The Windup Girl | ||||||||
Paolo Bacigalupi | ||||||||
Narrated by Jonathan Davis, unabridged | ||||||||
Brilliance Audio, 19 hours, 33 minutes | ||||||||
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A review by Sarah Trowbridge
Within this scenario we have Anderson Lake, the undercover "calorie man" and Hock Seng, the "yellow card" Chinese
refugee, despised by the Thai people and relegated to poverty in a shantytown. Another player is Jaidee, a member
of the "white shirts," as the hated and feared enforcers of the Environmental Ministry are known. And of course,
Emiko, the "windup girl" -- a powerless and degraded sex slave designed and manufactured in Japan, abandoned by
her owner and trapped outside the law in Thailand.
What has happened some decades prior to the story is the collapse of the world's food supply, as a result of
corporate ownership of proprietary crops and the transformation of nature's bounty into tightly controlled
intellectual property. The food-owning conglomerates, or "calorie companies," have waged biological warfare in
the form of man-made viruses engineered to destroy targeted crops. This has led to widespread contamination of
grains and produce around the globe. New plagues such as "cibiscosis" and "fa' gan fringe" have decimated populations
and continue to cut people down -- especially those poor enough or desperate enough to consume foods contaminated
with human-engineered diseases like the deadly blister rust. The only foods that are safe to eat are the engineered,
trademarked, and mostly flavorless calorie company products like U-Tex rice and SoyPRO. Not coincidentally,
every one of these proprietary foods is sterile: safe for consumption, but useless for propagation of more
food for a hungry planet. If you want more to eat, you have to buy it from a calorie company.
For further evidence of the general global breakdown that went before, it is clear that The Windup Girl
is set in a post-oil world. Our present era is known as "the Expansion," while the years following the collapse
are referred to as "the Contraction." Petroleum as a fuel or as raw material for manufacturing is practically
nowhere apparently. Power is generated by the release of massive springs that have been wound by the physical
efforts of both humans and of teams of massive, elephantine creatures called megodonts, which have been created
through engineered mutation, or "generipping." Generippers, it seems, are responsible not only for worldwide
plagues and sterile, tasteless foodstuffs, but also for new lifeforms that walk among us. In addition to the
hardworking and useful megodonts, generipping has brought us the deceptively whimsical cheshires: ravenous house
cats modified with the ability to disappear, that managed to wipe out and supersede the worldwide cat population
in little more than a generation. And then there are the New People: artificially engineered, purpose-built
humanoids who are in some ways not quite human, and in others, superhuman. They are also known as "windups."
And so we come to the book's eponymous character. Supernaturally beautiful, with skin as smooth as mango, Emiko
has been engineered to obey. A manufactured creation, she is completely submissive to the commands of others,
in keeping with her technical specifications. As such, she comes across as the epitome of the clichéd SF fanboy's
wet dream. The windup girl is debased, humiliated, exploited... and clearly designed to titillate. And even
though Emiko gets her La Femme Nikita moment (which, come to think of it, is probably just another facet
of the exploitation fantasy), the scenes of rape and degradation that precede it are depicted with a level
of detail and attention that could almost be called "loving," and which can't be accidental.
The Windup Girl is fully loaded with the complexities of its setting and the criss-crossing objectives
of its many characters. However, the development of the individual characters and the through line of the plot
are not sufficiently robust to sustain the story's weight. The novel roams and rambles, wallowing among its many
components and switching from viewpoint to viewpoint, and does not really begin to cohere until about two-thirds
of the way in. The final third is significantly more interesting and well-paced than what preceded it, but the
wait will simply prove too long for some listeners. Jonathan Davis is a competent enough reader, but his voice
interpretations for most of the Asian characters are variations on a lisping whisper that unfortunately
smacks strongly of old Hollywood stereotypes, and does nothing to improve the appeal of the story or its characters.
Sarah Trowbridge reads (and listens) compulsively, chronically, and eclectically. She is a public librarian in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. |
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