Suvudu Universe

The world has warmed, the seas have risen, oil reserves have run out. It’s the 23rd century and Anderson Lake, AgriGen’s Calorie Man has just arrived in Bangkok, Thailand. In the bleak vision of the future presented in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, calories are currency, giant biotechnology corporations, called “calorie companies,” dominate the world, and bio-terrorism is not just the tool of the downtrodden, but of the power elite as well.

This Bangkok of the future sits below sea level and is only kept dry with a complex system of levees and pumps. Megodonts, genetically modified elephants, carry supplies down the city’s long boulevards, and supercats with strange abilities live on discarded scraps in the city’s crowded alleyways. Without fossil fuels to power industry, humanity has resorted to genetically modifying beasts of burden to do their work. At Anderson Lake’s factory, they use megodonts to wind their kink springs, which store energy for later use, like a battery that doesn’t require electricity. But the factory, and Anderson’s position in it, is merely a front. He is really after Thailand’s seedbank, a repository of crops thought to be extinct. He searches Bangkok’s food markets for lost foodstuffs, hoping that he will discover new and more powerful calories sources.

Beasts of burden aren’t the only things that have been genetically modified in this not-too-distant future. Emiko is one of the “New People,” genetically modified humanoids that have been created for a specific purpose. Emiko’s purpose was to satisfy the decadent whims of a Japanese businessman, but she has since been abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. An outcast, an illegal alien, a “windup girl,” Emiko has nowhere to turn but Raleigh, a sex-club owner, but the refuge he offers is hardly better than the “mulching” she would face if she were caught by government authorities.

With a child queen sitting on Thailand’s throne, the balance of power is very much in doubt. The Somdet Chaopraya, the queen’s regent, is the most powerful man in Thailand and seeks only to retain his authority. General Pracha is the chief of the Environmental Ministry, also called the “White Shirts,” and wants to increase the length of his ministry’s long arm. Akkarat is the head of the Trade Ministry and uses his position to line his own pockets with bribes, which the calorie companies are all too happy to pay as they try to strengthen their influence over the country.

As opposing factions clash over control of the city, they unleash a wave of terrorism, coups, and genetically mutated plagues. And when circumstances bring Anderson and Emiko together, he discovers that he may have found something that he values more than his job, and if they are going to get out of the city alive, she will have to discover that she has skills beyond what she was created for.

The Windup Girl won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel in 2010 and was one of Time magazine’s ten best fiction books of 2009. Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, said that “it’s ridiculous how good this book is.” The highest praise that I can offer is that after finishing this novel, I couldn’t name the “good guys” or the “bad guys,” even though almost all of the characters are working in opposition to each other. That’s how complex this book is, and that’s how fully realized Bacigalupi’s vision of the future is.