The Windup Girl in Utopian and Dystopian Reading Group

Apr 03, 2013 Lit Bug (Foram) rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, literary, novels, ph-d, sf, owned, other-science-fiction, asian, nebula-hugo

This 2009 Nebula and Hugo Award-winning futuristic bio-punk novel is set in the 23rd century Thailand, when global warming has depleted all natural energy sources and overturned all remnants of the past, familiar world. Now manual kink-springs are used to generate power. Rising ocean levels have ensured the depletion of old-world farming and food resources, resulting into rampant biotechnology, owned by gigantic mega-corporations who produce and sell genehacked seeds and use bio-terrorism and co This 2009 Nebula and Hugo Award-winning futuristic bio-punk novel is set in the 23rd century Thailand, when global warming has depleted all natural energy sources and overturned all remnants of the past, familiar world. Now manual kink-springs are used to generate power. Rising ocean levels have ensured the depletion of old-world farming and food resources, resulting into rampant biotechnology, owned by gigantic mega-corporations who produce and sell genehacked seeds and use bio-terrorism and conspire politically to attain economic leverage. The world is rife with frequent bio-catastrophes in the form of mutant diseases, which forces the world even more to rely on the biotechnology of the corporates.

Only Thailand has escaped the fate - with sheer foresight, it has built its indigenous seed-bank that has massively reduced its dependence on AgriGen, a major biotech company. But Thailand is not immune to political machinings - the three most powerful men in Thailand are locked in an uneasy, covert battle with each other - Somdet Chaopraya, Akkarat and General Pracha. When Emiko, the windup girl, murder Somdet, who is also the legal protector of the Child Queen of Thailand, the political battle becomes only more intense as Akkarat and Pracha try to take over power from each others' hands, as AgriGen ambassadors try to take advantage of the confusion to lay their hands upon the hidden seedbank.

The result is not only a political and military battle, but a hard-hitting inquiry into the nature of politics, biotechnology and its corporatization, neo-colonialism and the effects of global warming while we have not yet imagined the configurations of power in a world with no old power sources. The windup Emiko, who is at the crux of the novel, also raises the question of what it means to be human, and if there is really such a thing as HUMAN. And because she is a female android who is sexually abused, it very dexterously comments on a future where the artificial nature of life further complicates the questions of sexism and prostitution.

The novel is told in several threads, one of Emiko, which half-way merges with that of Anderson, of Hock Sen and Mai with Anderson which merges with Emiko towards the end, of the white shirts Jaidee and Kanya, whose stories are wound with the rest of the others. The coming together of these threads is amazingly done. The dialogues are seamless, with no unnecessary, mundane or commonplace observations. Each character has a clear, distinct, credible and necessary-to-the-plot personality. And while we may not agree with what a particular character has done, the world-building, though simple, is so perfect, one can always sympathize with what happened.

It is a wonderful read, and a delightful book in terms of both story-telling and a representative of its narrow sub-genre. ...more

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