The Windup Girl

By Paolo Bacigalupi
Night Shade Books, $24.95, 360 pages

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, takes place in a future in which what could be called the “caloric industrial complex,” controls industry, commerce, and the overall economy of the planet. All transactions, business or otherwise, in some way are based on calories, or more precisely, the lack thereof. It is a dystopian vision, reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick’s Blade Runner in its dark depiction of a world where technology and the ability to manipulate genes have serious, and unanticipated, consequences for both the environment and human beings.

The central character in The Windup Girl is Anderson Lake, who works for the monolithic company AgriGen. Lake’s job is to discover new, and sometimes old and forgotten, food–much of which has been genetically modified. Another key figure in the story is Emiko, the Windup Girl of the title. She is one of the “New People,” who are not human, but rather genetically engineered and, as such, exploited by the rest of the population. Anderson encounters Emiko in one of his forays into an Asian street market where she has been abandoned and where her sojourn of discovery of her destiny as well as that of the New People, and ultimately the planet, begins to unfold.

Bacigalupi has created a fully imagined world in The Windup Girl that is densely packed with ideas about genetic manipulation, distribution of resources, the social order, and environmental degradation. However, he is never pedantic in addressing these concepts; rather they are expressed through the settings he vividly describes and in the actions of his characters. In short, The Windup Girl is science fiction with an environmental message, but one that does not get in the way of its compelling story

Reviewed by Doug Robins