Customer Reviews

The Windup Girl

5 star:		(127)
4 star:		(71)
3 star:		(36)
2 star:		(32)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

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.

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

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.

Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel The Windup Girl is a frightening, realistic and brilliant look at the near future of the world. Taking place in Thailand at some point in the future, Bacigalupi paints a picture of a world that is caught between several major problems: climate change has affected the lives of many people around the world, and in turn, has brought a rise in global agricultural corporations, and global energy resources have been depleted, forcing major changes in the way people live their lives, and how a world-wide economy functions with different resources. Corporations have run amok with trying to maintain their profit margins, and released a number of plagues upon the world that devastated the planet's ecology upon which we all depend, and because of their actions, remain just a single step ahead of the latest mutation of blister rust and other assorted plagues. Thailand is a country that has thus far weathered the storm - the Royal government has maintained a fierce isolationist policy to keep the country from succumbing. As a result, Thailand has a precious resource that western companies desperately want: a genebank, containing thousands of new strains of crops that could be utilized to combat the ongoing struggle against plagues and hunger world-wide.

The story follows several discrete storylines and characters, each with their own motivations and demons. Anderson is a `calorie man', a westerner who ostensibly manages a factory that manufactures kink-springs, a renewable power source. Jaidee is a member of the Environmental Ministry, tasked with maintaining a barrier between Thailand and the rest of the world and the dangers that it poses. Emiko is a windup, a genetically engineered woman, designed by the Japanese for servitude and for sex, who has been abandoned in Thailand and fears that she will be mulched (killed and burned for energy). In addition to these main characters, there are a number of other background characters who are just as complex as their counterparts. In a nut-shell, Anderson has come to Thailand on the behalf of a major Agricorporation that is hoping to gain a foothold in the country in order to obtain rights to the country's gene banks. While he is ostensibly looking for ways to combat the plagues, Thailand officials believe that the corporations have far more sinister and selfish motivations for the gene banks. While in the country, he has to walk a narrow line to stay in the country, as the Environmental Ministry intends to keep Thailand free.

Captain Jaidee is a leading member of the Environmental Ministry, and throughout the book, it is clear that the country is not necessarily unified in its position to remain away from the rest of the world. Limited trade and imports occur through the actions of the Trade Ministry, which is at frightening odds with the Environmental Ministry, to the point where open bloodshed and crimes are committed on both sides to try and force their position upon the rest of the country, which eventually interrupts into violence, which helps to push forward some of the plans that Anderson and others have laid to gain more traction into the country.

Emiko's titular character is somewhere between the various storylines. As an artificial biological construct, she is a representation of what is wrong with the outside world in the eyes of a secular nation that believes heavily in the value of one's soul and rebirth. To the Thai people, she is a soulless being, one who is against nature, and essentially lumped in with the problems of the world. Thus, Emiko, who is unsuited for Thailand's climate with reduced pores (she overheats easily) and a body structure that makes her stutter while moving, which makes her a literal odd woman out, and thus a target to the Environmental Ministry (also known as White Shirts for their uniform) who see her as a threat to the country's independence.

Futuristic worlds are a common element in Science Fiction, but it is very rare to have one that is so deeply realized as Bacugalupi's Thailand, one that takes the current state of existence for the country and extrapolates into the future with hypothetical events. The portrait that he paints of the world is very scary indeed, and the constructed world has reacted accordingly though a number of levels. What makes this novel so interesting is just how everything fits together. There are economic elements that make sense, social, biological and political, all of which are not mere exposition in a prologue in the novel, but where they are an active part of the storyline. This, in a way is one of the best examples of show, don't tell, a writing exercise that I remember from creative writing courses. What is even better (or sobering, depending on how you look at it), this world makes sense. I can see major corporations putting profit ahead of common sense, and I can see the world going to hell in much more vivid detail now. Furthermore, Bacugalupi posits the power struggle between various departments of government, each with their own agendas and motives, both at odds with one another, which trails up through to the very end of the book.

There's a strong look at morality and ethics when it comes to bioengineering and the eventual fate of the species, and how our role fits within a society such as what we see in the future. Emiko, a Windup, is shunned, hated, in reaction to what she was, and what she represented: something highly unnatural. By the same token, there are holes in that sort of feeling, as one character confronts towards the end of the novel. One thing that particularly stuck in my mind was how much of evolution is an unnatural, random occurrence, verses how much of it is conscious decisions that any sort of creature makes that better enhances their chances of survival? In this world, survival is predicated on the work of gene rippers and scientists who remain just a couple of steps against plagues - it is noted that the windups are built for a purpose, and that they are immune to most problems in the world because of their unique design. Like the clashes in the Thailand government, there is a larger struggle at stake, survival, with both sides making valid arguments for their continued existence. In a sense, this story is a look at how the human race might choose to survive, and enter a new stage of development. To me, this is a very profound element to the story.

