The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi ★★★★

[mithriltabby]

Bacigalupi spins a cautionary tale of genetic engineering, giving us a look at a future that merits averting: amidst the carnage of rising seas, “calorie companies” release genetically engineered diseases and pests to create a market for their own resistant varieties. The action is set in Thailand, the sole holdout in its portion of the world, able to keep ahead of the plagues and famines through the foresight of maintaining a seedbank and keeping genetic engineering talent on tap. The story follows a tangle of plot threads: the “calorie man” sent to Thailand to gain access to the government seed bank by any means necessary, a Chinese refugee from a Malaysian ethnic purge, a genetically engineered “windup girl” from Japan abandoned in a country where her very existence is illegal, and two members of the government’s Environment Ministry who each have to deal with endemic corruption in their own department and others.

The story is good and well-paced, with very believable extrapolation of current trends. Even the “calorie man” sent to perform corruption on behalf of corrupt masters manages to be a sympathetic character. The science seems tweaked for effect— there is an astonishing shift to muscles, fire, and high-tech springs, with occasional mentions of burning coal, without a single nod to the biofuels and windmills that should be easily possible with the same underlying technology. Not a feel-good story, though; it isn’t quite postapocalyptic, but it has the same flavor of “count survival as a victory” rather than offering hope that things will get better.