book review: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

I was excited about this Sci Fi debut and winner of five major international SF awards, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (that’s pronounced BATCH-i-ga-LOOP-ee, fact fans). So excited, in fact, that I prematurely placed it as one of my top 5 SFF books of 2010 (not actually published in 2010). I was a few chapters in at that point and was feeling optimistic, plus the book felt good and heavy and the frankly beautiful cover said it was ‘The Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel’ so all signs were pointing towards it being a winner.

It was released by Night Shade Books in the US and Orbit in the UK. I read Orbit’s paperback, published in December 2010, although in a burst of marketing-prowess, the publisher released the eBook shortly before the print version.

It’s set in 23rd century Thailand, in a world where Europe and America have succumbed to the calorie wars and ‘genehack’ plagues created by bioengineering companies, global warming has caused the oceans to rise and temperatures to soar and engineered seedbanks contain the world’s failing food supply. It’s Steampunk meets Science Fiction. Factories are powered by kink-springs, goods are flown over by dirigibles and cars are things of the past. Thailand is ruled by a child queen, but governed by two rival generals, Pracha, of the Environment Ministry, and Akkarat, of the Trade ministry.

The present tense narrative is split between several key players.

Anderson Lake is farang, an American who is working undercover in Thailand as the manager of a kink-spring factory, whose real purpose is to discover the whereabouts of the government’s seedbank on behalf of his employers, the calorie company AgriGen.

Hock Seng, one of the city’s unwelcome yellow cards - Chinese refugees and survivors of the horrific Malaysian purges - is employed by Lake and wants his factory blueprints, and, always, to survive another day.

Emiko is the eponymous character. Outlawed in Thailand, she’s a beautiful, genetically engineered Japanese windup who’s been designed to serve and obey but was abandoned in the city by her master. Emiko is now forced to work in the sex industry, spending her nights being repeatedly raped for other peoples’ pleasure, but also dreaming of escaping to the rumoured safe haven for ‘New People’.

Captain Jaidee and Lieutenant Kanya are White Shirts, vehemently enforcing the Environment Ministry’s brutal regime on all illegally sourced goods in the city. But Kanya’s loyalties aren’t what they seem.

Beginning with an enraged rampage from one of Lake’s factory megodonts – vast, genetically modified elephants – a domino effect of events occur within the confines of the city’s walls, inevitably leading to tumultuous consequences. Each of the main characters represents a division within the city of Krung Thep. Thai, Chinese, Japanese, the farang Westerners, the engineered windup. Each fraction hates the other with extreme prejudice and sweeping generalisations. This serves to both highlight the ridiculousness of racial intolerance and deprives you of a character you can emotionally invest in.

It’s an environmental social commentary. Man-made plagues have already wiped out much of the earth’s population and narrowed its food supplies, but still prejudices divide the remaining peoples so they are constantly at threat of turning on each other, when another plague or global warming-related disaster is always just around the corner.

Here’s why part of me is in awe of this book: it's unique, and brooding, and well-constructed. The present tense narrative has presumably been chosen to reveal the short-sightedness of the characters, as well as the uncertainty of their future as they all sit on the cusp of some cataclysmic event, waiting for monsoon season, waiting for an excuse to fight, waiting for another plague. They are living in a crucible of tension. The pace and tension are excellently built to the point where even the weather is against the characters, slowly bringing them to the boil amongst the nuances of political plotting. As a reader you feel like you’re watching a series of simmering pans to see which one boils over first. In the end it doesn’t matter, because Bacigalupi has engineered the narrative so expertly that it runs like clockwork, each part working against another towards the same grim conclusion.

And yet, despite my admiration for Bacigalupi’s talent, I can’t bring myself to love this book, because I couldn’t find any joy in it. The plot was excellently executed, but the characters left me cold. Each one has a necessarily dark past that is alluded to, but you still barely feel like you’ve scratched their surface. The characters are all products of their tragic lives, and their current situations are so dire it’s hard to gain any sense of hope, or really feel enough for one of them that you want them to survive their hardships. The only truly relatable character – again, this speaks volumes for Bacigalupi’s overriding message and gift – is the windup girl, Emiko, but her genes force her to go around in circles, never finding the escape she desires. Her rape scenes are harrowing – and even though they are a justifiable point in the plot, they resound through the text and set its bleak tone.

This is why I’m so torn over this book: I can see the writing talent and intent behind the desolate design - no one would want this future - but I also want to be able to root for at least one character, and instead as readers you’re constantly held at arm’s length.

