenge to common perceptions of the human condition. She is just not equipped by the author to provide real insight about what makes us human in the way that other persons of artificial intelligence are — for example Blade Runner’s Rachael. And because Emiko’s inelegant and vulgar sexual degradation is met with no real critique apart from an eventual and violent retaliation, she becomes a one-dimensional, tragic figure, albeit a remarkably resilient one.
Bacigalupi does provide a fantastically strong and complex female character in Kanya, who is arguably the novel’s heroine. Haunted by the ghost of her betrayed captain, she is affixed to the heart of a Bangkok in transition and it is her conviction that ultimately chooses the kingdom’s fate. That the novel could easily be titled “The New Tiger of Bangkok” demonstrates Bacigalupi’s skill as writer and the strength of his narrative.
The Windup Girl is a thrilling read with a vivid and fully-realized world, a diverse cast of characters, and energetic, descriptive prose that balances action and intrigue well over the course of 376 pages.
The Aberrant Rag 