The Windup Girl

The entire story takes place in Bangkok, Thailand, sometime in the future. The days are dark days and the world is pretty much under the control of calories companies (like PurCal and AgriGen), who manage to bio-engineer seeds that are infertile. That is, they are good only for one use. As such, people are depended on them to supply new seeds each planting season. They also employ people who tour the globe to track and get hold of regular seeds (fertile ones) that are kept in secrecy in various places.

Bangkok is one of the places who kept itself self-sustained and is yet to be enslaved to the calories companies. And this is were the story takes places. The plot interweaves the tales of Anderson, an AgriGen agent who manages a decoy factory, Hock Seng, a Chinese who is second in command in that factory, Jaidee and Kanya, officers in the local police, the White shirts, and Emiko, the windup girl. The windup girl is a "new people", an highly advanced genetically modified humans that are being created in Japan. Emiko is an highly attractive and was genetically programmed to obey and serve people, somewhat similar to a geisha.

The author, Paolo Bacigalupi, tells an engaging and interesting story, with well developed characters. There were several occasions where I though that the descriptions were too graphic for me, especially with respect to Emiko in Raleigh's nightclub. However, my only criticism is the Emiko is not given more screen time, as it will be very interesting to see what happens to her in the future.

The most disturbing part of the story is that it describes a reality that is not far fetched, as today we already have different seeds that were bio-engineered, patented and are now controlled by giant agricultural companies. The importance of the book is by providing a glimpse to a possible future that might be lurking right around the corner, if things will not be regulated fast. Overall, to sum up I can say that this is a very interesting and original science-fiction book, with an eye opening message to a possible future.

Wow. Talk about dystopia. This is it! The author's prose rubs your face in the squalid conditions that we caused ourselves. Genetic manipulation gone wild. The outcast "Windup Girl" is the common thread throughout. Don't expect a Hollywood type ending, but do expect it to be as positive as practical in the imagined future earth. Corporate politics, some violence, and a lot of societal examination is mixed well.

Nothing gets me more excited than rich world building, and there is nothing that Paolo Bacigalupi excels at more than that. As an aspiring writer myself it is always the first thing I look for, how developed and cohesive is the fiction world that the story is taking place in. The Windup Girl succeeded in immersing me in its miserable fictional Thailand, this being a more plausible future to me than the shiny chrome metallic future that many science fiction novels attempt to portray.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the world building and setting that Bacigalupi describes throughout the novel, the plot and structure of the novel were a complete turn off. Bacigalupi gives almost no backstory to the world, and regularly throws out terms and slang in this universe with no explanation as to their meaning. The novel is constantly switching viewpoints which make it difficult to follow along, let alone remember which character is which. The characters are well developed once you can identify them, but more often than not despicable and almost impossible to root for. Emiko, who should have been the most sympathetic character, even has her horrible moments regardless of being the only character that I would consider being “good natured”. I normally love a far out dystopian future but this book was unable to capture my attention and was a drag to get through. To me this book would take multiple read throughs to fully grasp all of the themes and nuance that Bacigalupi has put into this world, but there is no chance I will ever attempt to read this again. I pride myself on my ability to give any genre or story a chance, not being picky in my tastes, but this book starts off on the wrong foot and never made it back to my good side.

My first read from Mr Bacigalupi, and what a ride it was. An amazing tale that is not only immensely entertaining, but equally well written. Excellent character and plot development. A very humane story wrapped in a dark and utterly believable future Earth where food is the weapon of choice. Read it and enjoy.

Good and interesting story set in a post environmental disaster Thailand where a new social order has been established to control the crop diseases and use of natural resources. Still, I found the story slow and the events a bit narrow, not exploring the potential of the interesting context (I am used to space opera sci-fi!). It took me a long time to read. It's a good book and I would give the author another chance.

