PRAISE FOR THE WINDUP GIRL
“Bacigalupi is a worthy successor to William Gibson: this is cyberpunk without computers.”
— Time Magazine, Best Books of 2009
“Reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner…. Bacigalupi has created a fully imagined world in The Windup Girl that is densely packed with ideas about genetic manipulation, distribution of resources, the social order, and environmental degradation. However, he is never pedantic in addressing these concepts; rather they are expressed through the settings he vividly describes and in the actions of his characters. In short, The Windup Girl is science fiction with an environmental message, but one that does not get in the way of its compelling story.”
— Sacramento Book Review
“This complex, literate and intensely felt tale, which recalls both William Gibson and Ian McDonald at their very best, will garner Bacigalupi significant critical attention and is clearly one of the finest science fiction novels of the year.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Bacigalupi is as unflinching in his examination of the unthinkable cruelty, humiliation and banal evil that humanity inflicts on the Other as he is on the bleak future that our mass consumption society will inevitably unleash. In his fictional vision, there will be no miraculous rescue from our moral or environmental sins. The Windup Girl will almost certainly be the most important SF novel of the year for its willingness to confront the most cherished notions of the genre, namely that our future is bright and we will overcome our selfish, cruel nature.”
— BookPage
“A captivating look at a dystopic future that seems all too possible. East meets West in a clash of cultures brilliantly portrayed in razor-sharp images, tension-building pacing, and sharply etched characters. Fans of the sf techno-fiction of China Miéville and Neal Stephenson should flock to this cautionary thriller.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
“Bacigalupi constructs a sobering and nuanced future Bangkok teetering on the edge of disaster. In this inhospitable environment, a disparate group of characters calculates how to survive. The novel’s gritty tone, provocative story line, and sympathetic characters evoke a world that is frighteningly real.”
— ALA 2010 Reading List Awards (Best SF Novel of the Year)
“2010’s science fiction ‘it’ book brings poetry and excitement to ecotastrophe.”
— Cory Doctorow, author of Makers and Little Brother
“An extraordinary, virtuoso, shock-immersion rendering of [a] transformed world…. An important book, and a fine one.”
— John Clute, SCI FI Wire
“Disturbing… beautiful, fast-paced, exciting…and also a novel of hope. Unlike many dystopian authors, Bacigalupi knows that at our core humans always struggle against any challenge. While we may not consistently do right, we consistently hope to do better.”
— SF Signal
“Deftly plotted and evocative … Despite a grim view of the century or two to come, there is a sense of hope in the novel …”
— Orion Magazine
“Written with a feral conviction … provides fertile ground for discussion of many kinds, by many kinds of readers…. An unremittingly harsh work … I can’t recall another novel that has articulated the same vision of what it means to be human in the present moment with the same force. It’s that vision that insists that [the “windup girl”] Emiko is human, and that she remains bound at the end of the novel: because we remain bound, and she is us; because at least for now, science fiction remains bound; and because, quite probably, so does our world.”
— Strange Horizons
“The Windup Girl is almost unbearably brutal. It is also extremely good.”
— Nancy Kress, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Steal Across the Sky
“The most anticipated science fiction novel of the year. Bacigalupi takes the ideas and themes from his award-winning short fiction and explores them in greater complexity and depth than ever before. The results are spectacular. You won’t see the future the same way ever again.”
— C. C. Finlay, author of the Traitor to the Crown series
“Highly nuanced, violent, and grim … Readers with an interest in political or environmental science fiction or those for whom dystopias are particularly appealing will be intrigued. If they are able to immerse themselves completely into the calorie-mad world of a future Bangkok, they will not be disappointed.”
— School Library Journal
“Beautifully written with a cast of characters both major and minor who will make it extremely difficult on the reader as to whom to root for, The Windup Girl is an important, perhaps even cautionary tale about a very possible future, set in a Thailand one can almost taste and feel. Plan to see it on many a best-of list and most likely a few award short lists as well. It’s the end of the world as we know it, so eat your Soylent Green and enjoy the show. Dystopia Rules!”
— Patrick Heffernan, Mysterious Galaxy Books
“One of the best books I’ve read this year. On a line by line basis, it has the beauty of a well-crafted short story and then you get into the big sweep of the novel. The science fiction of it is thoroughly and frighteningly believable, but that isn’t what makes this a great book. What makes The Windup Girl beautiful and terrifying is its convincing portrayal of humanity, both as a society and as individuals.”
— Mary Robinette Kowal, author of Shades of Milk and Honey
“The Windup Girl is clearly one of the most significant books of the year, definitely worth Hugo consideration, and the herald of more good work to come from the author.”
— SF Revu
OTHER BOOKS BY PAOLO BACIGALUPI:
Pump Six and Other Stories
The Alchemist
The Water Knife
YOUNG ADULT
Ship Breaker
The Drowned Cities
The Doubt Factory
MIDDLE GRADE
Zombie Baseball Beatdown
THE WINDUP GIRL
Paolo Bacigalupi
NIGHT SHADE BOOKS
AN IMPRINT OF START PUBLISHING
NEW YORK
The Windup Girl © 2009 by Paolo Bacigalupi.