When all is said and done, there is one big theme that goes through and through with this book: survival. Each element of the book deals with this very issue, from the ultimate survival of the human race in a hostile world, to the immediate survival of several characters who are neck deep in political and economic conspiracy to the various branches of government who want to see their vision of the future for their country to survive the coming turmoil.

What truly stands out for this book is the rich detail and fantastic prose. I've purposely taken my time with this book so that I could absorb as much as I could. What Bacugalupi puts together is a superior story, one of the best science fiction novels that I have read in a long time, one that takes the best from well thought out characters, plausible economics and science and a complicated story.

(Originally posted to my blog)

The Windup Girl starts off promisingly: we get hints of a large story, and the details of the milieu are filled in in tantalizing glimpses--as is customary in science fiction. But then the novel fails to deliver, petering itself out in redundant action sequences, flat characters, and whole chapters spent listening to the same internal monologues over and over.

For me the novel simply felt amateurish and poorly written. Much of the writing is small, repetitive, and procedural. A typical example sentence is when a character muses: "Ah, Jaidee, she thinks. I am sorry. So sorry. For everything I have done to you and yours. I did not set out to hurt you." (p. 211) Here Bacigalupi has taken the merely functional statement of "I am sorry" and stretched it out to 26 words while adding nothing. And take this monologue where one character muses:

Is she alive? Is she dead? Was it Trade? Was it another? A 'jao por', incensed at Jaidee's audacity? Was it someone within the Environment Ministry? Bhirom-bhakdi, irritated at Jaidee's disregard for protocol? Was it meant as a kidnapping, or murder? Did she die fighting to get free? ... Does she float in the Chao Phraya, food now for the Boddhi Carp rev 2.3 that the Ministry has bred with such success?
(p. 168)

Here not only is Bacigalupi padding his book by just having a character ask questions (and ones which range from obvious to ridiculous), but he's even repeating the same questions in superficially different ways: "Is {x} true? Is {not x} true? Was it {y}? Was it {not y}? Or perhaps {z}? ..." The reader learns nothing, but words are used up. (And that excerpt was significantly abbreviated, by the way.)

Bacigalupi's action sequences are also propelled by similarly vapid bits of commentary from the characters, as when they say things like "I jumped, she thinks. I jumped." (p. 200) As the book drags on, Bacigalupi seems to resort to writing in nothing but staccato sentence fragments. Clichés are also out in force, such as when he starts off a chapter with some non sequitur rambling, then breathlessly segues back to his story with, "This is what Kanya thinks as she rides her bicycle across the city." (p. 192) I found this writing hardly conscientious, and it made me wish that standards were higher in science fiction.

Another thing that grated on me was Bacigalupi's use of extraneous foreign words. Introducing foreign words can be fascinating when they embody unique concepts. I remember an engaging scene in a Hiroshima docudrama where President Truman and his advisors are trying to interpet the Japanese response to the Potsdam Declaration, and they have to call in an expert to translate the word 'mokusatsu' for them because it has no English equivalent, yet its precise meaning was crucial to determining whether Japan was going to surrender or continue the war--and so then whether the US should use the atomic bombs. That was intriguing. But in The Windup Girl foreign words seem to be used in only two ways. The first is for something that will only be mentioned once and that doesn't matter at all, such as the names of foods:

He misses Hainan chicken and 'laksa asam' and good sweet 'kopi' and 'roti canai.'
(p. 69)

The sentence seems intended as mere flavor text to remind the reader that this book takes place in Thailand. Yet this establishment is still going on by page 69, and far later, with throwaway references to 'jinjok lizards,' 'takram balls,' 'laab mu', and 'gaeng gai.'

