The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

This is the second Bacigalupi book I've read, the first being The Water Knife.  He seems to delight in writing stories that detail all of the ways that humanity is fucking itself over and what might happen after that.  TWK focused on the water crisis in the American west.  The Windup Girl is about genetically modified organisms.

As with TWK, TWG has several main characters.  Anderson Lake is living in Thailand and working undercover for an American food company called AgriGren.  He's investigating varieties of foods that have started popping up in Thailand (which has restrictions against dealing with the big food companies) because something is not quite right about them, and he suspects a Western geneticist (or generipper) of working with Thailand's seed bank on bringing the foods back into existence.  (Because, of course, no one in Thailand could do this themselves.)  As part of his cover, he runs a factory that makes kink springs--this is a spring-powered world, as apparently most gasoline has been used up, and there are strict carbon emission restrictions in place.

Our other big characters are Emiko, the titular windup girl.  Windups are genetically engineered people created by the Japanese to fulfill different tasks.  Emiko was built as a secretary/assistant/all around pretty girl, and lived a life of luxury until her owner abandoned her in Thailand instead of paying to bring her back to Japan after a business trip.  Now she works at a strip joint/brothel where she is raped onstage nightly by one of her fellow performers.  She's also reviled by the people of Thailand in general because they believe windups have no souls.  Tan Hock Seng is Anderson Lake's factory manager who's using his position to advance himself, and Jaidee, the head of a band of "white shirts" who work as enforcers for the Environment Ministry and are the arch enemies of the Trade Ministry.

This did not appeal to me as much as The Water Knife did.  Something about the passion of the characters that moved TWK was not really present in The Windup Girl.  Emiko yearns to be free, but that's about as passionate it gets.  Even Jaidee, with his hatred for the Trade Ministry and his love for the people of Thailand, doesn't seem to embody the same passions that the characters in TWK did.  The world here is fascinating; the genetically-modified organisms that populate it, from the plants to the megadonts (like elephants, but not) to the windups (who also come in many-armed varieties, for factory for field work, and presumably other types, too) and more.  But what initially seems like a strong central plot revolving around Anderson's search for the new food and the generipper behind it and Emiko's quest for freedom, seems to quickly get derailed into a plot that more revolves around the de-evolution of relations between the different Ministries into a scramble that will determine the country's future.  While this makes sense for the character of Jaidee, it doesn't seem to really "fit" the other characters, who sort of all end up along for the ride.  And while Emiko ultimately is a catalyst, and I thought that part worked well, I feel like this just missed the boat for me overall.  It did win a Hugo and a Nebula, though, so clearly not everyone feels the same way.  The ending is powerful and open enough that it lets the reader imagine the different ways the story might go from there, but again...the body of the book just didn't capture me.

3 stars out of 5 for wonderful world building and a good catalyst and ending, but an unconvincing body.

The Water Knife - Paolo Bacigalupi

The Water Knife is basically a story of the people of the American southwest and what happens to them when water starts drying up, droughts begin taking over, and the scramble liquid becomes all-encompassing.  The "water knife" of the title is not an actual knife, but the main character, Angel.  He is a water knife in the sense that he "cuts" water; that is, he works for a woman named Catherine Case, known as the Queen of the Colorado River, who enforces the water rights of Las Vegas vehemently.  Angel is one of her posse who goes out and takes down anyone who's trying to siphon Case's water away, cutting off the flow by any means necessary and leaving people and places to die in his wake.  He is very, very good at what he does, which makes him the perfect candidate for a mission Case wants completed: find out what's happening with a rumored score in Arizona, and if there are water rights up for grabs, grab them.

Our other two main characters are Lucy and Maria, who live in Phoenix--Angel's destination.  Phoenix is slowly being devoured by the desert, dust storms coming more frequently and lasting longer, the water only for the very wealthy; those who aren't wealthy are basically living off the mercy of the Red Cross.  Everyone with sense and ability is getting out, but getting out is hard because the other states have closed their borders to refugees from the waterless states.  Maria is originally from Texas, which has been completely destroyed by natural disasters, and she wants to leave Arizona, too, but can't afford a "coyote" to smuggle her across the border into another state.  She and her friend Sarah are basically doing all they can just to stay afloat--Sarah by working as a prostitute, Maria by selling water from Red Cross pumps at hiked-up prices at a construction site.  Lucy, on the other hand, can leave whenever she wants; she's not from Arizon, but has moved there to further her career as a journalist and document Phoenix's descent, which she does quite faithfully via the hashtag #PhoneixDownTheTubes.  But Lucy gets more than she bargained for when one of her friends, who'd spent recent days talking about a big score and a way to California, turns up dead.  Furious, Lucy aims her pen at everyone she's resisted targeting for so long, completely disregarding her own safety in a city that has basically become a dog-eat-dog world.

As Angel searches for water rights and Lucy searches for the truth, their paths and that of Maria begin to weave in and out of each other.  It's an extremely dangerous place, Bacigalupi's Phoenix, People get shown, blown up, fed to hyenas, and all sorts of other unpleasant things.  This is a very violent book; I'd really say it's not for the faint-of-heart.  There is also an "attraction" plotline, which I hesitate to call a real romance because the characters like each other, are intrigued by each other, and are definitely attracted to each other, but they're still also perfectly willing to stab each other in the back if necessary, and neither of them is really sure what their involvement is.  "Romance" typically implies some sort of resolution, which this didn't have and I don't think will have, given that, to my knowledge, there's not going to a Water Knife #2.

The path of this book is twisty and turning, with things spiraling in around each other but everything still interlocking quite well.  I didn't see any gaping plotholes; Bacigalupi's world seems very tight.  This is, however, a book that lacks a lot of resolution.  There's no world-saving going on here, so if you're the type of person who likes to leave a book with everything wrapped up in a neat little package, this is not for you.  It's definitely a "it's the journey, not the destination" that counts type of book.  In the end, the world (or at least the American southwest) is still pretty much screwed, but I'd come to care about the characters and have hope for their individual futures more than I did for the world at large.  It was a type of ending that, yes, would suck if it were reality (which it very well could become; that is the scary part about books like this) but I think fit the narrative perfectly.  It also read, to me, as basically a prequel to Dust by Hugh Howey.  Put together, I think the two are a really good sci-fi story about what might happen when we start running out of water.  It is not, however, a book that goes along with the misleadingly-titled (but lovely) What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.

An excellent book, but a violent one and one that is scary in its foreboding of a likely reality.  Sensitive readers be warned!

4.5 stars out of 5.