The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi won both the Hugo and Nebula awards when it was published in 2009: a rare achievement for any author of science fiction, rarer still for a debut novel. So when I found it, dog-eared and languishing behind an old coffee grinder at the thrift store, I was surprised that I had never heard of it. Even though the aughts are thoroughly in the rearview mirror, it’s strange for an achievement like Bacigalupi’s to have had so little staying power. After all, most people with even a casual interest in fantasy and science fiction will have heard of Miéville’s The City & The City, which won the same awards in the same year. I became determined to see for myself what made up the gulf between these two novels, so I ponied up the requisite three bucks and dove in.

At its best, The Windup Girl is a masterful and hideous vision of a post-oil earth, and the lengths human beings will go to in order to survive it. The climate catastrophe that shaped Bacigalupi’s Thailand is generations in the past, having erased terrifying swaths of crops and livestock from existence long before living memory. On this earth arable land is worth killing for, and consequently Thailand has become the epicenter of a new kind of political struggle: the war for calories. Anderson, one of the book’s central characters and the first character we are introduced to, is a soldier in this conflict. An agent of one of the shadowy calorie companies based in his native America, he has been sent to scour Thailand for new crops: viable seeds revived from pre-catastrophe genetic material by Thai scientists. These seeds can then be stolen by Anderson, copyrighted, and made sterile. Thailand, and the world at large, are already dependent on many such products: SoyPRO, which produces only one crop of beans before necessitating the purchase of new seed. Several varieties of wheat, rice and corn that have been similarly neutered by the calorie companies make up an outsized percentage of the world’s daily food intake. It’s an ugly job. The kind of evil that favors board meetings over bullets, and Anderson is a model employee.

He purchases a ngaw from a street vendor, recognizable to the reader as a resurrected dragonfruit, and examines it cautiously for signs of blister rust: an engineered blight intended to curb the farming of illegal crops that has since made the jump to humans. He’s wise to do so. Deaths wrought by blister rust are swift, ugly and painful. There are many such plagues in this world, grim insurances designed by scientists on the calorie companies’ payroll to protect their bottom line, utterly indifferent to any human collateral. Finding the fruit clean, he eats and takes a rickshaw to his cover: overseeing a factory that manufactures the new fuel for the new world. This is where the story begins.

In terms of exposition, Bacigalupi can run with the big dogs. Everything that we know and understand about the world of The Windup Girl is gleaned through conversations, inferences, and context clues. He draws the reader forward, especially in the first half of the novel, with intrigue and curiosity about the world he’s created. Every page offers an opportunity to know more, to better understand the gears that turn Bacigalupi’s dark future, and it is immensely rewarding to read. By my estimation, it’s apparent from the first page why the novel was selected for its accolades. The world feels real, like a possibility rather than something that requires the suspension of your disbelief as the price of admission.

Unfortunately, as strong as this facet of his writing may be, by the second half of the book its weaknesses become more visible and more disturbing.

The book centers around five main characters. Anderson, the calorie man. Hock Seng, a former shipping magnate driven from his native China by a religious pogrom. Jaidee, a retired Muay Thai prizefighter working as the director of Thailand’s environment ministry (known colloquially as “the white shirts”). Kanya, Jaidee’s secretary, and later his successor. Lastly, there is Emiko: the titular Windup Girl. The characters orbit each other for most of the plot and therein lies the first disappointment of The Windup Girl. The threads of their stories form less of a braid and more of a loose tangle, with Jaidee and Kanya being the most isolated of the main characters. Kanya only meets Hock Seng once in the final few pages of the book, and then only to exchange a few sentences. Most of the characters bear little, if any observable influence on each other’s lives until the final act of the novel, where their plots implode into an orgiastic whirlwind of violence with barely any warning.  I say “barely” because while there are through lines relating to things like oppression, racism, and Sci-Fi’s oft-asked question of “what makes us human?”, these themes seem to start at a simmer and never quite make their way to a boil. The conclusion of the novel feels more like a surprise than an inevitability, and while that may be forgivable for a debut novel, it is less so for a Hugo and Nebula award winner.

However, by my estimation the gravest sin The Windup Girl commits is its handling of the titular character. Emiko is one of the “New People”, cyborgs that are half-grown, half-constructed from incredibly complex clockwork to be a servant class in the new world. They are secretaries, concubines and foot soldiers, engineered to be unfailingly obedient. Having been abandoned in Thailand several years ago by the Japanese executive she was created to serve, she is alone and vulnerable in a world that does not recognize or understand her humanity. She is feared for her newness, lusted after for her physical form (more on that later), and reviled for her visible differences all at once. She is set up from the moment of her introduction to be not only the main character, but the most interesting character in the story. Her existence already asks the most profound questions the book is likely to touch on: what makes us human? What defines cruelty when it’s directed at someone who has been stripped of their humanity, or when they were never recognized as human in the first place? Can a person transcend the circumstances of their birth? At times it feels like Bacigalupi is winding up (sorry) to ask these questions, but when the ball is over home plate he whiffs in spectacular fashion. As she is, Emiko is barely a Bond girl. A loosely defined woman who is there to be sexy and be rescued by other characters. When she has the opportunity to exercise some kind of agency over her situation, it is almost always through seduction and fawning and while this is explained through the plot device of her engineered obedience, it doesn’t make it feel any less gross. She defends herself exactly once, and while the violence she enacts is both staggering in its scale and well-deserved by its recipients, it occurs ¾ of the way through the novel at the end of a long line of injustices and assaults that Emiko endures without a word of protest. Oh yeah, that’s another thing: Emiko is assaulted multiple times over the course of this book, and while I believe that depiction of evil does not equate to endorsement of evil, it’s hard to make that case here. If Bacigalupi’s strength is in his exposition and descriptive language, he really pours on the steam at the darkest parts of Emiko’s story. At multiple points I was forced to put this book down due to how graphic and creative the descriptions of these acts became. It turned my stomach, and maybe I would have been able to make a case for these elements of the plot if they served a greater purpose in the development of her character, in serving as some kind of motivation behind the other events in the book, but as they are they feel more like the insertion of a fetish.

In conclusion, The Windup Girl is a disappointing read. Not because it’s bad per se, but because it’s sexist. Like, really sexist. Like the kind of sexist that would make a frat brother scratch the back of his head uncomfortably and mutter “Jesus” under his breath. If you find yourself in a thrift store and see its cover peeking out from behind a coffee grinder, your money would be better spent on the copy of Ender’s Game that’s sitting next to the toaster. Unrealized potential / 10