The Windup Girl

Paulo Bacigalupi

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, February 26th 2011

Science fiction comes in a variety of flavours, from alternative histories to distant futures, cyber- to steam-punk. While some authors use alien worlds and marvellous technology as an exotic backdrop for an old-fashioned adventure story, there is a long tradition of science fiction being used to comment on contemporary issues and the way they may shape our future.

Paolo Bacigalupi falls into the second camp. His novel The Windup Girl is set in a near-future world of rising seas, bio-engineered plagues, collapsing nations, energy scarcity and starvation. With entire genera driven to extinction by global warming and rapidly mutating plant pathogens, most of the world’s food supply in the control of Western ‘calorie companies’. These powerful cartels sell genetically engineered rice and other staples resistant to the viruses that (it is implied) they themselves designed to guarantee a market for their products.

Genetic modification has also extended into the animal kingdom, creating such creatures as megadonts (massive elephants used for transportation or harnessed to drive assembly lines and engines) and cheshires (cats with a chameleon-like ability to blend into their surroundings). The Japanese have even bred humans with enhanced immune systems, delayed aging, and the instinctive need to serve; Ten-hands for factory work, Warriors for military use, and Geisha for sexual and personal duties. Lest they be accidentally mistaken for ‘real’ people, they are also engineered with a characteristic stop-start motion that leads to their more common label, ‘Windups’.

Unlike many countries, Thailand has managed to maintain a degree of political and social stability by maintaining a policy of strict isolation. Bangkok survives behind massive dykes that hold back the encroaching ocean, protected by the White Shirts, soldiers from the Environment Ministry who control the entry of foreign goods and contain outbreaks of plant and human disease. Respect for the Ministry has waned over the years, however. Endemic corruption and the sometimes brutal quarantine measures meted out by the White Shirts has alienated the public, and the power of the Trade Ministry (assisted by foreign business interests) is in the ascendant.

The novel focuses on four characters caught in the midst of this flux, individual representatives of the political and racial factions of the drowning city. Anderson Lake is a covert AgriGen representative trying to discover how foodstuffs once thought extinct have started to appear in local markets. His secretary, Hock Seng, is an elderly Malay Chinese refugee, haunted by the memories of the genocide that drove him from his home and determined to regain the status and wealth he once possessed.

Newly elevated to White Shirt commander, Captain Kanya is a woman caught between professional and personal loyalties, constantly having to choose which side to betray. And then there is Emiko, the ultimate outsider; a Windup abandoned by her Japanese ‘patron’ to a life of pain and humiliation in a backstreet brothel.  Although she dreams of escape from her physical, psychological and genetic constraints it is not until she meets Lake that she realises that such freedom is a real possibility. Her actions precipitate the final confrontation between Environment and Trade, throwing the city into chaos.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/vehicle-comment-takes-filthy-sweltering-streets