This edition of The Windup Girl © 2015 by Night Shade Books.
“The Calorie Man” © 2005 by Spilogale, Inc. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2005.
“Yellow Card Man” © 2006 by Paolo Bacigalupi. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2006.
Edited by Juliet Ulman
Cover art by Raphael Lacoste
Book design by Owen Corrigan
Author photo by JT Thomas Photography
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 375 Hudson Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10014.
Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.
Visit our website at www.start-publishing.com.
ISBN: 978-1-59780-574-2
Printed in the United States of America
For Anjula
CONTENTS
The Windup Girl
The Calorie Man
Yellow Card Man
Extrapolations:
A Conversation with Paolo Bacigalupi
1
“No! I don’t want the mangosteen.” Anderson Lake leans forward, pointing. “I want that one, there. Kaw pollamai nee khap. The one with the red skin and the green hairs.”
The peasant woman smiles, showing teeth blackened from chewing betel nut, and points to a pyramid
of fruits stacked beside her. “Un nee chai mai kha?”
“Right. Those. Khap.” Anderson nods and makes himself smile. “What are they called?”
“Ngaw.” She pronounces the word carefully for his foreign ear, and hands across a sample.
Anderson takes the fruit, frowning. “It’s new?”
“Kha.” She nods an affirmative.
Anderson turns the fruit in his hand, studying it. It’s more like a gaudy sea anemone or a furry puffer fish than a fruit. Coarse green tendrils protrude from all sides, tickling his palm. The skin has the rust-red tinge of blister rust, but when he sniffs he doesn’t get any stink of decay. It seems perfectly healthy, despite its appearance.
“Ngaw,” the peasant woman says again, and then, as if reading his mind, “New. No blister rust.”
Anderson nods absently. Around him, the market soi bustles with Bangkok’s morning shoppers. Mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-fin plaa. Overhead, palm-oil polymer tarps sag under the blast furnace heat of the tropic sun, shading the market with hand-painted images of clipper ship trading companies and the face of the revered Child Queen. A man jostles past, holding vermilion-combed chickens high as they flap and squawk outrage on their way to slaughter, and women in brightly colored pha sin bargain and smile with the vendors, driving down the price of pirated U-Tex rice and new-variant tomatoes.
None of it touches Anderson.
“Ngaw,” the woman says again, seeking connection.
The fruit’s long hairs tickle his palm, challenging him to recognize its origin. Another Thai genehacking success, just like the tomatoes and eggplants and chiles that abound in the neighboring stalls. It’s as if the Grahamite Bible’s prophecies are coming to pass. As if Saint Francis himself stirs in his grave, restless, preparing to stride forth onto the land, bearing with him the bounty of history’s lost calories.
“And he shall come with trumpets, and Eden shall return …”
Anderson turns the strange hairy fruit in his hand. It carries no stink of cibiscosis. No scab of blister rust. No graffiti of genehack weevil engraves its skin. The world’s flowers and vegetables and trees and fruits make up the geography of Anderson Lake’s mind, and yet nowhere does he find a helpful signpost that leads him to identification.
Ngaw. A mystery.
He mimes that he would like to taste and the peasant woman takes back the fruit. Her brown thumb easily tears away the hairy rind, revealing a pale core. Translucent and veinous, it resembles nothing so much as the pickled onions served in martinis at research clubs in Des Moines.
She hands back the fruit. Anderson sniffs tentatively. Inhales floral syrup. Ngaw. It shouldn’t exist. Yesterday, it didn’t. Yesterday, not a single stall in Bangkok sold these fruits, and yet now they sit in pyramids, piled all around this grimy woman where she squats on the ground under the partial shading of her tarp. From around her neck, a gold glinting amulet of the martyr Phra Seub winks at him, a talisman of protection against the agricultural plagues of the calorie companies.
Anderson wishes he could observe the fruit in its natural habitat, hanging from a tree or lurking under the leaves of some bush. With more information, he might guess genus and family, might divine some whisper of the genetic past that the Thai Kingdom is trying to excavate, but there are no more clues. He slips the ngaw’s slick translucent ball into his mouth.
A fist of flavor, ripe with sugar and fecundity. The sticky flower bomb coats his tongue. It’s as though he’s back in the HiGro fields of Iowa, offered his first tiny block of hard candy by a Midwest Compact agronomist when he was nothing but a farmer’s boy, barefoot amid the corn stalks. The shell-shocked moment of flavor—real flavor—after a lifetime devoid of it.
Sun pours down. Shoppers jostle and bargain, but nothing touches him. He rolls the ngaw around in his mouth, eyes closed, tasting the past, savoring the time when this fruit must once have flourished, before cibiscosis and Nippon genehack weevil and blister rust and scabis mold razed the landscape.
Under the hammer heat of tropic sun, surrounded by the groan of water buffalo and the cry of dying chickens, he is one with paradise. If he were a Grahamite, he would fall to his knees and give ecstatic thanks for the flavor of Eden’s return.