The second way in which Bacigalupi uses foreign words is as stand-ins for perfectly equivalent English cognates. He maintains a corpus of about two dozen foreign words, and he either leaves the reader to figure them out, or he introduces them as risibly as this:

She has no appreciation for 'sanuk', for fun, even such intense fun, such 'sanuk mak' as successfully shaking down the Trade Ministry ...
(p. 49)

For myself, I don't see any crucial difference between the concepts of 'fun' and 'sanuk.' And yet from then on Bacigalupi insists on using only 'sanuk.' Perhaps because copping out to a foreign word relieves him of having to think of a synonym such as 'cheer,' 'amusement,' or 'mirth.' Combine this with Bacigalupi's reliance on repetition to make word count, and one ends up seeing sentences like this over and over:

Not like Kanya, dour Kanya, all 'jai yen' all the time. Not 'sanuk' at all, but certainly 'jai yen.'
(p. 84)

While the Thai words escaped me, Bacigalupi also uses some Chinese words, which I did understand, and so I knew exactly how silly he was being. For example he says 'yang guizi foreign devil,' as if oblivious to the fact that he's repeating himself on the level of, 'What's your soup du jour of the day?' And he uses 'Xiansheng' several times without explanation, despite the fact that all it means is 'Mister.' Yeah, you can see how much that loses in translation.

It is not hard to write a good book or at least a passable one, but it is far easier to litter it with repeated mistakes, which is how The Windup Girl felt for me. I wish I could read a tighter version of the story with the clunky and redundant writing removed. But I don't have much incentive to read another offering from Mr. Bacigalupi since his writing style has already proven sufficient to clinch the top two awards in science fiction, so there is little chance that he will see any need to alter it. This seems a telling referendum on the state of science fiction itself, and reminds me why I moved away from it to other genres.

Oh gods, Oh gods I tried. I am not known to give up on a lot of books. There are even some books I give up on and decide I'll likely come back to....sadly, Paolo Bacigulpi's THE WINDUP GIRL is not one of them.

Now I am clearly in the minority here as the book has won both the Nebula award and tied for first for the Hugo (and I am pretty sure that China Meiville's THE CITY & THE CITY is more worth the win), but oh my god I was bored and annoyed.

Firstly, if you approach this book from any kind of grounded, believable scientific/futurist standpoint you will only be frustrated. This is the story of a future world where the human race can't seem to re-engengineer power after the oil industry goes south, but genehacking fruits and veggies is easy-peasy....but has also produced oodles of accidental bio-engineered diseases that kind of run rampant. Wait, so you're telling me it's a BAD idea to tamper with the genetic makeup of foods but everyone does it anyway.....to the point that calorie is king and currency? Who knew the future scientific minds were so dopey. Please. If you try to tell me that the worlds scientists will revert to coiled springs for power in a plant that is run by dirty marketeers and giant bio-engineered elephants turn wheels, and algea growing tanks that have these screens that take the skim off the top, and then there's these giant wooden pins that...

...are you asleep yet?

Cause I sure was. I can't even harp on this book properly cause it's so boring.

Emiko, the windup girl (artificial sex doll human) of the title, who is abused and degraded by her patron and Bangkok society at large, is at least a BIT interesting, but she just kind of gets lost in amongst the other crap. I mean here we have a character that could be the very pinpoint story in this book. The one that has all the conflict and humanity-shuns-robot thing...and what do we do with her? We give her over to the main protagonist Anderson Lake....and she stagnates there. Anderson Lake is completely irredeemable and unlikable entirely. Hock Seng, his factory worker who deals with day to day stuff and the like is actually worse, and comes off as petty, spiteful and ridiculously annoying. The young character of Mai is too connected to Hock Seng to be of any interest, and then there are the ministries of Environment and Trade....*snnnnoooore....snkkrrfkkk...* Wha? Hello? What were we talking about?

So yeah, you know that crap you didn't like in the Star Wars prequels about the whole Trade Federation and political blockades? Yup, that's the kind of bollocks that is going on in this book too, and it's more boring here. Things like the mob boss that Hock Seng is in cahoots with, and the Muay Thai person, and the other assorted characters...all boring.

This is a story for people who like politics, and environmental law and maybe a little bit of philosophy. Wikipedia calls it Bio-punk....and I loathe that word. Don't invent a word to describe a sub-genre of sci-fi that only qualifies as sci-fi LOOSELY. Beyond that the prose is kind of all over the place. It's not bad perse, but rather its kind of "scatterbrained". Then there's the constant need to use Thai and Chinese and Malay words in italics...which is odd. Bacigulpi uses them in the first chapter, explains them, and then continues to use them in italics. It's as if he's saying "Hey look! I'm am so smart! I can rock this in another language" which bugs me anyways, as the book is in english and while talking about people "wai" (hands pressed together to forehead) is appropriate as it is a cultural thing (though no need for the constant italics dude, we get it), it's a lot of then other terms used that don't really need to be in Thai. I mean, you wrote the book in English dude....why give sporadic words or terms (non-cultural specific!) unless you are just showing off? Offputting to say the least.