I am a fantasy and science fiction aficionado. The venue of this sci-fi novel is SE Asia in a post bio-catastrophe world. The nature of the bio-catastrophe was not ever made clear enough to permit me to put the tribulations of the characters into a coherent context. I just could not get to a point of caring about the tribulations of the characters being presented. I gave it up about one third of the way into it.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is tortured maze of plot twists through a bleak future Bangkok where Monsanto-esque agribusinesses rule a world of scarcity. Packed with political intrigue and grit, this book will make you question where we're all headed. It deserves its Hugo and Nebula awards.

Absolutely the best book I've read recently-and I read one or two books per week. Great concept, great story, wonderful characters, well written. Pretty much everything a serious reader could ask for. Not for light readers, you cannot plow thru it in day. I'm frequently disappointed when I pick up a book and finish it in just a few hours because its fluff. The Windup Girl is anything but.

Set in a future Thailand, genetically modified food has played havoc with the environment. Thailand stand lone as a Bastian of food grown from natural seed. Politics, plots, and flawed but interesting characters will keep you reading and wondering if this is the world we're headed for.

I really enjoyed the book - science fiction of the highest order - good characters and premise. As for the recordings, I'm not as enthusiastic. Part of the problem is the book itself - the start of the novel is fairly flat without a lot of action and doesn't lend itself to audio dramatization and the narration could have been better. Three and a half stars. I'd recommend reading the book if possible, rather than listening to it on disc.

This is an amazingly rich and detailed vision of a dystopian future after global trade and agriculture have been devastated by a rise in sea-levels, genetic modifications gone awry and the exhaustion of petroleum. Things move along a bit fast in the final chapters, and it may seem a bit rushed, but the pace was fine for me.

The first half of the book is a gradual reveal of the world, and a slow buildup to the crisis at the end. The characters may appear "flat", but that is largely because they're trapped by circumstances and there isn't a lot of room for them to maneuver. There are no heroes here, and no happy endings. Any reader looking for a character to root for is going to end up disappointed. Uncompromising crusaders and conniving pragmatists are both equally adept at destroying themselves and those around them in this world.

My only quibble with the world as imagined is that I think our energy future is brighter than Bacigalupi suggests, alternative energy sources should help us avoid returning to domesticated animals as a power source. Anyone who has seen Asian farmers transporting produce on a bullock cart while talking on their cell-phones will have no trouble understanding how genetically engineered animals might be used to power factories.

The novel is one of the best expressions of how fragile our extremely comfortable and privileged lives are. Characters whose lives have been completely overturned, either by large-scale riots, or the actions of a bureaucracy respond in different ways to the memory of their powerlessness. Bacigalupi's description of urban rioting is amongst the best I've seen.

This is a dense, well, written, powerful book written for a thoughtful reader. It is not simple but few good books ever are.

I saw a review of this book someplace saying,'ridiculously good'.
Honestly, I thought that was a bit over the top, but got the book anyway.
Having read it, all I can say is 'ridiculously good' as a descriptor doesn't do it justice.
So great, it's wonderful and should be made into a movie, and 10 more of the same!

PS - If you're a fan of the dystopic futures of William Gibson, and enjoy 'ribopunk' SF .....you'll truly love this!

I wanted to like this story, but a strong beginning drifted into a weak middle, with an attempt to revive the story in the last few pages.
I enjoyed the speculation of where we are headed in a world dominated by supranational conglomerates which value only the monetary value of climate, bioresearch, and humanity.
I look forward to watching Mr. Paolo Bacigalupi's writings; he has important ideas worth reading.

This was a very odd story. A friend recommended it to me, and I tried reading it on and off but almost 2 years later I still haven't finished it and have only read 3/4 of it with no plans to pick it back up.

I liked this book, but I had nagging problems while reading it. The worldbuilding is very interesting, with many great details. It reminded me of The Diamond Age. This book lacks that one's humor, though, and the plot spins its wheels through a saggy middle portion. Some of the characters feel very underdeveloped, and one character serves as nothing more than a point of view for brutal gang rape scenes that feel exploitative and unnecessary.

