The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

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

The Gone-Away World - Nick Harkaway

Books that genuinely surprise are rare these days.  Let's face it, we've seen just about every story, every trope and every plot device there is at this point.  The weight of all that's come before makes a surprising effort all the more difficult to come by.

Perhaps then, the only way to surprise these days is to write something that's absolutely bat-shit crazy.  Off the wall.

Allow me to introduce The Gone-Away World, the début novel from English author Nick Harkaway and one of the most surprising works of speculative fiction in recent times.

It's the tale of a world suffering from the devastation of the Go-Away War.  Where particles of matter left over from the war float around in storms which cause apparitions, hallucinations and the sub-creation of new and supposedly soulless people.  There's conspiracy.  There's adventure.  There are pirates and ninja-mimes.  There's a troupe of ex-special forces soldiers turned truckers known as the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County.  And trust me when I say, it's crazy.  It's off the rails, plain old nuts.

Funny, enthralling, and above all surprising, Harkaway's début effort is the sort of work which makes writer's jealous.  His obvious intelligence and mastery of humour, political savvy and philosophy shine through.  His use of language is entertaining, if at times convoluted.

If you can handle all that, then I dare you to read this book.  Invest the time and you'll be engaged, thrilled and delighted.  Sometimes all at once.  And just when you think you've nailed it down, this slippery, ambitious marvel of a book will surprise you again.

To be perfectly honest with you, my main concern with the novel is that Harkaway may have used up all of his creativity and his daringly silly ideas at once.  But that, after all, is not this book's problem.  It's also one I'll find the answer to when I dive into his sophomore effort, Angelmaker. Which I absolutely will.  With The Gone-Away World he earned it.

My score - 9/10