The Windup Girl

361 pages

English language

Published Nov. 6, 2010 by Night Shade Books.

ISBN:
978-1-59780-158-4
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
506251750

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4 stars (176 reviews)

What Happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits? And what happens when said bio-terrorism forces humanity to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of "The Calorie Man"( Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and "Yellow Card Man" (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these questions.

14 editions

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

the good plot and writing puts it up into the upper percentile of genre fiction off the bat. I hope one day to know enough about Thai culture and history to see specifically what Bacigalupi got wrong about it here.

one piece of criticism that was sent my way (by someone who is probably reading this, and I do thank them for it) made the, I think the slightly yank-centric point, that it emphasised ethnic and religious tensions within Asia (between Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, Japanese and Chinese) and that this came at the expense of a focus on white supremacy (which is not to suggest that this is absent, every non-white character refers to white people as devils). I personally found the representation of periodic programs of ethnic cleansing to the work to be quite convincingly done and, alongside the treatment of opportunistic disease, convey a persuasive account of a …

Review of "The windup girl"

4 stars

In a dystopic world where cities have been/are being swallowed by the ocean, genetic modifications/viruses and the sort have killed billions in many countries and destroyed ecosystems and large corporations that provide disease resistant strains of food and tech wield far too much power, this book focuses on happenings in Thailand.

The world building is great---lots of ideas that I hadn't run into before, so it was certainly fresh. It also gets points from me for not being based in the west. I think reading the short story (the calorie man) and the novelette (the yellow card man) that came before this one would perhaps have given me a clearer idea of the world---this one sort of assumes one is familiar with it.

It does start a little slow (again, maybe it took me longer to understand the scene because I hadn't read the earlier texts) but it picked up …

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

The Windup Girl is an amazing book playing in a post apocalyptical Bangkok.
I've been to Bangkok dozens of times now and that helped me visualise the new setting a lot.

The book paints an interesting picture about what a world looks like when it is ruined by designer plagues that wiped out the world food supply, corrupt mega companies, fallen nations and of course: climate change.

The story follows main characters from different factions who are warring for power.
The cool thing is, that you as the reader root for a lot of the characters, even as you know that they are opposing each other.

Very cool read, highly recommended

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

A good SciFi/social satire story. The title windup girl is an android whose programming includes an automatic obedience but she slowly rebels against this and discovers her superpower while combating her physical and mental disabilities.
Set in a future Thailand, it hosts a wide range of characters and can be read as both summer entertainment as well as a critique of current politics and some philosophical issues.

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

In this incredible novel, Paolo Bacigalupi presents the reader with a disturbing yet compelling vision of the future. Energy is so tightly controlled that people get around by bicycles and rickshaws, burn black-market methane, power their computers like old-fashioned sewing machines and their scooters with wound-up springs, and yoke giant, lumbering, genetically engineered pachyderms to spindles in factories. GMOs have run amok, being exploited by their designers for maximum profit. Engineered famines, diseases, and invasive species serve as combatants in a proxy war between competing Monsanto-like calorie companies. And then there's the Windup Girl. She's like a pleasure model replicant, and totally illegal in Bangkok, but abandoned there by a Japanese businessman. A chance encounter with a calorie company man sets things in motion, slowly winding one of Bacigalupi's kink-springs until the climax, when it is allowed to unwind its pent-up Joules.

I really enjoyed this book. Bacigalupi conveys his …

Review of 'La chica mecánica' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

La puntuación va según el rango de Goodreads, lo que significa que está un poco por encima del "meh" para mí.

La verdad es que es un libro que se me ha ido haciendo eterno por momentos, porque no he sido capaz de sentir empatía con ningún personaje. Respecto a la historia, me ha recordado a Los Pilares de la Tierra por lo de ir lanzándole problemas a los personajes, pero en esta ocasión sin ningún sentido visible.

En fin, que no soy capaz de recomendarselo a nadie aunque me duela, porque El Cementerio de barcos si me dejó un buen sabor de boca, lástima que fuera para públicos totalmente distintos.

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This is not an easy book to review. It took me more than a month to finish. I am deducing one star from the rating because I didn't always enjoy reading it, and sometimes had a hard time keeping going. But despite the lack in entertainment value I still think this is a good book. Let me explain why you should read it.

The book is set in a steampunk future Bangkok. The world economy has collapsed under the weight of climate change that has raised sea levels so much that Bangkok can only survive through high sea walls. Fossil fuels are as good as gone from the world. And as if that wasn't enough, rampant genetic manipulations of Monsanto style corporations called the "calorie companies" have caused a widespread collapse of ecological systems all over the world. Several genetic plagues have decimated mankind as well as eradicated innumerable other …

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

The Windup Girl is a debut novel for Paolo Bacigalupi, an author that seems to take present day issues and explore them in a science fiction setting. The Windup Girl is set in 23rd-century Thailand, and explores ideas around genetically modified ‘genehacked’ foods. Anderson Lake works for AgriGen’s Calorie, one of the three mega-corporations that control the biotechnology field, and controlling food production. Emiko is a Windup Girl, a beautiful creature, not human but rather a genetically engineered being.

The Windup Girl is a very difficult novel to summarise, but I do not really care about the plot; I picked this up for the themes. I knew this was going to be a biopunk novel that explores ideas of genetically modified food and bioterrorism but I was surprised with everything this book covers. With a food shortage, ‘calories become currency’, giving corporations with bio-engineering backgrounds the tools for larger profits …

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I have adored everything else that PB has written, including the short stories on which this book is based. But I found this book too mish-mashy, with too many threads and plots and subplots that don't come together well, and there is an ugly thread of rape and sexual abuse in the middle that I found really hard to take. Ugh.

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

At first the atmosphere gripped me, but the more I read, the more I had to suspend my disbelief. The world was beautiful and colorfully written, but why would people rear such huge animals to wind springs with the calories they could instead have used directly? Why the need to transport energy stored in springs? Why not just transport an animal (ox, donkey, elephant) and make it convert calories to energy on the spot where it's needed? That and some other things that seemed illogical to me was what made me stop reading. I do very much enjoy some of Bacigalupi's other works, though.

Review of 'The Windup Girl' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Modern genre fiction, that is science fiction and fantasy from the post Cold War era, is certainly entertaining, but not challenging — a meal replacement pill as compared to Haute cuisine. The authoritarian communist threat is done, and the public generally views space exploration as passé. As scifi authors, Huxley and Orwell were born at just the right time to write about “big” ideas.

I said as much to Jason Snell in a Twitter conversation who answered my question, “What value genre fiction?” with the question, “What value fiction at all?” Jason recommended of Paolo Bacigalupi. His first novel The Windup Girl had a difficult task: besides telling an engaging story, Bacigalupi had to restore my faith in genre fiction. He did splendidly.

See the rest of this review: chadkohalyk.com/2013/04/14/future-classic/

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