It's an interesting and complicated story. BUT why make it more complicated and difficult to read by throwing in a bunch of foreign and/or slang words??? the author even puts these words in italics as if say "here is a word you won't know" Why? It is hard enough to follow all the necessary foreign places and names without that literary trick. It would be more pleasurable to show the English word in parenthesis, at least for its first use. I looked the meaning of one word, then decided to just ship them. Even "A Clockwork Orange had a glossary.

Reading this book made me feel at times almost like I was there in it. Such a descriptive author, at ease painting pictures with words. I found the future genetic manipulation by humans controlling and modifying our food system somewhat frightening because it is completely imaginable and most likely already happening. So glad this was a kindle read because the "hold your finger on the word" dictionary came in handy several times. Wonderfully entertaining reading. Highly recommended! After reading this book, I had to devour all his other books as well. Great story teller!

First off, there are very graphic rape scenes so if you can't handle that, you probably should not read it.
The stories alternate between chapters.
Great insight on a human world with genetic engineering.

Initially hard to get into, but stick with it: This is a great book. I'm a huge Gibson fan, and while the prose style isn't like Gibson, Bacigalupi's command of the narrative and the ideas is similar -- and the story and ideas are similarly prescient. And while it remains basically nonpartisan and apolitical throughout, the story and ideas, as told from the 3rd person omniscient POVs of different characters from different cultures and with different, often tragic personal histories, gradually but thoroughly reveal the heartless, inhumane core of the future dystopian "progress" promised by the imperialism and capitalism of present day industrialised nations -- and all the devastating consequences we can already see early signs of occurring around the globe now. Like aspects of Neuromancer and Gibson's cyberpunk sci-fi, this book will one day in the future be viewed as having predicted reality. And though it will not be alone in that pantheon, it will likely be one of the most accurate.

First and foremost, though, your heart goes out to the title character. In the way that one can tell much about a society and it's people by their treatment of children and dogs, one can tell much about this future society by its treatment of "wind-ups," their manufactured, genetically engineered humans. One can also tell that it is chillingly like (certainly no worse than) current society in all industrialised countries and in their exploited third world partners.

This is newspaper science, at best, a full-throttle attack on biotechnology and capitalism whose added global warming silliness should delight the EPA. Despite that, and certainly because of the title character's eventual triumph over unwilling sexual bondage, this is compelling dystopian story telling. One can only be grateful not to have to share the author's worldview---except in these small doses.

I got this book after seeing positive reviews and seeing it was nominated for the Hugo/Nebula. I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy and I think this book fell squarely in a very common trap for these genres.

In a nutshell this is an excellent exercise in world building that is deficient in every other respect.

I could not get into any of the characters in this book - the author would assign a single trait to each one of the narrative centering characters and then fail to develop them at all. They were so one dimensional, often it was hard to tell why some of the narratives existed, except to show off the world building. The title character, was really the worst. She had no personality and her one motivation - to escape to a possibly mythic community of others like her - was to flimsy to sustain any interest. Not one character ever actually appeared to care about any other or about what was happening outside of the one assigned trait or goal. Each just moved through the landscape with marginal interaction.

Ostensibly there was a story about politics but you never could keep the sides straight or understand what was happening except people were fighting and things were going to hell. Even as these events occurred I kept waiting to care about any of it but I never was able to because none of the characters were emotionally responsive or changed in any way. The story telling was incredibly wooden and awkward.

I found the politics of the author (the agri-busneses as huge villains) to be a bit simplistic and heavy handed as well. Yes, Monsanto et al have jerky, very unethical, business practices that take advantage of the poor, but they're far from civilization destroying. Overall I can't believe this book won awards! But on the other hand, I think there is a history in Sci-Fi of ignoring bad writing if the world building is interesting, so maybe it's not that surprising after all.

