This is one great book. It’s set a few hundred years in the future, long after the oil-fueled “Exapansion” (that would be the time we are living the end of, right up to “Peak oil”), and after the “Contraction” (the collapse of society as cheap energy runs out).
The world of the Windup Girl is a post-synthetic biology world where synthetic organisms have gone wild and decimated natural populations, and “generippers” have created special humans, cheshire cats, killer weevils, and scourge upon scourge of killer diseases.
All the action of the book takes place in a Bangkok surrounded by levees to keep out the high water (caused by global warming, of course). The forces at play are calorie companies (ag companies trying to sell GM food); the Environmental Ministry (tasked to protect Thailand from external GM products, many which have gone haywire and ruined other countries); the Trade Ministry (salivating over the money GM products could bring, mostly through favors from the calorie companies); and the underworld of thieves, desperate immigrants, and the Mob.
The built world is so believable and interesting. You get into character, understanding how seeing a diesel vehicle is an exorbitant use of joules, or fat folks show off the calories they have access to, or how ice is a luxury (costs energy to produce). Also, guns and machines run off of springs, flywheels, and brute force (calories converted to kinetic energy).
The intricacy and world-building reminds me of Neal Stephenson (and not Gibson, to whom everyone seems to compare Bacigalupi – though I haven’t read Gibson in ages). And it was really exciting to see such a strong story wrapped around biology in a semi-post-electronic age. One thing that stood out, at least for the practical microbiologist in me, was there was nothing about microbes. The animals that were functional, were larger organisms and a bit exotic (such as mating glow-worms).
In any case, I highly recommend this book to someone who likes well-written SF with well-thought out world-building and a strong twist of bioscience. All the rest of you should read it just to blow your minds.
Here’s a nice concluding quote from a review in the Guardian:
“The Windup Girl embodies what SF does best of all: it remakes reality in compelling, absorbing and thought-provoking ways, and it lives on vividly in the mind.”
Image from Wikipedia (warning, spoilers!)