In the world of Speculative Fiction, there are award winning books and then there are award winning books which sweep all before them and make an impact across genres. Paolo Bacigalupi's 2009 work of art is one of the latter.
Evoking memories of genre masters Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, The Windup Girl creates a vivid and hauntingly plausible future against which a compellingly original tale is told. A recipient of the 2009 Nebula Award and the 2010 Hugo Award (an honour it shared with China Mieville's The City and the City), Bacigalupi's novel also cracked TIME Magazine's top 10 works of fiction for 2009.
The Windup Girl is set in the 23rd Century. In a world devoid of fossil fuels and largely submerged beneath rising ocean levels due to the effects of Global Warming, bio-engineered plagues sweep the globe. In Thailand, severe government regulations keep the nation separated from the rest of the world in an attempt to bypass the need to rely on calorie companies and their genehacked produce. The government employs brutally effective measures to protect the nation's food supplies from the dangers of mutated pests and diseases like blister rust and cibiscosis.
Against this startling and lucid backdrop, Bacigalupi introduces a cast of well-realised characters, including calorie company rep Anderson Lake, the windup girl Emiko (a bio-engineered humanoid organism), and disgraced military captain Jaidee Rojjanasukchai.
Throughout The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi uses an impressive combination of tight prose and well-paced action to tell a story of conspiracy, political corruption and global devastation which somehow manages to remain achingly human. Politically mature, and philosophically complex, The Windup Girl is the perfect mating of story and character. In the words of Lev Grossman, it's ridiculous how good this book is.
Give it a go.
My score - 9.5/10
Oh I loved Ship Breaker even got my 16 yr old to read it and Drowned Cities. I'm wondering if he'd like this one. I've had this one on my wishlist a long time. I might have to treat myself! Glad you reminded me of it.
ReplyDeleteHeather
The Windup Girl is appreciably older in tone. I believe the other titles were written as YA titles, while this had a more adult audience in mind. Having said that, the distinction is becoming less and less obvious these days.
ReplyDelete