This is a decently written SF-fantasy hybrid that is essentially warmed-over Ian McDonald (see Brasyl, River of Gods), a dystopian cyber-bio-steampunk ensemble drama with some really questionable science (energy storage in rubber bands (well, springs), anyone? and twisted/scrunched by elephants, no less). Its narrative scope, pace & breadth of concept is of the the-less-that-happens-the-artsier-it-is school (also see sometimes Paul J McAuley, Ian Watson). It can additionally be seen as a mashup of ideas from many a film (two that come to mind are The Quiet American and Blade Runner). I did not find it boring. I actually learned something, which was that methane is in fact lighter than air and can be used for lift (with the commensurate hazards). All that being said, scanning the reader comments here, it seems a majority of reviewers ("he uses too much weird jargon") have never Actually Read a Science Fiction Book before, or Learned a Bit of Thai or Chinese On or Before a Trip Abroad... Also, it doesn't take a genius to realize that if artificial people became available on the market, the very first thing they would be used for would be sex. Look at the Internet, duh.

Like the best speculative fiction, this novel plumbs societal and emotional frontiers as much as it does the technical and scientific. Paolo seems to know the dark side of our prejudices far too well. His vision is dark, but it sees a veritable future. Highly recommended

Bacigalupi sidesteps all debate about whether the modern fears of climate change, genetic engineering, and corporate capture of government, starting his book on the premise that these things will happen. The world he imagines is one which copes with these new realities in the best way that they can, which is to say, not well.

A magnificent achievement... this world where fossil fuels are scarce, and (mysteriously) nuclear power seems to have vanished, human animal effort - and the calories that power them - are crucial. Set in a not-so-far future Thailand, this is a powerful, fascinating story where several complex plot threads intertwine. Well worth it.

Pros: Another look at an interesting dystopian future for planet Earth, set in South East Asia. The story of how humans ended up in their predicament was well thought-out, and presented well to the reader. I enjoyed the setting, and the story line as a whole.

Cons: I am ultimately disappointed that such a sexist book won so many awards, but it’s a fun reminder of the gender politics of science fiction in North America. The rape/sex scenes were graphic and violent to point of being gratuitous, and the writing style invited the reader to enjoy the character’s suffering. Ultimately, they added nothing to the plot or character development, and seemed a cheap cop-out to illustrate a character's suffering. The titular character, the Windup Girl, is under-developed as a character, and defined by the abuse she suffers. The fact that the book is named after her, and yet her plot is so one-dimensional and her finale so unsatisfying, really detracted from the book.

I enjoyed reading this book but was expecting something more in the end. It was beautifully written and had all the elements of a great story, but I was disappointed the the characters lives didn't intersect more, or that there wasn't a satisfying conclusion to the various story lines. I understand that this is a future where there is little hope, and maybe that's what the author wanted to convey. Even in our dimmest hour mankind finds a way to rise above--at least I like to think so. Perhaps capitalism and free trade cast too great a shadow even for the authors imagination to shine through. Mankind has had its chance and it blew it, and nothing can save it. Oh well. Like I said, it was an interesting read, but dropped at the end and left me baffled and unsatisfied.

Wonderful book, beautifully rendered, well-told story about a dystopian future with strong female characters - didn't know Bacigalupi before but going to get all of his other books now that I've read this one. If you liked Oryx & Crake, you're likely to like this too.

After all the stellar reviews, I have to admit the novel was a let down. Apparently, it features many characters and plot lines from his previous short stories -- and I can see how this could have been a great 'short story.' As a novel, it just goes on and on. The future is too similar to our present (with a thin layer of fantastic creatures laid over it) to make it interesting. If the message was "the more things change, the more things stay the same" and humanity is simply doomed to repeat its own mistakes, then, yes, I got it -- after about ten pages.

Paolo knows a great deal about human ambition and the lengths we go to further our desires. This cautionary tale speaks of the perils and promise of gene manipulation as seen through the eyes of a genetic human construct.
The story is set in future ruined Thailand where most of the world is starving due to loss of plant diversity and epidemic blight.
Hero's and villains change sides depending on perspective. Wild and enjoyable ride that if you like a thinking persons science fiction, you should not miss.

