The Windup Girl
2009
- bioterrorism
- bioterrorisme
- fiction
- dystopian
- science fiction
- fiction, thrillers, general
- award:nebula_award=novel
- hugo award winner
- award:hugo_award=2010
- award:hugo_award=novel
The story
What Happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits? And what happens when said bio-terrorism forces humanity 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 questions.
What it’s like
Humid, sweat-slicked heat and the stink of rot pour off nearly every page, so the reader feels the tropics before anything else. The prose is dense and sensory, full of market smells, fermenting fruit, diesel exhaust, and the clatter of street life in a flooded, sea-warped Bangkok rendered in grimy, unsentimental detail. Its palette is sickly greens, rust, and the grey of failing machinery, with bursts of violent colour when the story turns sharp. The mood is a bleak, claustrophobic unease: a slow-burning dread that thickens as people scheme over seeds, food and survival. Pacing is deliberate and layered, with shifting viewpoints that let the world's politics and small private betrayals unfold at the same unhurried pace. Its people are morally compromised and lonely, moving through a long, slow reckoning with what they are and what they owe. Intensity is high: frequent graphic violence, some sexual content, and cruelty that lands hard and unflinching, with bodily horror and disease described plainly. This suits readers who want immersive, literary science fiction with weight and grit, not comfort, and who are ready for a grim, morally tangled story sitting in a close and sweltering world.
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