The Windup Girl

So I finished Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl. I'm off to ski this minute, but I wanted to post a summary and a quick response. At the same time I am rereading Altered Carbon, which is also a cyborg novel. Both novels assume a future (a la Bruce Sterling) in which the current nastinesses of human states and corporations still applies, and in spades. States will use force multiplied by technology and a monopoly on violence; corporations will continue to wreak havoc on the world as they pursue narrowly defined goals of profit and power. But Windup Girl takes place on the ravaged earth in (I believe) the late 21st century, so it hits home harder for me. And while both books have good dystopian politics, I think novels like Altered Carbon assume a level of technological sustainability that (at least right now) I don't assume.

The television show/cult series Firefly starts off with:

Here's how it is...

Earth-that-was got used up.

We moved out -- terraformed and colonized hundreds of new earths; some, rich and flush with the new technologies; some, not so much.

The problem is - earth that was looks pretty horrible when all the easy energy is gone and the agricultural science has turned out to be heavy on colonialism and profits and light on biological responsibility. And of course terraforming and space travel turn out to need, um, energy. Oh there will be cyborgs all right, but the technophilic bits of so many otherwise dark and critical cyberpunk novels look a lot different in Windup Girl. And it matters that the novel takes place in Thailand and not in high rises and rich corporate digs (as happens a lot in Gibson, by the way). The notion that we have a network powered by an always on electrical power system is, uh, not exactly happening in a world where energy is scarce. Will this world be the one that emerges? I honestly don't know, but I do know that the people responsible for this coming world are sitting with and among us right now, preparing us for seed monopolies and genetic accidents (Monsanto, Astra-Zeneca), a hard landing after peak oil (thanks to all of us and to the corporate and state masters who set up our burn it all up system the way they did), and a world where war, to put it mildly, wasn't fixed (see all the Star Trek views of a happy pretty future Earth).

There is one powerful moment in Windup Girl; Anderson the calorie man is looking at a photo from long ago, when Thais and Americans had all the fruit in the world, genetically developed over eons of evolutionary time. In the background is an internal-combustion gas guzzling automobile. And he imagines dragging those faces to his time, where the results of their blindness and greed for energy are horrific. Right before he pushes them off his 5 floors up balcony. I tried to imagine the faces of the future looking back through a window at me, and couldn't do it. And yet the image stays and stays, like a memento mori.

Here is a brief take on the plot:

In The Windup Girl, we are plunged into a fraught and difficult world: energy collapse and environmental disasters have changed the shape of the planet, swamping its coastal cities and destroying our capacity to travel or move freight at high speeds. Add to this a series of genetic-engineering screwups that lay waste to the world's crops and trigger wave after wave of punishing plagues, and the rise of midwestern American genetic engineering cartels that control the world's supply of plague-resistant GM crops.

Anderson Lake is one such Calorie Man, working undercover in Thailand, a rogue state where generippers reverse-engineer the food cartels' sterile crops and combine them with carefully hoarded genetic material from the Thai seedbank. Anderson lives in Bangkok, undercover, running a factory nominally involved in the manufacture of experimental windup springs that can compactly and efficiently store the energy pushed into them by GM elephants. He is the hub around which many stories spin: that of Hock Seng, a former wealthy Malay Chinese who has fled an ethnic purge and now runs Anderson's factory; that of Jaidee, the Tiger of Bangkok, a hard-fighting, uncorruptable shock-trooper in the Thai environment ministry; and Emiko, a "new person" manufactured in a Japanese vat to be a perfect servile helper, abandoned by her owner to the brothels of Thailand, where she is cruelly mistreated.

The Windup Girl is a story about colonialism, independence, mysticism and ethics, sex and loyalty, and the opposing forces of greed and empathy.

http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/the-windup-girl-2010.html