The Windup Girl - Paulo Bacigalupi

[bookgazing]

Paulo Bacigalupi doesn’t allow his characters much joy in his debut novel, 'The Windup Girl'. None of the men, women or technological creations that populate his dystopian version of Thailand enjoy any sense of stability and any advantage they may benefit from is quickly lost. ‘The Windup Girl’ may sound like a bleak vision of the future and it is for the characters who live in it, but Bacigalupi’s world is a gothic treat for readers, as he has created an intoxicating dystopian environment where the fresh shoots of growth contrast with the ruinous magnificence of decay to produce a world of deconstructed beauty.

Anderson Lake, is a calorie man sent to find out how Thailand continues to support its population. ‘The Windup Girl’ is situated in a time when scientists attempts to genetically modify food has resulted in a world where plagues of insects and diseases make much food inedible. Most of the safe food is created by Midwest scientific powers, which control the supplies of food to other countries. Thailand continues to produce its own food, which limits the power of the Midwest suppliers and offers them the chance to steal new plant species from Thailand. Anderson suspects a Midwest scientist called Gibson has defected to Thailand and has come to get his employers access to the seed banks Gibson has created.

As Anderson lives in a world where excessive genetic modification has killed off naturally grown food, ‘The Windup Girl’ follows the pattern of many dystopian novels, by characterising the use of technology as bad and worships nature as good. The entire premise of the novel is that excessive use of technology has impoverished human society and there are many passages where characters think about the natural plant life that has been lost with an angry kind of nostalgia, for example Anderson thinks:

‘He can usually ignore the foolish confidence of the past-the waste, the arrogance, the absurd wealth-but this one irritates him: the fat flesh hanging off the farang, the astonishing abundance of calories that are so obviously secondary to the color, and attractiveness of a market that has thirty varieties of fruit: mangosteens, pineapples, coconuts, certainly…but there are no oranges now. None of these…these…dragonfruits, none of these pomelos, none of these yellow things…lemons. None of them. So many of these things are simple gone.’.

Most significantly the bo tree, which is prized as Buddhist’s as a religious symbol, has become extinct and the dead trees that lie around Bangkok force all the characters to reflect on what they have lost despite the technological advances they have made. When Anderson encounters a new fruit called ngaw, in the markets of Bangkok he thinks about his discovery in a reverential way, showing that new, edible plant life is the highest prize in this new world:

‘Sun pours down. Shoppers jostle and bargain, but nothing touches him. He rolls the ngaw around in his mouth, eyes closed, tasting the past, savouring the time when this fruit must have flourished, before cibiscosis and Nippon genehack weevil and blister rust and scabis mould razed the landscape.

Under the hammer heat of the tropic sun, surrounded by the groan of water buffalo and the cry of dying chickens, he is one with paradise. If he were a Grahamite, he would fall to his knees and give ecstatic thanks for the flavour of Eden’s return.

Anderson spits the black pit into his hand, smiling. He has read travelogues of history’s botanists and explorers, the men and women who pierced the deepest jungle wilderness of the earth in search of new species – and yet their discoveries cannot compare to this single fruit.

Those people all sought discoveries. He has found resurrection.’ .

Except, the ngaw has been engineered just like all the food in Anderson’s world. The new growth that he sees around him is created by the same technology that mutated and killed many of humanity’s original food sources. The only differences between the technology that grows the ngaw and the flawed technology that came before it is that technological knowledge has evolved and the people who use the technology, like Gibson, are more skilled. It is not the technology itself that Bacigalupi criticises, as a threat to nature. He shows that he finds people who shun technology unreasonable, by including a radical sect called the Grahamites who vaguely resemble Luddites and fundamentalist Christians. It is the way humans use technology that he criticises, aligning himself with hundreds of sci-fi authors who worry about the flawed, human element that inevitably accompanies technological expansion.

Authors of dystopian fiction and sci-fi commonly go on to develop their fears into a warning to the reader about the perils of mixing humanity with technology, by making sure that their characters best attempts are frustrated and they come to terrible ends. Bacigalupi contains seeds of this kind of warning, as his book contains many different characters who scheme to gain a bit of security and power, only to see their plans go up in smoke (literally in many cases). Some characters are punished for their sins, but the extremely good die, the evil survive and some of the schemers make it out alive. Although characters do often spout Bacigalupi’s own ideas on ethics, economy and trade ‘The Windup Girl’ does not operate primarily as a didactic warning to the world. Instead the majority of the book feels like a pure exercise in fiction and an exploration of where certain choices might take the characters and plot.

Ultimately it feels like Bacigalupi is curious to see what logical series of events would follow the scenario he has set up. This curiosity is reflected in a major theme of ‘The Windup Girl’; the idea of technological change as a form of forced evolution. One of the most interesting new developments in Thailand’s natural world is the appearance of cheshires, a super cat that can change colour to match its environment and appear from nowhere. The cheshires, many of the characters agree, where made too well. Their superior hunting skills means they kill off many species and makes them too advanced for regular cats to compete with. The cheshires are a study in the positives and negatives of technological evolution. Such an evolution is attractive because humanity values the advancement of knowledge, but once these technological advances are created they may supplant the natural world and chase humanity to extinction.

