88 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A story of the future that seems too real, September 30, 2009
This review is from: The Windup Girl (Hardcover)
It is hard to follow up the review by Blue Tyson...it covers the book very well so I will try not to repeat it.
As a reader of SF for many years,it is a rare moment that a book comes along that is shocking in its originality.
This a story set in a bleak world, but a world with hope as the characters struggle to find meaning and a future in this world.This is a world of corporate domination as groups fight for what is left in a decaying world.
But if anything ...this books central core is what it means to be human. That to be human is to make choices you may not like and that these choices define you for who you are.These characters must make those choices and that is what really makes this book great.
Be warned...this book does leave open a possible sequel but this book in itself is a stand alone story. Major plots are resolved in the end...but there are some questions to be answered.I have a feeling there is more to come.
This an author to watch...the only author that comes close to comparison is Ian McDonald.
This book is a must for all SF fans..enjoy and join me in hopefully a short wait for the next book.
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139 of 157 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thai generip terror., September 23, 2009
This review is from: The Windup Girl (Hardcover)
Thai generip terror.
It Bacigalupi ever writes anything that is sweetness and light, that right there would be likely proof of the Many Worlds Theory and the fact that you had slipped into an alternate universe.
The setting is Bangkok, or, colloquially, Krung Thep. It is also a near future dystopia. The city now houses many displaced Chinese refugees from a Malaysia turned fundamentalist muslim fanatics. (See his story Yellow Card Man for background) Bangkok itself is only kept from drowning by engineering and technology.
This is a post-oil world, with very little petroleum technology available, remaining. No evidence of solar tech, either, really. Power is provided by human labor and genetically engineered highly efficient animals pourding kinetic energy into springs, which then can be used to power machines. Treadle computers, even. Countries have shrunk in upon themselves as a result, but are beginning to look outward again, with ships, and dirigibles. This makes this setting rather unlike the mass-media or AI ridden future India and Brasil etc. of Ian McDonald's devising.
Particularly nasty are the 'calorie companies' - organisations that have the ability to manufacture crops in large supply: but their crops are sterile, so you always need to go back for more. That is if bugs and plagues 'weevils' and 'blister rust' do not get them. Much dirty, violent dealing in support of this activity (see his story The Calorie Man) and there are mentions of it going horribly wrong in other countries. One of the questions this raises is how they manage to stay around - why, with such hatred of them, are the calorie men and women not mercilessly hunted and slaughtered. The only intimations you get of this are economic power, based in the USA. Also China is apparently dysfunctional, and many other countries are devastated. Thailand, through foresight, is struggling on, and is hence a point of interest. Their genetic stocks and the genetic engineering expert they have on hand to help defend them are of interest to all.
The rapidly mutating diseases caused by genetic engineering meddling and conflict kill many - with mainly the calorie companies having the resources to combat their own hellish offspring, if they care to. Mutated cats with no real predators except humans have also destroyed a lot of the food chain.
The novel has many viewpoints:
Anderson Lake, An American calorie man representative, brought in to try and increase productivity at a factory working on more efficient power springs. More than he seems, however.
Hock Seng, The Yellow Card Man, an elderly fallen Chinese merchant who escaped massacres and now works for Lake.
Emiko, The Windup Girl. A Japanese artificially created human. Unable to reproduce, overheats easily but has many unknown talents. Left behind by her owner, currently a working bar girl.
Kanya, an officer in the Environment Ministry's corps of field soldiers responsible for protecting the city from incursions of disease, animals and artificial humans.
Conflict develops from many angles - there is longstanding resentment between the Environment Ministry and Trade Ministry because of different philosophies, inward, and outward looking, respectively. The foreign merchants look to exploit this. Then there is of course anti-refugee racism. As mentioned before, and historically, the Asian against Asian racism or nationalism is quite horrific.
The novel leaves you uneasy the whole way through, but fascinated. After many thousands of stories I am not easy to surprise. I had no idea what the hell was going to happen in this book, apart from the fact that it was likely to be bloody. The writing is excellent. Bacigalupi is a major talent, if unfortunately not very prolific.
Hard to predict, but I think this novel is quite likely to be important in the sense of SF history. It is brilliant, in its all sweating dystopian style.
Forget whatever else you are reading, and speed browse to Webscriptions where this is a available multiformat DRM free (thankfully, given its theme). Hopefully it will do well enough so his collection 'Pump Six' becomes available, too. This is good enough to buy in any or all varieties, however.
It is that rare beast, a 5 star novel. Great at the start, great in the middle, great at the end.
5 out of 5
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77 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating world..., July 9, 2010
I picked up this book after reading and loving the author's second novel, Ship Breaker. If you have read that one, you will see some similarities--the 200+ years in the future dystopian societies presented in each book are strongly influenced by environmental disaster, and the global re-shuffling of power that results from it. However, The Windup Girl, being a novel for adults, is clearly intended to be bleaker, and to present more complicated ideas in terms of the exact nature of the problems faced by the future world, than are found in the young adult novel Ship Breaker. TWG explores the deadly plagues, mutations and social problems that can result from tinkering with genetics, while also showing a glimpse of how such tinkering might more fully unleash our evolutionary potential. At the same time, the ravages of climate change and the depletion of fossil fuels that figure so strongly in Ship Breaker are present here, though they are not the main focus of the story.
The ideas presented in The Windup Girl are quite fascinating, and it is clear that Bacigalupi put a lot of thought and research into them. The world is very vivid and detailed.
The main problem with this book is that is sometimes tries to do too much. There are a lot of characters, and while there is some attempt made to develop many of them, it is simply not enough to make the reader care at times. As other reviewers brought up, the characters are not very likable. Unlikeable characters can still be interesting to read about if they are intriguing in some other way, but in this case I did not really feel like the characters were real people. Jaidee was the only character I really 'liked'. Anderson was basically an enigma- we never learn very much about him beyond that he works for a calorie company and comes from the Midwest. Emiko was not unlikeable per se, but she was a bit too much of the 'beautiful, submissive female cyborg' stock character for my taste. Her character improved at the end, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I had seen this character too many times before in cheesy sci fi movies. There just wasn't really anything original about her. The rest of the characters did not hold my attention at all. The most interesting was the supposedly "evil" Gibbons, who didn't have nearly as big a role as I would have liked to see.
As for the plot, it was interesting enough, but a bit all over the place. I never knew who to root for, and perhaps that was the point, but it could have been better executed.
Overall I would rate this 3 because while the world created was absolutely original and fascinating, the plot and characters were not up to that level. I would say that the plot and characters in Ship Breaker are significantly more memorable and engaging, and the world created is just as vivid, though the ideas are less complex. I would recommend both books, but stick with Ship Breaker if you are more of the 'read for fun' type. I did enjoy both books and plan to buy his future books as well.
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