You've also got one decidedly overly-graphic rape scene and one that we don't see but is described. My god. I'm sorry, but I don't sit down and enjoy reading about a girl (creche grown or not) being raped by a champagne bottle. Sorry, to me that IS NOT entertainment. That's the sort of sick crap we hear about in the news. Personally, I read books to escape and be entertained, not to be disturbed on various levels. How this guy won the HUGO and Nebula is kind of beyond me. It's almost as if Fantasy/Sci-Fi Awards have decided to start awarding the big prizes to genre writers who are attempting a masquerade as contemporary literary authors. Note to Bacigulpi: You can do social commentary without it being overtly offensive or obvious...ask Alastair Reynolds how to do it, cause that guy writes readable books.

To finish up. I made it about 3 quarters through and then skimmed to the end. I want to be nice, so I WILL say that buried somewhere in this giant needless volume is a story worth telling, and I think it is mainly Emiko's story (minus the graphic rape), but it never goes where it should go to be worthwhile and in the end she is totally WASTED. This could be social commentary on the use of her as an object ect. (Like BI66ER in the Matix:The Second Renaissance) and seeing her freak out, but it never has the cleverness of that and ends up being decidedly heavy-handed and offputting. I could give two craps about Anderson Lake, Hock Seng, Mai, Lord Dung, Algae, Springs, Megodonts, Giant wooden spikes, gene-altered fruits and therefore diseases, and I care even less for trade and environmental ministries and the inner workings of factory lines. Seriously there is a chapter that describes how the factory line all works...and then it is destroyed. So Mr. Bacigulpi...please explain to me the need to put us through the tedious explanation of the factory line and the algae tanks if you are only going to destroy it i the next scene?

Like I said, I am in the minority here as A LOT of people like this book, but I guess the story just wasn't my bag and it only served to bore me. Sorry folks, I didn't get into this one and I tried as I heard so many good things.

~Scott [...]

I was very excited to read this book and had heard wonderful things about it. It was a creative book but hard to get through. I listened to this on audio book which probably didn't help any; the audio book was very deliberately read making the story move even slower. I ended up stopping listening to this book about 2/3rds of the way through; it was just too tedious.

The story goes between four main characters. The first is a genetic scientist, a calorie man, named Anderson who is scouring the city to find its mysterious Seed Bank; he is masquerading as a plant owner. The second is Tan Hock Seng an aging Chinese Yellow Card who is trying to make a life for himself and gain back his former glory. The third is a wind up girl named Emiko who has been forced to work in a brothel after being sold to it by her Japanese master. The fourth is Jaidee, an officer of the Environmental Ministry and a revolutionist, who is determined to take back Thailand from the foreigners. In this depressing version of Thailand, a land where calories are the greatest commodity, these four characters will eventually influence not only each other but the fate of the whole country.

First I will say there are some good things about this book. The ideas present in the book are fabulous. The idea of calories being more important than anything after viruses have wiped out most vegetation is unique and compelling. The story is told with wonderful description; such that, as a reader, you can almost feel the heat and smell the smells of the city. Those were the things that kept me reading this book as long as I did.

Now for the rest of the things. The characters (if you can even say they have enough humanity to call them characters) are very dry, they apparently don't have many feelings and kind of just stumble through the story. There are no good characters in this book, they are despicable for different reasons. I did not enjoy a single one of them. Emiko was my favorite, but the passivity she showed at letting herself being constantly raped and tortured was a real turn off. Which I should mention there are multiple scenes where Emiko is explicitly raped and humiliated; again not my favorite thing to read about.

The pace is horribly slow. For example let's say Anderson is going to walk from point A to point B, can he do that? No, he must go on a 30 minute (remember I was listening to this) dissertation on his history, the history of other things possibly irrelevant to the story, etc etc. Then finally many mind-boggling minutes later, when you have finally forgotten what the heck was even going on, he will make it to his destination.

I also have a quibble about the writing style; it is very dry. At times this came across more as a biography of the characters than a story. It was tough to stay engaged with either the story or the characters. I am aware that all of these little random events were probably leading up to something fantastic or mind-boggling...unfortunately I ceased to care about any of it. This audio book seriously put me to sleep while I was driving, it was becoming a hazard to my health (and other drivers) so I had to stop listening to it.

