“What does the gentleman think I will do with his extra baht?’ she asks. “Buy a pretty piece of jewelry? Take myself to dinner? I am property, yes? I am Raleigh’s.” She tosses the money at his feet. “It makes no difference if I am rich or poor. I am owned.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (MAY 14, 2010)

Unlike much of the world, the Thai Kingdom had avoided inundation by the rising oceans. It had avoided pandemic decimation of crops and population. It had kept the global agri-corporations from accessing and either exploiting or destroying its vast and precious seed banks. It had taken drastic, isolationist steps to preserve itself while most of the rest of the world faltered into massive contraction and potential extinction.

The white shirts of the Environment Ministry enforced the official policy of the Child Queen’s regime, burning fields and villages if genetic blight or plague struck, conducting customs inspections of the expensive goods imported on dirigibles and confiscating and destroying even items supposedly protected by large bribes. And, “mulching” any windups they discovered.

Windups — also called New People — were bio-mechanically engineered creatures from Japan that could pass for human beings except that their everyday movements were jerky — reminding natural people of windup toys. Emiko was one of these windups; she had been imported to Bangkok and was, by constitution, submissive: she had been designed to obey, submit, and please. Her current “master” was neither Japanese nor Thai; he was Raleigh, a Westerner whose “club” was bar, opium den, and bordello among other things. Emiko, who in severely underpopulated Japan would have been valued and accepted, was basically a slave and “genetic trash” here.

Emiko caught the eye of Anderson Lake, a representative of AgriGen, a so-called “calorie company,” i.e., one of the multinationals that had a stranglehold on genetically modified grains and other foodstuffs which were being sold at exorbitant prices to other starving nations. He ostensibly ran the SpringLife factory that produced next-generation kink springs which were commonly used to power items that had formerly run on oil. Lake’s factory employed not only Thais and “yellow card” Chinese refugees but also, on the dangerous manufacturing floor, towering elephantine megodonts with four tusks that sometimes rampaged. Lake’s factory was more of a sham than a real enterprise, however. His true preoccupation was trying to ferret out the top secret storage sites of the Thai seed banks and to do whatever he could to shift high officials away from isolationism and toward free trade. Lake hoped Emiko could become a valuable informant, but he also found himself vulnerable to her trademark silky skin and sexual charms, complicating both of their existences.

Meanwhile, Jaidee, the Tiger of the white shirts, a fervent believer in guarding his country’s borders and long-term survival, misjudged the changing political winds in the Kingdom. Accused by his superiors of overstepping his authority, he was made a scapegoat by those aligning for a crucial showdown regarding the country’s future. The immense pressure on the Kingdom to open itself to “free trade” and to “share” its seed bank with the world might crush Jaidee, not to mention Hock Seng, a scheming yellow card Chinese employee of Anderson Lake’s, and…Emiko.

Emiko had heard rumors of a place to the north where other New People had a community of their own, and she wanted to escape Bangkok and find her own kind. But as the city became a powder keg waiting to be lit, she got more, not less, entangled with Lake, Raleigh, a genetic scientist, and other mercenary or exploitative examples of humanity. She also discovered hidden strengths (and aggressions) within herself she’d never guessed at before. Would Emiko affect the entire course of history in the Thai Kingdom? Or would that be left to others, and would she end up as a bystander, a witness to ecological disaster?

The Windup Girl vividly depicts a dystopian future ushered in by radical climate change and the reckless depletion of our natural resources as well as mismanagement and “generipping” of our crops and other food sources. Paolo Bacigalupi invents a scenario that one hopes is not too prescient but which compellingly grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. This, Bacigalupi’s first novel (he had previously written award-winning short stories), creates characters and plot with assurance that builds immediate and continued reader confidence in the integrity of the unfolding story. His characters are blemished, greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. They often act “badly” but as one might expect in their unforgiving environment. The world in which he enfolds them leaks disease and death but continues to display irrepressible human ingenuity. Bacigalupi’s future is one where science’s interference with nature has led Mankind to the brink. Emiko and the other windups represent one tangent of scientific development that might outlive human beings, and although the idea of articifial “life” surviving us isn’t a new idea, Bacigalupi’s version teams with innovative perspectives about her construction and status. Although Emiko is reasonably accused of having no soul. the author convinces the reader that she possesses an inner life and has a survival instinct at least as insistent as that of any natural person.

This novel is a 2010 Hugo Award nominee — along with five others. Looking at the list through my own bias for science fiction that deals with space travel and alien civilizations in other star systems, I noticed a trend this year with a bit of a jaundiced eye: most of the nominees were about a dystopian future/fantasy earth. I’d hoped for more subject matter breadth. But when I read the publisher’s summary of The Windup Girl, it wasn’t to be passed up. Whether it actually wins the Hugo or not, this novel is visionary, gritty, cautionary and highly intelligent. It definitely ranks in the top echelon of science fiction. Bacigalupi is a great and already polished talent, and I expect many more terrific (but maybe not quite so terrifying) tales from him.

