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Wednesday, December 28, 2011


The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl is inventive “Calorie-punk” sci-fi set in futuristic Bangkok a few hundred years after the “contraction” that came about in global trade as a result of us running out of hydrocarbons, and a series of corporate germ-warfare based around genetically modified foods. Edgy, fascinating world that lushly envelops a story that gets tripped up by its own plotting on occasion.

The language is solid, the characters are generally interesting, though only the Yellow Card and the Windup Girl stand out as memorable. The plot gets tangled in a study of regime change politics in Thailand, which is interesting, but can’t help as feel a little bit beside the point.
Still, this is certainly the best sci-fi I’ve read in a decade or more.

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