GMO Espionage Fuels Environmental Thriller "The Windup Girl"

Science fiction about the environment can get preachy, so Paolo Bacigalupi's hard SF novel The Windup Girl is a welcome change. Set in Thailand's future, the book follows scientist spies hunting good genomes in a world ruined by GMO diseases.

In the tradition of politically-minded hard SF writers like Iain M. Banks and Ian McDonald, Bacigalupi follows the interconnected stories of several people caught up in great social shifts. In the case of The Windup Girl, they're all caught in the genome industry's web: We have a covert "calorie man" called Anderson who tries to sniff out uncontaminated genomes for a Monsanto-esque multinational called AgriGen; a "yellow card" Chinese refugee named Hock Seng who is trying to climb to the top of the energy-generator black market in Thailand; Environment Ministry shock troops Jaidee and Kanya, whose job is to protect Thailand from contaminated genomes, foreign imports, and dirty energy; and the mysterious whore Emiko, a genetically-engineered "windup" person abandoned by her former owner in Thailand, where GMO people are illegal.

We follow these characters through every eschelon of Thai society, from backroom meetings between government officials to backroom performances at the strip club where Emiko is fetishistically degraded every night. The action takes place in the weeks leading up to a clash between the Trade Ministry - who want to open Thailand up to business with AgriGen and other multinationals - and the Environment Ministry, which has fought to keep Thailand and its ultra-valuable seed bank isolated from other nations (and ecosystems). The globe is still recovering from a series of diseases that ravaged crops and humans alike, so exposure to foreign people and objects can be deadly. Companies like PurCal and AgriGen have cornered the market on disease-free strains of rice and wheat, selling to countries where "blister rust" and GMO beetles have reduced food supplies to dust.

Thailand's seed bank, a collection of heirloom seeds from long-extinct plant species, has allowed the country to remain independent from the multinationals. The Environment Ministry's "white shirts," led by Jaidee, have burned all the contaminated fields and even recruited shady foreign gene hackers to help synthesize new, disease-resistant crops. But now times are changing. The palace is starting to support Trade, and calorie men like Anderson are secretly offering them lucrative deals to share the seed bank in exchange for military and financial support.

As tensions mount, Trade takes violent retribution against Environment. Violence begins bubbling up on all sides. And somehow Anderson meets Emiko, beginning a strange affair with the windup that has an unexpected effect on the future of Thailand.

One of the strengths of The Windup Girl, other than its intriguing characters, is Bacigalupi's world building. You can practically taste this future Thailand he's built, especially when Anderson discovers a newly-engineered fruit in the marketplace and tries to figure out what genes went into its construction. We're given just enough background to understand the economic and environmental factors that created this world, but Bacigalupi doesn't bog us down in endless discussions of ecosystems and fuel consumption.

And there are several moments where the hard SF here merges deftly with a magical realism that compliments it nicely. Thailand is haunted by GMO cats called "cheshires," created as souped-up pets, whose fur is designed to merge chameolon-like into the background. This has made them unstoppable predators, and they've eaten every other creature in their niche. But at certain points, it almost seems as if these creatures are seeping through walls. Which isn't surprising when you consider that Jaidee's ghost is a major character, and that Emiko has been implausibly engineered to have jerky, mechanical movements like a windup doll.