The Windup Girl Audible – Unabridged

The Windup Girl Audible – Unabridged ridged
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi ID: B002P9T7ZI

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen’s Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok’s street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history’s lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko…Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism’s genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of The Calorie Man (Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and Yellow Card Man (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these poignant questions.BONUS AUDIO: In an exclusive introduction, author Paolo Bacigalupi explains how a horrible trip to Thailand led to the idea for The Windup Girl.
Done.
Audible Audio EditionListening Length: 19 hours and 34 minutesProgram Type: AudiobookVersion: UnabridgedPublisher: Audible StudiosAudible.com Release Date: September 15, 2009Whispersync for Voice: ReadyLanguage: EnglishID: B002P9T7ZI Best Sellers Rank: #9 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Anthologies #14 in Books > Audible Audiobooks > Science Fiction > High Tech #58 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Hard Science Fiction
Thai generip terror.

It Bacigalupi ever writes anything that is sweetness and light, that right there would be likely proof of the Many Worlds Theory and the fact that you had slipped into an alternate universe.

The setting is Bangkok, or, colloquially, Krung Thep. It is also a near future dystopia. The city now houses many displaced Chinese refugees from a Malaysia turned fundamentalist muslim fanatics. (See his story Yellow Card Man for background) Bangkok itself is only kept from drowning by engineering and technology.

This is a post-oil world, with very little petroleum technology available, remaining. No evidence of solar tech, either, really. Power is provided by human labor and genetically engineered highly efficient animals pourding kinetic energy into springs, which then can be used to power machines. Treadle computers, even. Countries have shrunk in upon themselves as a result, but are beginning to look outward again, with ships, and dirigibles. This makes this setting rather unlike the mass-media or AI ridden future India and Brasil etc. of Ian McDonald’s devising.

Particularly nasty are the ‘calorie companies’ – organisations that have the ability to manufacture crops in large supply: but their crops are sterile, so you always need to go back for more. That is if bugs and plagues ‘weevils’ and ‘blister rust’ do not get them. Much dirty, violent dealing in support of this activity (see his story The Calorie Man) and there are mentions of it going horribly wrong in other countries. One of the questions this raises is how they manage to stay around – why, with such hatred of them, are the calorie men and women not mercilessly hunted and slaughtered. The only intimations you get of this are economic power, based in the USA.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut novel The Windup Girl is a frightening, realistic and brilliant look at the near future of the world. Taking place in Thailand at some point in the future, Bacigalupi paints a picture of a world that is caught between several major problems: climate change has affected the lives of many people around the world, and in turn, has brought a rise in global agricultural corporations, and global energy resources have been depleted, forcing major changes in the way people live their lives, and how a world-wide economy functions with different resources. Corporations have run amok with trying to maintain their profit margins, and released a number of plagues upon the world that devastated the planet’s ecology upon which we all depend, and because of their actions, remain just a single step ahead of the latest mutation of blister rust and other assorted plagues. Thailand is a country that has thus far weathered the storm – the Royal government has maintained a fierce isolationist policy to keep the country from succumbing. As a result, Thailand has a precious resource that western companies desperately want: a genebank, containing thousands of new strains of crops that could be utilized to combat the ongoing struggle against plagues and hunger world-wide.

The story follows several discrete storylines and characters, each with their own motivations and demons. Anderson is a `calorie man’, a westerner who ostensibly manages a factory that manufactures kink-springs, a renewable power source. Jaidee is a member of the Environmental Ministry, tasked with maintaining a barrier between Thailand and the rest of the world and the dangers that it poses.
Paolo Bacigalupi was an unfamiliar name to me, but this novel received frothing praise and an unusually good cover, so I gifted it to my dad knowing I’d eventually get a crack at reading it (books are good like that).

This is a debut novel, and a quick glance at Bacigalupi’s previous work reveals a volume of short stories that includes titles like Pump Six, Yellow Card Man and The Calorie Man. He has been crafting this world for a while now, the culmination of which is The Windup Girl. It’s a cynical but splendidly imagined projection of the near future: fossil fuels are rare and exorbitantly expensive; global warming has raised sea level and weather patterns are volatile; misadventures in bioengineering have ravaged the world with plagues of viruses, bacteria, fungus and insects; corporate interests gain power as regional governments succumb to revolt.

This apocalyptic Thailand is plausible but miserable. You will not gasp at the majesty of steampunk invention here – you will likely gag. Windup’s Bangkok is full of feral cats, religious and political fanatics, refugees and opportunistic businessmen. The resident crime boss is named the Dung Lord, and he vies for power along with Trade Minister Akkarat and General Pracha, the victor of a military junta at the narrative’s outset. The cast of characters are all hard-bitten, all nursing personal grievances, all hopelessly driven to do what they end up doing. Anderson Lake (a great name for this anti-hero, but they’re all good) is an American agribusinessman sent to Thailand with the objective of gaining access to the Kingdom’s jealously-guarded seed stock. While pursuing this goal, he becomes entangled with Emiko, the genetically-engineered courtesan of the novel’s title.
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