Book: The windup girl

[liv]

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

Details: (c) 2009 Paolo Bacigalupi; Pub Night Shade Books 2010; ISBN 978-1-59780-158-4

Verdict: The windup girl is enjoyable, Zeitgeisty SF with enough readability to make up for its flaws.

Reasons for reading it: People are talking about it a lot and it seems to be a major player in contemporary SF.

How it came into my hands: I went to Baen looking for something else, and there it was, with Baen's usual system of DRM-free and sensible prices, so I pounced on it.

It's easy to see why The windup girl is generating so much buzz. It really hits a lot of the talking points in the SF scene at the moment, and it's also pacy and readable. Tick: it is set in the near future of somewhere that isn't the US or England. Tick: it addresses lots of current anxieties about environmental disaster and rising sea-levels, unwanted consequences of genetic technology, excessive corporate and business influence on politics. Tick: it has a vaguely steampunky aesthetic, with airships and recreated mammoths and mechanical, wood and metal equivalents of stuff that in our world is plastic and electronic. It's doing all these highly commercial and contemporary things reasonably well, not outstandingly amazing IMO, but certainly more than competent from a technical perspective.

It's a funny thing to say, but I think the book would have been a lot better without the eponymous windup girl. Without her we have an interesting and original story about the conflict between the Trade and Environment ministeries, characters with divided loyalties double and triple-crossing eachother, we have Westerners who don't really understand the issues but who want Thailand to open up its markets. We have threats of natural disaster in the form of pandemics and flooding, which don't necessarily respect political deals, and we have an ordinary, apolitical guy, Hock Seng, trying to get by in a very hostile world. This set-up allows for some interesting world-building, and it's an exciting, complex, multi-threaded story. I can't really see what the Emiko arc adds to this; she's not very much developed as a character, and the whole thing with an android who wants to be free is a bit of a cliché by now. My main complaint is that the version of this rather tired story in The windup girl relies far too heavily on detailed descriptions of rape and sexual humiliation. This sort of detail comes across as merely voyeuristic, it's not successful in making Emiko sympathetic or adding dramatic tension, it's just creepy and unpleasant.

My other complaint is that the biology is atrocious. I mean, I wasn't expecting complete scientific accuracy, but for a book where genetic technology is so central to the plot and the setting, it would help if the author actually had a clue what a gene is, and the recurrent theme about converting calories to joules really made me twitch. It is annoying that a male-authored book which is so full of really basic errors gets so much recognition and praise as "hard" SF, while something like Bujold's Vorkosigan series is dismissed as "just" space opera even though the scientific underpinnings are actually much better. I was generally able to suspend my disbelief and just enjoy the story; it's the general atmosphere that I'm annoyed about, not this specific book.

I have absolutely no way to judge whether the portrayal of Thai culture is accurate or exoticized. Personally, as a reader, I am only too happy to have books where the future has a bit more variety than just urban America with whizz-bang gadgets, but it's certainly possible for this kind of thing to be offensive, appropriative or even racist. As an ignorant western reader, I certainly enjoyed the little details of the background culture (and don't really mind whether they're imaginatively made up by Bacigalupi, or based on actual Thai culture.) The role of reincarnation and ghosts make the story particularly interesting and rich. I also enjoyed the cultural differences and sometimes misunderstandings between Thai, Japanese, Chinese and American characters.

Generally I am not inclined towards stories where too much science and technology leads to the apocalypse, but I can definitely see why such stories have traction at the moment. And The windup girl succeeds in presenting some moral complexity and nuance beyond just "agribusiness BAD". I particularly liked the development of the Trade / Environment situation, because it's not about good versus evil, it's about corruption versus zealotry, which is much more interesting. Overall I enjoyed the book in spite of its flaws, and in spite of rather a lot of graphic violence for my taste.

Comments

[rysmiel]

If I'm recalling correctly, (this is what I get for not having written up a books-read post more recently than May) this is one of the recentish titles that got thrown across the room for me because it has to flat-out lie about non-conventional energy sources to generate its (uncomfortably gleeful) doom and gloom; there's a difference between being pessimistic about the prospects of some forms of energy generation and arbitrarily erasing the real-world state of the art on such.

[liv]

Yeah, I can see that would annoy you as much as some other off things annoyed me! I went into the book prepared to accept its premise that there was a real problem growing enough food to sustain the world population. That seems a reasonable starting point for a post-apocalyptic story, and I didn't really pay much attention to how the "Contraction" was supposed to have worked.

I did think it was a bit Michael Crichton school SF, it's not about how cool science is, it's about how scientists are too arrogant and try to meddle with things they shouldn't and this leads to everybody getting devoured by monsters. Not my preferred approach, really, but I'm not completely against technophobic SF if it's otherwise well written.

[crystalpyramid]

How is hard SF defined? It seemed very much along my definition of "soft SF", obsessed with social stuff and biology stuff, but maybe I'm conflating hardness of SF with hardness of the sciences.

[jack]

I always think of "hard" science fiction as having some combination of "the books is ABOUT the science", "the science is consistent", and "the science is realistic". Which often go together, but not always. I think hard science fiction is more likely to be about hard sciences, but not necessarily.

Edit: But I don't know about Wind-up Girl specifically.

[forestofglory]

http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=Hard_science_fiction

[liv]

That's a really useful definition, thank you for the link!

[purplecthulhu]

I read this a while back and also had issues with the science, though mostly the thermodynamics not the biology. The idea that you can get energy out of food more effectively by feeding it to giant elephants rather than, say, burning it is just so wrong. The elephant uses way more of that food in being an elephant and in pooping out residue that it just doesn't work. They weren't even burning the droppings afterwards!

And I know a lot of people didn't like the springs.

I think the book might be better considered to be a kind of steampunk (elephantpunk?) rather than hard or soft SF.

[coalescent]

I object to filing it with steampunk, but there's clearly nothing hard about the s in this particular f. I read the tech almost as satiric, stripping out all the intermediate steps that energy goes through in our society and just making it really obvious that it ultimately comes down to having enough to eat.

[liv]

Yeah, that's what I meant about the converting calories to joules thing, it's not just an error of vocabulary, it's a really fundamental understanding of what energy is! I would have been prepared to accept to some extent that it's worth some inefficiency in energy to get in a convenient portable form for powering your machines (after all, burning coal to generate electricity and then distributing it via high tension cables is hardly efficient!), but the way it's described just makes no sense. I think they were burning the droppings, but even so, that doesn't really excuse the whole set up.

I've seen the book referred to as "biopunk" but I hate the idea of biology being even tangentially associated with such anti-scientific nonsense. I suppose treating it as a kind of 'punk makes me feel more charitable towards it than hearing all the buzz about what innovative hard SF it's supposed to be!

[coalescent]

Regarding cultural authenticity or lack thereof, I've seen a few broadly positive reactions from Thai/Malaysian readers, and a few emphatically negative ones.

I think the point of Emiko is that she's not so much rebelling as adapting - I think it's strongly hinted at the end of this novel that she's better suited to this world than pretty much any of the other characters, and is in some sense the future of a humanity that has always used technology to adapt itself to its environment. I can't blame anyone for feeling that the sexual scenes cross a line. I don't think they're excessive in number or duration (there are only two, both fairly short, and both with direct plot relevance), but they're really brutally explicit.