Editor’s note:  The Windup Girl has won the Nebula Award and tied for the Hugo Award. It has also been chosen as Time Magazine’s book of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 233 readers
PUBLISHER:	Night Shade Books (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paolo Bacigalupi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another 2010 Hugo and Nebula Award Nominee: The City and the City by China Mieville And another 2010 Hugo Nominee: WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Bibliography:

• Pump Six and Other Stories (2008)
• The Windup Girl (2009)
• Ship Breakers (2010)
• The Alchemists (2011)
• The Drowned (May 2012)

“This matter has to move beyond virtue. Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilization, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are. For humanity en masse, greed triumphs virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention, the pleasures of ingenuity and cooperation, the satisfaction of profit. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (MAR 30, 2010)

Reading Solar, Ian McEwan’s entertaining and clever new novel, reminded me of an appearance by Al Gore on the Daily Show. Jon Stewart, it seemed, had grown increasingly tired of all the talk and dire warnings about global warming. He asked Gore if the former vice president was at all concerned that the urgency with which the warnings were declared, took some of the attention away from the solutions. In other words, was there a disconnect between the message and the solutions, which seemed so abstract? Stewart wanted tangible solutions—something we could all sink our teeth into.

Professor Michael Beard, the protagonist of McEwan’s novel, is well equipped to understand both sides of that argument. As the novel opens, we find him to be in his early 50s, a man who is resting on past laurels (Beard won the Nobel Prize in his youth for some essential work on quantum physics) and “lent his title, Professor Beard, Nobel Laureate, to letterheads and institutes.” He now serves as titular head of a new government environmental policy agency and weekly makes the train commute from his home in Paddington in England to the agency’s headquarters in Reading.

Even if publicly the center is working on an important project—the Wind Turbine for Urban Domestic Use—Beard doesn’t appreciate the dire tone in which much of the warnings about global warming is relayed. “There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over the centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world and therefore made sense, or was just a little less irrelevant,” Beard believes. Still he plods along on the project because it affords him a steady paycheck and lets him pay attention to his real love—womanizing.

Back home, Beard’s fifth wife, Patrice, is having an affair with a construction worker, using Beard’s various infidelities against him. Trying hard to get a grip around this fact and to the thought that he is headed for divorce yet again, Beard jumps at an invitation to attend a conference on global warming way in Spitsbergen in the Arctic. This particular segment of the book really captures the freezing cold very effectively particularly through one over-the-top segment where Beard desperately tries to pee after tackling layers and layers of clothing.

Once he returns home, a sudden unforeseen event has Beard acting in his established selfish and self-serving mode and this act totally changes the direction of the novel. In the second part of the book, Beard is now working on a project involving artificial photosynthesis and is getting ready to throw the switch on a big project way across the world in the deserts of New Mexico. But, as they say, what goes around comes around and it remains to be seen whether the past will eventually catch up with the obnoxious Beard.

There are segments in the book that are funny but overall Solar is no comedy. It has ample doses of cynicism for sure—for example, Beard’s project at the Reading institute, the wind turbine, is labeled as a “single eye-catching project that would be comprehensible to the taxpayer and the media.” McEwan can be snide when he wants to be. This is the case when the conference attendees in the Arctic offset “the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions” by “planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.”

You can tell that McEwan has done a lot of research for the novel. And even the arguments he makes in science are convincing. In the Arctic expedition, there is a mudroom that gets more and more disorganized as the days go by and towards the end there is a mad scramble for the few warm clothes that are left. The novel makes an extremely fluent analogy between the chaos of this room and our larger lives in general. McEwan shows us that rules and more important, enforcement, are necessary for things to work. “Science of course was fine, and who knew, art was too, but perhaps self-knowledge was beside the point,” he writes, “Boot rooms needed good systems so that flawed creatures could use them properly. Leave nothing, Beard decided, to science or art, or to idealism. Only good laws would save the boot room. And citizens who respected the law.”

Beard is a despicable character and readers will find little to appreciate in him. This is a problem for the book—it is hard to root for a character you despise. Yet Solar succeeds in part because of McEwan’s absolutely spectacular writing. Every sentence is worth cherishing and reading slowly. When McEwan describes even an airplane trolley in the most precise terms—Beard had “an overdeveloped awareness of the precise location in the aisle of the drinks trolley, of that muffled clinking sound and its asymptomatic approach,”—you know exactly what he means.

As the book progresses to its spirited ending, you realize that under the guise of a comedy, Solar is a much more insightful book. One begins to wonder if Beard, in his excesses, is supposed to signify us—all of humanity. If that were indeed the case, we need those “tangible solutions” to global warming sooner rather than later. What irony it is then, to realize that these solutions will likely be served to us by someone like Beard.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 184 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese (March 30, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ian McEwan
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Saturday Atonement Another climate change novel: State of Fear by Michael Crichton

Bibliography:

• First Love, Last Rites: Stories (1975)
• In Between the Sheets and Other Stories (1978)
• The Cement Garden (1978)
• The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
• The Child in Time (1987)
• The Innocent (1989)
• Black Dogs (1992)
• Enduring Love (1997)
• Amsterdam (1998)
• Atonement (2001; 2002 in US)
• Saturday (2005)
• On Chesil Beach (2007)
• Solar (2010)
• Sweet Tooth (November 2012)

Children’s Books:

• The Daydreamer (1994)

Screenplays:

• The Imitation Game (1981)
• Or Shall We Die (1983)
• The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985)
• Soursweet (1989)
• The Good Son (1993)

Movies from books:

• The Comfort of Strangers (1991)
• The Cement Garden (1994)
• The Innocent (1995)
• Atonement (2007)