WG is Burdett's Bangkok 8 meets Chua's World on Fire: a Thailand crime thriller which goes from commercial espionage to national politics in which the Southeast Asian mixture of deep reverence for a decaying & incompetent monarchy combines with globalizing capitalism and ambitious military leaders plotting a coup and a population stewing with resentment towards a Chinese immigrant underclass (exemplified by the clever Hock Seng who tries to sense the winds of ethnic cleansing & escape in time) which bids fair to turn Thailand into another Malaysia, which combustible mixture explodes when lit off by a crusading cop & his two-faced sidekick and the accident of a trafficked Japanese prostitute. While not a genre I have any particular devotion to, it's a fun one to return too since I haven't read a thriller novel set in Thailand in a long time so it's fresh to me, and I particularly enjoyed the sections dealing with Hock Seng's planning. (To a lesser extent, I was interested in the treacherous subordinate.) I read it in two sittings because I wanted to see what happened.

Oh, and apparently it's supposed to be a SF novel as well. That part doesn't need too much discussion since WG is not very good as a SF novel: while the worldbuilding is detailed, perhaps even excessive in terms of providing jargon and little tidbits for the reader to figure out (I can't quite decide whether to fault WG for data-dumps, since it does a good job early on avoiding explaining too much but I think the discipline wavers later on), the world thus built unfortunately lacks any intellectual coherence, and so it fails utterly as any kind of Gibsonian near-future extrapolation, or any kind of extrapolation at all for that matter - in its thoughtlessness and cliches, it comes off as just more Al-Gore-style liberal chic (to list two examples I couldn't stop thinking about: so the world economy is based on springs as an energy storage mechanism and coal & biofuel as the only apparent energy sources, with nothing about solar panels...? humanity is supposed to have engineered super-effective broad-spectrum plant viruses which Nature, despite billions of years/quadrillions of viral generations over quintillions of individual viruses, has not...? it's hard to know which of these two points is more wildly improbable.) Also, I can forgive the mad scientist cliche who we're supposed to have mixed feelings about (although to me as a transhumanist, the question is not 'why not have everyone be New People' but 'why hasn't that already happened when they're described as a brilliant success and improvements in every way upon baseline humanity?') but it seems a little dubious to name the book after one of the characters whose portrayal is the least convincing.