The book is described as ‘hard science (fiction) and magical realism’ by io9, who absolutely loved it. Perhaps as a Fantasy fan, rather than a Sci Fi fan, I’m not the target audience. But Orbit are all for targeting ‘the widest possible readership’, it says so on their site. However, I clearly am of the ‘everything should be sunbeams and rainbows’ perspective, so I’d still encourage you to try this for yourself before accepting anyone else’s verdict, especially mine. I’d love to hear what you thought. Here's a free sample chapter. I do spoil you.

6/10

bite me: the week in bite-sized chunks

I haven’t written a post for ages because of several factors. It was Christmas. I was in a food-induced stupor. It was my birthday (not particularly relevant but I was determined to eat my weight in tiny little cakes and it was very time consuming). A further food-induced stupor followed. My assignments were due in for my MA. I started a new job. So. After all of those excuses, I’m finally back behind the computer and fighting the food haze in order to fill a genteel black hole.

So what have I missed whilst preoccupied with cake?

i09: these guys, whoever they are, have released The Power List, filled with people who ‘rocked science fiction and fantasy in 2010’. These 20 listed individuals have been helping to cajole SFF out of its niche and into the glaring spotlight of the public eye, which is exactly what my dissertation is focussed on (or will be, one day). Even better, rather than simply striving to reach a mass market, they’ve only made the genre richer for the rest of us. Some of those involved in drumming up the geek chic in 2010 are: Steven Moffat who demonstrated that it was possible to do a worthy remake of Sherlock Holmes without resorting to Dick Van Dykian dialects. Oh, and pulled off a freaking ace new series of Doctor Who. Orbit author Paolo Bacigalupi (pronounced Batch-i-ga-loop-ee according to Paulo), whose novel The Windup Girl has won the Hugo and Nebula awards, is on there for proving that ‘hard SF can still be relevant and popular’. I’m experiencing a love-confusion relationship with it at the moment, as I’m not a major fan of SF (barring Douglas Adams, obviously), but it’s engaging and like nothing I’ve ever read before. Also the cover is gorgeous and, while this might sound odd, the book has a weighty feel to it that makes it so satisfying to hold and read. Also it smells great. Review to follow. Another score for Orbit as Publishing Director Tim Holman has been setting up the imprint’s New York branch. Even Sandra Bullock gets a nod for playing self-consciously kooky crossword writer (she wears red boots!) in All About Steve. No wait, for being in SFF movie Gravity directed by Alfonso Cuarón. After Steve she knows the only possible way is up. Head on over to i09 for the full list. Now.

Voyager: the blog has been a bit quiet over Christmas, but they did receive some honey off author Janny Wurts, which is nice. Also, I’m heading down there for a week at the beginning of February as part of my MA, something I’m a little (read: ridiculously) excited about. I really just wanted to share that.

Orbit: on the Orbit blog Robert Jackson Bennett (author of Mr Shivers, reviewed here) wrote this hugely interesting piece ‘On the Death of Geek Culture’, in response to Patton Oswalt’s ‘Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die.’ The essence of the latter is Oswalt saying that everyone can be an expert (ie, a geek) on an aspect of niche culture so no one is. The niche has become the norm. Oswalt wants a return to the niche, pre internet, pre YouTube fan-bashing of classics, pre wiki-bloody-pedia (god, I love that thing). Bennett’s response is interesting because his arguably unique stance, as a Horror/thriller author, is that this would be a Bad Thing. Geek culture is cultural agoraphobia. It’s under the bed sheets with the torch and comic. It’s secular, insular and it’s well and truly down the rabbit hole. I can see both of their points. But Oswalt seems to want a return to a pre-nostalgia driven society so he can be, well, nostalgic (but original). And Bennett is suggesting that SFF and geek culture can be used as escapism, rather than a momentary retreat, which is a bit too dismissive of what is a wide-ranging passion for so many people. Or maybe I can’t agree with him because I don’t feel like I’m ‘trapped in a prison of artifice and quirk’, geek culture isn’t an excuse not to step out of my comfort zone because there is nothing comforting about reading a book with a dragon on the front of it in the middle of a crowd of commuters reading Hilary Mantel. Or maybe that's just my geek-shame speaking. Maybe it's time to push the boundaries and try something new. Like reading Science Fiction instead of purely Fantasy, that would be totally wild.

Angry Robot Books: ever the savvy publisher, this relative newbie in the SFF world is always ready to innovate and do things just differently enough to get noticed. For the entire month of March, the imprint will be accepting unsolicited manuscripts. They’ve hired a team of readers to wade through what will inevitably be an absolute mountain of novels composed of wannabes, no-hopers and, just maybe, a diamond in the rough that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day. Contain yourselves long enough to pen that bestseller/Angry Robot desk ornament.