Bleak, depressing, dysfunctional future.
Yet powerfully compelling.
Paolo slowly peels this complex onion of a story revealing a complicated tangle of interrelated characters.
Each character is smart in their own odd perspective causing them to disrupt each other in this fascinating story.

Long, meandering work without much of a payoff. The writing is tight and some of the futuristic ideas are intriguing, but as a whole the story fails in my opinion. Note, I loved The Water Knife, so the author is worth a shot, this is just not his best work.

I enjoyed the world building, but don't necessarily buy the physics of "wind up toys" as the energy of the future. I am not even sure that corporatist dystopia even qualifies as science fiction. But good characters and an interesting plot.

Having spent some time until recently living and working in South East Asia I was immediately drawn into this dystopian novel's premises, finding that Bagicalupi, like a good Thai chef, had taken a variety of existing ingredients and with some imagination and flair concocted them into a tasty, spicy mix that savours the reader's need for a page-turner and does not disappoint their appetite. In founding his vision of dystopia in current concerns and happenings it easily becomes all too believable.

If you are worried about possible repercussions from the genetic modification of foodstuffs and the loss of biodiversity in edible flora leading to a collapse in the food chain then meet the calorie men. If you remember the atrocities that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia or are aware of the rising racial tensions in Malaysia and its discriminatory bumiputra laws then meet the yellow card refugees from ethnic cleansing. If you have seen television news footage of violent, even lethal demonstrations in Bangkok between red shirts and yellow shirts then meet the violent rivalry between the Ministries of Trade and Environment.

Into this spicy mix Bagicalupi stirs a cast of main characters that are all too believable, primarily because they exhibit thoughts and behavior that we can recognize and either despise or relate to. Whether you empathize most with the determined calorie man and his ability to attempt to find advantage in the most adverse of situations, the corrupt politician who may or may not be as corrupt as his rival or the yellow card, scheming, ducking and diving between those more powerful and the forces they unleash is not important. The storytelling whisks the reader along leaving their attitudes likely to change as the plot unfolds.

The Windup Girl is a story of invention and imagination grounded in today's all too real fears and possibilities, written with style. Read it.

A great future dystopia novel. Has scientific futurism, (mostly) in-depth characters, fun plot line, detailed world building, and thought provoking ethical themes. This will be added with the Huxley, Orwell, and Atwood novel recommendations from teachers.

Despite a tedious start, some stilted prose, and multiple unnecessarily graphic sexual abuse scenes (which may add shock-value but detract from the story), I still think Bacigalupi has written something remarkable here. This "bio-punk" saga is the hyper-organic dystopian antithesis of cyberpunk. Traditional resources, tech, and basic human protections are lost to profiteering, unrestrained bioengineering, and outright ethnic discrimination. All that is left is the search for calories, hopefully derived from foods free of human-engineered disease. On top of this, Bacigalupi stacks elements of racism, sexism, classism, and religious violence, some of which can be hauntingly familiar, given the rather exotic setting. The key, though, is that Bacigalupi manages to convey all of this without whining. His characters could stand further development, but the ruthless real-world parallels to our own squandering of natural resources coupled with ethical neglect in competitive agro-engineering provide a great deal of food for thought. A fascinating read, despite the disgusting bits.

The author is thoughtful and smart. The future in store for us, after the agro-chemical corporations have won the current patent war to own the food production of the world, and the gene-manipulators have created and own not only plants, but modified people with animal genes. After all- since they are allowed to hold patents on living, reproducing plants because they have modified their genes, why wouldn't they also own the "people" they create?

My only complaint is the gratuitous violence against "a woman". Why the author found that necessary, I'll never understand. The book was very entertaining. The author, unfortunately, seems a bit Yuck!

I tried starting The Windup a couple times and was turned off be the brutality of the life lived in a future Bangkok. Once I came to grips with this new world reality I was captivated by each new character and how their lives grew to mesh so perfectly. Great read.