The Windup Girl

I’m just finishing up a “biopunk” dystopian bit of scifi, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. I’ve been meaning to get around to reading it for several years now under the false premise that I believed it to be something more steampunk in flavor. I keep thinking that steampunk as a subgenre really holds a lot of promise, but I must keep finding the clinkers to read, or that thinking is flawed in some way. I’ve never found a steampunk novel that has actually held up to that promise, which makes me slightly sad.

My misunderstanding was probably a self-inflicted wound, based largely on the name of the novel. I think “windup”, I think “clockwork” and when I think “clockwork”, I think “steampunk”. I was quickly corrected as to the subgenre within the first few paragraphs of reading. This is a near-future society, with warfare based on DNA and generipping, with foodstuff as a weapon having forced a societal collapse — mutations (intended and unintended) have brought many countries to their knees just to have disease- and mutation-resistant crops and animals as foodstuff. Adding to the problems, from my understanding there is also a pollution, global warming and fuels-shortage problem going on — so nearly everything requires caloric expenditure to run instead of electricity, hydrocarbons or alternative energy sources (I assume solar is inefficient due to pollution). Hence, energy is often stored in “springs” which are wound via physical labor. Springpunk? Perhaps. “Biopunk” seems to be the label most folks have applied.

Sound complicated? Yes and no. You don’t need to necessarily understand how these obstacles have been nominally overcome to get the idea that things aren’t the way they used to be back in 2020s. I can see potential threads to pick apart for logic, but I can suspend my disbelief for this tale — it follows the golden rule of being internally logically consistent, even if it might not be entirely consistent with what seems logical by out-of-story standards. And, importantly for me, it doesn’t have God lending a hand at every little difficulty (unlike the book I recently abandoned for that reason).

I have about forty pages left to read and I think I see where things are heading, but I’ve been surprised at the direction the story has taken at times. I can recommend it to folks looking for “something different”. It isn’t so outré of a story as to make you shake your head trying to wrap your head around some of the strange and sometimes horrifying details (like China Miéville novels can sometimes leave me feeling), but it is offbeat enough to say: well, you don’t read something like that everyday.

In case you were wondering about the title… The windup girl does play a role as an actual character in the tale. She is a genetically modified New Human intended to be willing servant for Japanese powerbrokers, with extreme training, dog-based DNA to enhance faithfulness and a desire to please, as well DNA modifications for beauty and esthetics in how they move (which is robotic). They are less than second-class citizens and are treated as slaves and sexual companions. The world has decided that they “have no soul”, which is a familiar refrain to excuse not allowing them sentience and full-human status (although they are mostly human in their DNA). The windup in the book is a bit of a plot catalyst. Beyond that, I won’t spoil it for those of you who may be interested in reading the novel.

This book has been a nice change of pace. I like it enough that I would be willing to read more by the author, but I’m not rushing out to make one of his books my next read. But the story did inspire me to try and look beyond the traditional milieu’s out there for a story to take place (post-collapse Thailand) and it makes me reconsider some of my ideas for how to approach my narratively-framed series of short stories that I haven’t gotten around to writing yet.

I think I’m going to eschew a scoring system when I mention what I am reading. I’m not sure a 1-10 or 1-5 stars scale is all that representative of most books when you get down to it. How about: “I quite liked what I read, but not to the point of raving about it,” for a score?