Pop Goes the World

TITLE: The Windup Girl
AUTHOR: Paolo Bacigalupi
PUBLISHER: Night Shade Books

RATING
5/5 "Led Zeppelin"; 4/5 "99 Luftballons"; 3/5 "Balloon boy"; 2/5 "The Hindenburg"; 1/5 "Lead Zeppelin"
SCORE 3/5

Dirigibles. I knew we were in trouble as soon as the story introduced dirigibles. They’ve become a sort of billboard for an entire class of bloated speculative fiction, an all-too literal metaphor for lardy, lumbering stories flogging thinly-veiled allegories of modern ills—Goodyear blimps for the beard-and-ponytail set. My advice to authors is, you see a zeppelin lumbering into the airspace over one of your stories, show no mercy—shoot that bastard down. Kill your darlings, as Faulkner said. You’ll be glad you did.

Mr Bacigalupi’s novel has rightly won praise and awards for its original blend of futurism and steampunk, a kind of retro-future that preys on modern fears, but the whole structure is a bit like a dirigible itself—the impressive-looking frame most just holds a tub of gas.

“The Windup Girl” is set in Thailand, in a near-future where pretty much every bad thing you’re worried about happening, happened. It’s a kind of scrapbook of apocalyptic newspaper headlines. Oil and gas have run out, leaving civilization dependent on muscle power and a bit of coal (peak oil fears, check!). Airplanes and cars have gone the way of dinosaurs and mammoths, which is ironic, since thanks to genetic engineering, mammoths (“megadonts”, sorry) are back in fashion as a source of muscle. Oh yeah, zeppelins are back in too. Sigh.

Speaking of genetic engineering, geneticists at a “calorie companies”, a bunch of evil corporations located in Des Moines for some strange reason, have deliberately created super-parasites and crop blights, to wipe out the world’s food sources and make everyone dependent on their genetically-modified (GM) products (GM food fears, check! Large, faceless company fears, check! Fears of Midwestern states, che—wait, what?!).

Genetic engineering ain’t all bad though, since it’s allowed the Japanese to neatly solve their problem of a declining population without having to rely on any foul-smelling foreigners. They’ve created “windups”, tailor-made test-tube people, smarter, faster and stronger than ordinary folk, but with deliberate built-in weaknesses to stop them taking over the planet, such as the stuttering motion that gives them their nickname.

Emiko is the “Windup Girl” of the title, bred to be a businessman’s ideal personal secretary—sexy, multilingual, obedient, and when you’re done with her, pop her in the recycling bin. Her last boss didn’t want to keep her but didn’t have the stomach to mulch her, so she has been abandoned in Bangkok, forced to work in a nightclub where she is continually humiliated as subhuman.

There she meets Anderson Lake, whose name sounds like it should be the title of an accounting firm, ostensibly the owner of a factory manufacturing coiled springs, but actually an agent of the “calorie companies”, searching for Thailand’s secret source of new foodstuffs. His mission is complicated by his scheming factory foreman, Hock Seng, an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia who barely escaped an Islamic-inspired pogrom against his people (Fears of fundamental Islam, check!).

Mr Bacigalupi’s Thailand is filled with bowing and corruption, ladyboys and royalist-popularist tensions, a weird mish-mash that feels cribbed from the introduction to a Lonely Planet guide and the “Asia” section of the Economist magazine. This is symptomatic of the wider problem with the book—once you get past some rather neat ideas that went into building this world, there’s not much to keep you there.

The setting is relentlessly grim, and other than Emiko none of the characters is even remotely sympathetic. I enjoyed the book, I’ll admit, but I don’t think I smiled once the whole time I was reading it. It feels downbeat and didactic, more like a Greenpeace manifesto than a work of fiction. I wonder if Mr Bacigalupi isn’t preaching to the converted here, though. I imagine plenty of speculative fiction readers are already composting and bicycling to work and eating locally-grown organic vegetables, or at least wish they did.

The plot, too, feels as thin as a zeppelin’s skin, with events floating from point to point without any particular thrust or trajectory. The climax in particular feels just plain false, involving a sudden and near-psychotic change of heart on the part of one character, while the epilogue’s note of hope jars against the crushing despair of the rest of the book.

In short, I feel Mr Bacigalupi’s imagination and talent for twisting modern fears into future fables is not matched by his skills as a storyteller. I’ve already noted the lack of humor, or even humanity in his characters. At times, he slides into cliché—just once, I’d like to read about a band of evil misfits and rebels brought to heal by a benevolent faceless corporation, just for the hell of it. I’d read that.

Just so long as you promise not to put any dirigibles in it.