We're all Doomed

[mtvessel]

Sep 2017
The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi – Orbit, 2010
* * * *
Unlike the Becky Chambers books in my previous review, this novel, a worthy winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, has all three ingredients of my perfect SF trifecta. It is set in a memorable future Thailand. Its four main characters are all nuanced and intriguing, and serve to illustrate the various facets of the political thriller plot, which has a proper shape. It's just a shame that it's all so grim.

Though, to be honest, that's not a surprise given the mess that the world is in at the start of the novel. A combination of peak oil, global warming and mass starvation caused by genetically engineered plagues has caused a devolution in technology. The internet and mobile phones no longer exist, and transport and electrical devices use kink springs, energy storage gadgets which are wound by genetically engineered mammoths called megodonts, in place of batteries. Anderson Lake, one of the four protagonists, is ostensibly the farang (foreign) owner of a factory making kink springs in downtown Bangkok, but is in fact a spy for AgriGen, one of the evil multinational companies that spread crop blights such as blister rust and cibiscosis and then sell seeds that are resistant to them. He is trying to locate the source of Thailand's plague-resistant crops. His wily manager, Hock Seng, a yellow-card Malaysian Chinese refugee, is equally dubious, being ruthlessly pragmatic and entirely concerned with his own survival. Both these characters support the Trade Ministry run by General Akkarat, one of the two big political blocs. The other is the Environment Ministry, which enforces environmental laws and quarantine regulations via a brutal and corrupt pseudo-military outfit called the whiteshirts who are represented by the dashing and popular captain Jaidee Rojjanasukchai, the "Tiger of Bangkok", and his strait-laced deputy Kanya. Somewhere between the two is Emiko, the windup girl of the title. She is a New Person, genetically engineered to be a living sex toy, with a characteristic stuttering movement, a desire to please (spliced in from labrador dogs, according to one character), and a problem with overheating due to badly designed pores. When Emiko and Anderson Lake meet in a brothel, it sets off a chain of events that will change everything.

The worldbuilding is detailed and impressive, if not entirely plausible. I will buy the loss of the internet and mobile phones, even though wind-up versions of the latter already exist, but the genetic engineering of humans struck me as over the top. Genetic manipulation is complicated and requires expensive machines and ingredients. It seems hard to imagine that in an impoverished world, genetics would take priority over information technology when the latter is so much easier. Also, call it my liberal tendencies, but I can't believe that genetically engineered humans would not be accorded the same basic rights as any other humans. The idea that any post-slavery society, no matter how desperate, would accept a clearly self-aware and suffering being as an object that could be "mulched" on a whim merely because her DNA was synthesised in a machine just doesn't ring true. This tainted my view of Emiko, who is too obviously a character with whom the reader is being forced to sympathise, and Anderson Lake, whom we are supposed to like, despite his evil-corporation connection, because he is on Emiko's side.

In fact there are no heroes in this novel, which makes it a tough and dispiriting read. Bacigalupi evidently has a deeply cynical and pessimistic view of the world. But with the Paris Accord, humanity's one hope of avoiding the rising floods and global weather weirding described in this novel, being undermined by a recalcitrant president, it seems all too plausible. I'm kind of glad that I won't be around to see it.