The Windup Girl in Questionable Content Challenge 2012

Sep 28, 2011 Pavarti Tyler rated it it was amazing

Shelves: scifi, epicfiction

The Windup Girl was not an easy book to read. I've read a number of negative reviews of this book and while I don't agree I understand how this happened. I couldn't read more than 3 or 4 chapters at a time without my ears starting to leak gray matter. But please, don't let that stop you. The Windup Girl is both terrifying and hopeful, devastating and beautiful. The dichotomy of humanity has never been captured as well as Bacigalupi did in here.

I've talked a lot in the past about world building a The Windup Girl was not an easy book to read. I've read a number of negative reviews of this book and while I don't agree I understand how this happened. I couldn't read more than 3 or 4 chapters at a time without my ears starting to leak gray matter. But please, don't let that stop you. The Windup Girl is both terrifying and hopeful, devastating and beautiful. The dichotomy of humanity has never been captured as well as Bacigalupi did in here.

I've talked a lot in the past about world building and how a quality book, especially sci-fi, doesn't stop at location. A quality book builds a world using history, anthropology, science, sociology, genetics, religion and politics. All of these factors exist in The Windup Girl and more. Bacigalupi tackles biology, evolution, family and the essential question of what it means to be human.

Strangely, the most human character in the entire book is the one who is considered to not have a soul. Emiko is a Windup, one of the New People, built and bred for specific purposes. The society of The Windup Girl is obsessed with Niche. Everyone has a place and in a time when resources are scarce and hope is extinct, clinging to ones role is what keeps order and sanity in an insane world. Emiko's Niche is as a servant. Bred to obey, designed to give and experience pleasure, her innocence and crisis of self is the most engaging of the plots. However, without the others her story would lack the context which makes it so powerful and heartbreaking.

While The Windup Girl is a fictional novel speculating on the future of the world if we continue to mess with the genes of our food it's one that feels very familiar. It isn't hard to imagine a world where rickshaw's replace cars because there is no fuel left, or where carbon emission allotments are sold on the black market to the highest bidder. The threat of a virus or strain of an illness which we cannot defeat is in the back of our minds already. Antibiotic resistant strep and recalled Cantaloupe already infect our modern world. Take that reality to the extreme and you have Bacigalupi's novel.

For my part I was exceptionally happy with The Windup Girl. It was a full story, that surprised and challenged with uncomfortable questions on the nature of humanity. Bacigalupi used every resource the writer has available, from research to religion to pure fantasy, to create something completely original. I highly recommend this novel to everyone.

Oh and because I'm an Indie Author and I'm so sick of hearing about typos I'd like to point out that this Hugo Award winning, Nebula Prize novel had a number of typos, specifically on pages 276 and 307. My favorite was: "The scooter slews to a stop and she hops down." Guess what word he meant. So the next time you find an error or two in a self published novel consider this before you blast it all over the internet. ...more

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Oct 29, 2011 Andy Gavin rated it liked it

This novel won the 2009 Nebula and tied for the 2010 Hugo. It's set in an approximately 100-200 years-from-now dystopian future Bangkok ravaged by gene engineered diseases. Fossil fuels are nearly exhausted and society eeks by on "megadont" (gene hacked elephant) and human power.

At first I found this intensely gripping, as the depiction of the future world is crystal bright and highly novel. The prose is fantastic, bordering on slightly literary. The problem is that the story has a lot of charac This novel won the 2009 Nebula and tied for the 2010 Hugo. It's set in an approximately 100-200 years-from-now dystopian future Bangkok ravaged by gene engineered diseases. Fossil fuels are nearly exhausted and society eeks by on "megadont" (gene hacked elephant) and human power.

At first I found this intensely gripping, as the depiction of the future world is crystal bright and highly novel. The prose is fantastic, bordering on slightly literary. The problem is that the story has a lot of characters, five or six main points of view, and I found it very hard to care about most of them. I only really liked Emiko, the gene hacked whore/slave looking for a better life. The American gene thief was okay too. The rest of them I could hardly focus on enough to follow their rambling monologues. Once the relative novelty of the world ground down a bit, I just couldn't keep myself interested in what was happening. There's plenty of plot, but it's moderately byzantine, and I just didn't care.

Because books are all about the characters. Contrast The Windup Girl with something like Song of Ice and Fire (which I need to write up, but is being adapted into an HBO series). The plot and world in that book are intense, but Martin makes you care for all (well most) of the characters. The Windup Girl has a lot of repetitive rantings. The elderly Chinese guy for example goes on for about two pages in his second chapter about his distrust of banks. Sure this was supposed to instill the sense that he no longer trusts any institution (for good reason), but it just felt self indulgent. The seedy scenes with the titular character in sort of future Patpong where cool though, albiet disturbing.

Let me get back to the world, as this is the biggest strength of this book. The author clearly spent some serious time in Bangkok, and the foreign, yet vaguely possible future was pretty damn good. I don't really buy the relying on springs for power, and there's very little impact here of either nanotech or computers, both of which I think will dominate the 21st century. Still, it was pretty cool. There's a serious element of "environmental preachy" between the lines, which I suspect is a factor in it's award winning status. Award gives love a leftist cause. Not that I'm not pro-environment, I'm just not a "causist." The book reminded me of Neuromancer and Diamond Age in that they described really cool and consistant worlds, but had inadequate character development. Diamond Age in particular is pretty darn boring once you get over the world (which is great). Two many characters, no reason to care about them, opaque and weird motives.

Personally, I think authors should focus tighter on character in these "new world" type books. For example, Consider Phlebas worked for me. People bag on it's story, but at least it focuses fairly well on a particular guy's adventure, and the world is amazing. There's only so much you can do in one book, and a totally new world is a lot. Occasionally someone managed both, like one of my all time favorite novels, Hyperion, but brilliant as that is, even it still suffers from switching the POV so often. But boy does he work some serious pathos into a number of them. ...more

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Mar 25, 2011 M. Pax rated it it was amazing

Fabulous. So rich, well imagined and well written. Best thing I've read in a long time. Hope to see more from Paolo. ...more

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Aug 19, 2010 Stuart rated it it was amazing

This book just blew me away. Bleak and disturbing for the future world, but the writing is top notch. I've read all five Hugo award nominated books for 2009, and I would have a hard choice to choose between this and Cherie Priest's "Boneshaker." ...more

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