Anderson spits the black pit into his hand, smiling. He has read travelogues of history’s botanists and explorers, the men and women who pierced the deepest jungle wildernesses of the earth in search of new species—and yet their discoveries cannot compare to this single fruit.
Those people all sought discoveries. He has found a resurrection.
The peasant woman beams, sure of a sale. “Ao gee kilo kha?” How much?
“Are they safe?” he asks.
She points at the Environment Ministry certificates laid on the cobbles beside her, underlining the dates of inspection with a finger. “Latest variation,” she says. “Top grade.”
Anderson studies the glinting seals. Most likely, she bribed the white shirts for stamps rather than going through the full inspection process that would have guaranteed immunity to eighth-generation blister rust along with resistance to cibiscosis 111.mt7 and mt8. The cynical part of him supposes that it hardly matters. The intricate stamps that glitter in the sun are more talismanic than functional, something to make people feel secure in a dangerous world. In truth, if cibiscosis breaks out again, these certificates will do nothing. It will be a new variation, and all the old tests will be useless, and then people will pray to their Phra Seub amulets and King Rama XII images and make offerings at the City Pillar Shrine, and they will all cough up the meat of their lungs no matter how many Environment Ministry stamps adorn their produce.
Anderson pockets the ngaw’s pit. “I’ll take a kilo. No. Two. Song.”
He hands over a hemp sack without bothering to bargain. Whatever she asks, it will be too little. Miracles are worth the world. A unique gene that resists a calorie plague or utilizes nitrogen more efficiently sends profits skyrocketing. If he looks around the market right now, that truth is everywhere displayed. The alley bustles with Thais purchasing everything from generipped versions of U-Tex rice to vermilion-variant poultry. But all of those things are old advances, based on previous genehack work done by AgriGen and PurCal and Total Nutrient Holdings. The fruits of old science, manufactured in the bowels of the Midwest Compact’s research labs.
The ngaw is different. The ngaw doesn’t come from the Midwest. The Thai Kingdom is clever where others are not. It thrives while countries like India and Burma and Vietnam all fall like dominoes, starving and begging for the scientific advances of the calorie monopolies.
A few people stop to examine Anderson’s purchase, but even if Anderson thinks the price is low, they apparently find it too expensive and pass on.
The woman hands across the ngaw, and Anderson almost laughs with pleasure. Not a single one of these furry fruits should exist; he might as well be hefting a sack of trilobites. If his guess about the ngaw’s origin is correct, it represents a return from extinction as shocking as if a Tyrannosaurus were stalking down Thanon Sukhumvit. But then, the same is true of the potatoes and tomatoes and chiles that fill the market, all piled in such splendid abundance, an array of fecund nightshades that no one has seen in generations. In this drowning city, all things seem possible. Fruits and vegetables return from the grave, extinct flowers blossom on the avenues, and behind it all, the Environment Ministry works magic with the genetic material of generations lost.
Carrying his sacked fruit, Anderson squeezes back down the soi to the avenue beyond. A seethe of traffic greets him, morning commuters clogging Thanon Rama IX like the Mekong in flood. Bicycles and cycle rickshaws, blue-black water buffaloes and great shambling megodonts.
At Anderson’s arrival, Lao Gu emerges from the shade of a crumbling office tower, carefully pinching off the burning tip of a cigarette. Nightshades again. They’re everywhere. Nowhere else in the world, but here they riot in ab
undance. Lao Gu tucks the remainder of the tobacco into a ragged shirt pocket as he trots ahead of Anderson to their cycle rickshaw.
The old Chinese man is nothing but a scarecrow, dressed in rags, but still, he is lucky. Alive, when most of his people are dead. Employed, while his fellow Malayan refugees are packed like slaughter chickens into sweltering Expansion towers. Lao Gu has stringy muscle on his bones and enough money to indulge in Singha cigarettes. To the rest of the yellow card refugees he is as lucky as a king.
Lao Gu straddles the cycle’s saddle and waits patiently as Anderson clambers into the passenger seat behind. “Office,” Anderson says. “Bai khap.” Then switches to Chinese. “Zou ba.”
The old man stands on his pedals and they merge into traffic. Around them, bicycle bells ring like cibiscosis chimes, irritated at their obstruction.
Lao Gu ignores them and weaves deeper into the traffic flow.
Anderson reaches for another ngaw, then restrains himself. He should save them. They’re too valuable to gobble like a greedy child. The Thais have found some new way to disinter the past, and all he wants to do is feast on the evidence. He drums his fingers on the bagged fruit, fighting for self-control.
To distract himself, he fishes for his pack of cigarettes and lights one. He draws on the tobacco, savoring the burn, remembering his surprise when he first discovered how successful the Thai Kingdom had become, how widely spread the nightshades. And as he smokes, he thinks of Yates. Remembers the man’s disappointment as they sat across from one another with resurrected history smoldering between them.
* * *
“Nightshades.”
Yates’ match flared in the dimness of SpringLife’s offices, illuminating florid features as he touched flame to a cigarette and drew hard. Rice paper crackled. The tip glowed and Yates exhaled, sending a stream of smoke ceilingward to where crank fans panted against the sauna swelter.
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