“The Windup Girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi – Rise of Decadence

There are many ways to go about imagining the post-apocalyptic scenario, and most people tend to see it as a relatively desolate wasteland.

However, there are authors out there who envision the fall of man to be something more gradual, eventually spiralling out of control into increasingly vile decadence, giving rise to violence, hatred, social class divisions, diseases, and ultimately, extermination. Paolo Bacigalupi takes us to such a universe in his acclaimed novel The Windup Girl.

In the world Bacigalupi has meticulously crafted, we are in the near future, one where calories have become the main currency while the world is being ravaged by the bio-engineered plagues that run rampant on Earth, created for the profit of the elite. A world in a state of continuous falling, one where the division between the rich and the poor is an ever-growing schism reaching sickening proportions.

In this world, we are introduced to two characters, the first one being Anderson Lake, a man sent to Bangkok in order to be an undercover factory manager while searching the streets for foods believed to no longer exist.

The second character is the titular Windup Girl, Emiko. She was engineered and programmed to satisfy every decadent desire of a Tokyo businessman, but has now found herself abandoned on the streets of Bangkok, clueless, without any direction to go or idea of what to do, with some regarding her as a being without a soul, while others see her as the devil himself.

The first thing that springs to the eyes when reading this novel is just how much effort went into meticulously building the world and all the details we're showered with. In this post-oil world, where most of the technology that depended on that resource dwindled away with it, the people make do with kinetic human and animal labour, which can be used to power machines and even computers.

We also get to be rather well-acquainted with the calorie companies who have the rights and means to plant large crops... that are sterile, forcing everyone to keep buying from them. As you can imagine, evil conspiracies just come with the territory here.

This dystopia is very different from the wasteland apocalypses or technology and gadget-ridden futures, having an entirely unique system of its own. The two short stories included in this version of the book, “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man” only serve to add more and more details to a fantastic world that deserves to be explored over and over.

In any case, moving on to the story, we are presented with a multitude of viewpoints to follow, with there being two additional characters to the protagonists mentioned above.

There are a number of different conflicts taking place between giant corporations as well as between regular people, all of them developing from a number of different angles and touching upon morality, economy, philosophy, and so on.

Many heftier topics are dealt with in this book, including racism and nationalism taken more to the extremes than we are used to. Bacigalupi develops all the threads into a story that flows smoothly and takes us to the kind of denouement you won't soon forget.

All in all, The Windup Girl is a highly original, carefully constructed and engaging science-fiction novel that certainly holds its head high above the rest of the pack; anyone looking for a different and remarkable experience with dystopian novels will most certainly have a blast with this book.

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Paolo Bacigalupi Paolo Bacigalupi is an American author of science-fiction and fantasy stories, and is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, Compton Crook and Michael L. Printz awards. His debut novel, The Windup Girl, is what earned him three of those.