Bacigalupi also seems to wonder if technological evolution can be stopped, once it is started. He bravely imagines how far humans can advance technology before it renders them obsolete and in the end, briefly wonders if extinction would be as troubling for the general world as it would be for humanity. He poses these questions in a really interesting way by giving technology a near human form, in Kiko the windup girl of the title. Kiko, is part of a group called New People who were engineered in Japan and genetically designed to serve people. They were created after the cheshires and so were made with deliberate flaws. The flaws, like smaller pores and an inability to reproduce, stop them from performing so well that they wipe out humanity. These flaws are humanity’s attempt to control technology, while continuing to advance invention. The seemingly natural consequences of this attempt play out throughout the book as Kiko changes from a woman hobbled by these flaws, sure she is meant to be subservient, to a character who comes to understand how great her power is. Towards the end of the book we see that humanity and its old systems may be falling away, but evolution still continues on Earth with Kiko, other windups and any humans who can adapt, like Anderson’s factory manager Hock Seng. Perhaps it is in this conclusion that Bacigalupi finally succumbs and signals a life message for humanity; adapt and survive alongside our world’s evolution, or refuse and die. Doesn’t that seem like a fitting message for a science fiction author to hand out?

I really enjoyed ‘The Windup Girl’. I haven’t talked about the characters, because there are so many of them and it would take some time, but I found each main character distinct and interesting and they wended their way through the choices they made and the consequences these choices brought, rather like each character was involved in a ‘Make your own adventure’ book. ‘The Windup Girl’ is a very cool book, built out of image rich prose that evokes a hot and lively environment, that mixes the ancient and the modern into a Bangkok that struggles between growth and destruction. I could almost feel the atmosphere of the world rising like steam off the pages in passages like:

‘Street vendors extend arms draped with garlands of marigolds for temple offerings and hold up glinting amulets of revered monks to protect against everything from infertility to scabis mold. Food carts smoke and hiss with the scents of frying oil and fermented fish while around the ankles of their customers, the flicker-shimmer shapes of cheshires twine, yowling and hoping for scraps.

Overhead, the towers of Bangkok’s old Expansion loom, robed in vines and mold, windows long blown out, great bones picked clean. Without air conditioning or elevators to make them habitable, they stand and blister in the sun. The black smoke of illegal fires wafts from their pores, marking where Malayan refugees hurriedly scald chapattis and boil kopi before the white shirts can storm the sweltering heights and beat them for their infringements.’

Like the Booksmugglers I wanted a little bit more scientific explanation and I don’t really understand why book is being classified as steampunk, unless it’s the juxtaposition of general old and new technologies that make it part of the steampunk genre, but I don’t really care about classifications.

Now I’m about to go into some pretty nitpicky analysis that might make it sound like the book was a bit more of a mixed bag for me than it actually was. The problems I’m going to talk about are once again due to cultural glut and a lack of diversity, similar to those I mentioned in my review of ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle’. They are not about this book, they are about the publishing mix that it feeds into.

I spent a lot of Paulo Bacigalupi’s ‘The Windup Girl’ asking myself the question ‘What if ‘The Windup Girl’ was ‘The Windup Guy?’. Maybe that’s nonsense, because it’s an undeniable fact that Kiko is female and by asking ‘What if?’ I’m no longer talking about ‘The Windup Girl’ that actually exists, but about the way I might like to have seen the book written.

Still, during all those scenes where a woman sexually abuses Kiko, the windup girl, for the pleasure of brothel patrons and during all those scenes where Kiko must obey men because wind ups are genetically modified to serve I kept wondering ‘Why couldn’t Kiko have been a windup guy? Why is it always women taking the sexual beat downs from men and from women, no matter what their sexual orientation? Would the dynamics between Kiko and the world have to change if she were a guy? (my conclusion: no, the same story could be told with a man in her role). Would it have been changed anyway?’ (my conclusion: probably) And most interesting to me ‘Even though windups are extremely rare in Thailand why don’t we see a male wind up, or hear Kiko mention male windups explicitly?’. She has lots of memories of windups training together as children, but in these memories the other windup’s genders are not specified.

You can go off in all sorts of crazy directions once you start questioning why a character is depicted the way they are (Why isn’t Kiko a pink racoon?). I don’t mean to offer these questions up as a criticism of the book, more as jumping off points for further discussion about the possibilities of subverting the norm of fiction.

Perhaps Hayden Thorne’s recent post at ‘The Naughty Book Kitties’ will help illustrate what I mean. She looked at examples of anime that she likes and considered the possibilities for placing gay or lesbian characters into anime series. I don’t think Thorne was aiming to criticise the works as they stand, she was just pointing out that making characters in these works gay or lesbian could have opened up new possibilities for a story (as could any different choice of characters) or alternatively could have been done very easily without changing the story. By talking about how easily characters sexuality could be changed, she points out how it isn’t essential to the stories of these series for all the characters in them to be straight. In the same way I’m saying I don’t think that everyone who gets sexually abused in novels needs to be a woman, for story purposes. Maybe I’m talking about other variants of that statement: every woman who finds herself in a dystopian world doesn’t need to get sexually abused, every time an author creates a new life form that is low status and so has the potential to find itself in a position of little power where it might be sexually abused they don’t need to represent that life form through a female character... That last one is a bit iffy because in some cases authors are trying to make a point about women and power, but that illustrates what I mean when I say we need diversity and flexible approaches in fiction. My way is not the only way, but neither is the dominant cultural way the only way.

I guess what my questions really boil down to is that I think Bacigalupi makes some pretty standard choices when it comes to Kiko, which stick out because the rest of ‘The Windup Girl’ is so inventive. Bacigalupi often subverts the dominant fictional focus on male, white, straight and Western. His whole novel is set in Thailand, his Thai characters get to be main characters, with their own dedicated narrative sections and there’s a complex secondary character who just happens to be a lesbian, who later rises to extreme power. Then when it comes to Kiko, it feels like Bacigalupi travels a familiar, worn out route.

Still a strong debut novel and here's to 'Ship Breaker' being even better.

Other Reviews

The Booksmugglers

Asking the Wrong Questions