The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, 359 pages

Bangkok of the future is terrifying — climate change has made the tropical climate more extreme; bioterrorism has decimated the population with plagues; foreign GMO agriculture companies dangle plague-resistant crops as bait for bribes; fossil fuels are all but gone and what energy resources remain are tightly controlled; and the ministries of Trade and Environment have created warring (and corrupt) factions within government, destabilizing an already precarious situation. This novel simultaneously follows:

• one of those foreign GMO guys as he attempts to track down Thailand's seedbank while keeping up appearances of running a spring factory;
• the refugee manager of that spring factory, who is always keeping an eye out for himself first;
• the titular windup girl, a New Person genetically inclined to please her human master, whether she wants to or not; and
• a pair of Environment Ministry officers, one of whom is something of a state-sponsored environmental terrorist against the Trade Ministry.

Is it hard to keep all of this straight? Yup. Are any of the characters particularly likeable? Not really. Is the payoff worth it? Eh, still up in the air about that. The last 80-100 pages of this book are really compelling, and focus on a few characters that are barely mentioned in the first 250 pages. The unevenness of this book drives me nuts and makes me wonder how this tied for the 2010 Hugo for Best Novel. It was OK, at best.