Something written in this type of analytical style would have made an intriguing short story, but as a full-length book it was just too tedious to get through.

Overall I did not enjoy this. The characters were depressing, the pace excruciating, and the world demoralizing. I may read future short stories by Bacigalupi since I find his ideas intriguing, but I will not be picking up any more full-length books by him.

I really wanted to like this book. Broken nearish-future after environmental disaster, a world still struggling to adapt and survive and progress, mostly post-carbon tech, the beginnings of posthumans - sounds like interesting scifi! And I enjoyed the scifi elements. The way that life has adapted to climate change and ecosystem crisis across the world is great stuff. While some of the tech is cooler than it is practical, it all worked for me.

But.

This is a condensed version of the 2,000-word review I wrote elsewhere on the internet, because while I liked the scifi elements of The Windup Girl I disliked so much more.

First of all, here's a warning for Thai readers or anyone who knows the country very well: it's not a very good depiction. Even taking into account the differences in 200 years, it doesn't feel like Bangkok. As a farang, I was noticing the aesthetic wrongs. Women wearing pha sin (clothing that got phased out in the 20th C), piles of "reeking" durians down every alley (they only reek when they're cut open, which is only done individually at a customer's request). Dubious transliterations of Thai. The kind of foreign language use that makes anyone who knows the words involved laugh so very much ("water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-fin plaa", anyone?). Based on things like this, I suspect that any Thai reader is going to notice many, many more problems. Granted, some details are really nice (lizard-noises! night-time street stalls! garland sellers and the fact that orchids and marigolds are re-engineered ahead of many other flowers! ghosts!) but, overall, it's like Bacigalupi took the place names Ploenchit, Sukhumvit, etc and applied them to some other city, and it bugged me throughout the book.

There's also a Chinese character who thinks of white people as "foreign devils" non-stop, which felt bizarre and veering into stereotype, and the only time Muslims are mentioned is in the context of a fundamentalist Muslim uprising in Malay. It is, apparently, impossible for current SF writers to imagine a future in which many Muslims are not fundamentalists.

Most egregious of all, to me, is Bacigalupi's handling of the titular character Emiko.

Emiko is one of a Japanese servant class of augmented humans who was abandoned in Bangkok and has been forced into prostitution. With her the focus is so much on how victimised she is, how terrible her life is, how her altered genes make her suffer (her pores are small to make smooth skin so she can't sweat/cool properly and overheats in Thai heat; her genes are doglike and make her subservient and she falls under this sway often). Almost all of her personality and thoughts rotate around this. There are one or two moments when you get a sense of Emiko-the-person not Emiko-the-victim, but they're fleeting. And then.

When she finally snaps and kills a roomful of men who just raped her with a champagne bottle, among other things, we're not actually shown this scene, only its after-effects. The narrative spends more time lovingly detailing the aforementioned rape (plus an earlier over-detailed rape) than showing the survivor of rape surviving, and this is all upside-down and wrong and gross.

This book had far, far too many problems for me to enjoy it, as much as I really wanted to.

I did love the ghosts though.

This book has won the Nebula, plus some other awards. May win more. The world depicted is certainly dystopian. Some of the ideas he explores and extrapolates from- say the 'Calorie Wars" - are great speculation, doing what good Sci-Fi has always done - hold up a mirror and ask, "Is THIS the future?"

BUT. BUT. The plot arc is dismal. The writing is not that good, and the characters are all abandoned - all except his Windup Girl. The sexual acts described seemed needlessly brutal for his story, not to mention sexist, fifteen year old male nonsense. This book is probably a comic book that escaped and ended up in print. He may become wildly popular. I doubt I will buy, or read, this author again.

I tried to enjoy this book. After picking up the publisher's weekly review at my job, I thought for once I would read a unique sci-fi book in the midst of a sea of copycats and standardized storytelling. It was unique....a unique slog to get through. At times I dreaded opening the book, not for fear/excitement/etc of what would happen to the characters, but how much time would pass as I tried to advance upon the impenetrable prose. I found the writing to be stilted and uneven, as if I was climbing a mountain and upon reaching the summit, realizing the the clouds obscured an even steeper slope to the top. The author would almost certainly disagree with me but the novel falls flat; the book's idea had promised but it feels like the author rushed the final product without reviewing what went on the pages.