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The Windup Girl cover art

The Windup Girl

By: Paolo Bacigalupi
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
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Summary

Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine)

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories.

There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of The Calorie Man (Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and Yellow Card Man (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these poignant questions.

BONUS AUDIO: In an exclusive introduction, author Paolo Bacigalupi explains how a horrible trip to Thailand led to the idea for The Windup Girl.

©2009 Paolo Bacigalupi (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

  • Hugo Award, Best Novel, 2010
  • Nebula Award, Best Novel, 2009
  • Best Books of 2009, Publishers Weekly
  • 10 Best Fiction Books of 2009, Time magazine
  • Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy 2009, Library Journal

"Paolo Bacigalupi's debut sci-fi novel is a stunner, especially as interpreted under the careful ministrations of narrator Jonathan Davis. The novel postulates a corrupt near-future society in Southeast Asia, where powerful corporations vie for control over rice yields by wielding bioengineered viruses as tools for profit." ( AudioFile)
" 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." ( Book Page)
"A classic dystopian novel likely to be short listed for the Nebula and Hugo Awards" ( SF Signal)

What listeners say about The Windup Girl

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great story - Narrator on Valium

Jonathan Davis MUST have been paid by the minute. I can't imagine any other reason for the glacial narration. Fortunately my Audible app lets me change the narration speed. I found "1.5 times" was about right. As a result, this was a considerably shorter book than I'd expected!

Now, the story: The Windup Girl is a fable of a world without fossil fuels, where mega-corporations claim Intellectual Property rights over genetically engineered cereal crops while millions starve. It's a story set in world where gene-hacked sub-class are quite literally, lower than trash.

It's story of contamination, where disease, superstition and revolution spread in the same way as suspicion, fear and depravity.

The Windup Girl exists in a place of poverty and decay, where your next mouthful of fresh fruit might see you coughing up blood in the gutter, and where the corrupted remnants of the police have become the most feared gang in the district.

It's challenging. Especially because of it's heavy reliance on Thai culture. So don't expect an easy page turner. That said, I absolutely loved it.

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13 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Glacial.

After investing 5 hours I have given up with this audiobook. There is way too much time dedicated to slow exposition as back stories are built. A simple activity such as hiding some cash in a hidey hole inside a bamboo wall takes about 15 minutes to achieve. For some reason I am stuck with the impression that most character conversations have to involve someone shrugging. It's a shame because the Asian post-civ setting is interesting but yes, I get it: Malaysian, Thai and Chinese people are deep thinkers whose complex cultural rules need to be navigated carefully. The trouble is that Bacigalupi hammers this home page after page after page (i.e. minute after minute after minute), at the expense of actual plot development. I perked up a bit at the introduction of the Windup Girl character, but she's barely in the first five hours of this story.
All the characters appear to be mired in their own personal misery, in a society that offers little joy. Fair enough if you like the semi-apocalyptic, post-civilisation genre, but there are other authors (Alistair Reynolds leaps to mind) who could convey the same mood but in a fraction of the time, and without sacrificing the depth that Bacigalupi seems to prioritise over action.
If there's an annotated version of this audiobook, I suggest you try that instead, unless you have infinite patience.

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Breathtaking

I'm two thirds the way through this novel, but I feel sufficiently confident thus far to post some comments. It's easy to appreciate why it has won significant awards.
Whereas I did not enjoy other works by the author, I may have to re-read and give them a second chance after this book.
It's hard not to use superlatives to describe 'Wind-up Girl'. From the start, this book is, in my subjective opinion, fascinating, stunning and visionary. I think some significant credit is also due to the excellent narration of Jonathan Davis (who, I'm noting, does a good job on several other books)
A twenty second century Bangkok is richly described and experienced through the lives of the central characters.
By moving between several characters whose lives intersect the novel keeps a freshness going between chapters.
It's not a hard science SF novel, in that the author does not get bogged down in the science of genomics, but neither does he commit any major howlers in his inferences and extrapolations. The characters are well fleshed and the story has a realistic progression. An entirely original work, though with perhaps more than a nod toward the works of other great authors such as Phillip.K.Dick. I anticipate that this will see a major cinematic adaptation at some point.

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Great book terrible narration

Paola Bacigalupi did a good job researching the nuances of Thai culture for this book, and he used Thai words carefully and appropriately. However, it took me about 5 years to finally listen all the way through because the narrator could not pronounce Thai words. It would have been easy for him to learn to say thanon, Ayutthaya, and mahout, but he did not and it sounded terrible. It would be like listening to a book about Scotland by a narrator who pronounced Edinburgh with a hard g at the end of the word. I eventually listened after several friends mentioned how good the novel is, and I stuck it out until the story got good enough to excuse the dreadful pronunciation. It would be a better book to read, rather than listen.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
  • mg
  • 05-12-20

Boring

The only reason I got to the end of this book is because I fell asleep.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Who deflated the performer?

This entire book sounds like the performer is apologising for his own existence. Even at 1.5x speed, the contemplative silences between sentences are still long enough for the listener to stop paying attention and move on with their life.

The story seemed interesting, but I can't be really sure.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

So slow

I am a prolific listener of audio books and am loathe to give one up without at least one full read through but this is very slow. You can glaze over for fifteen minutes and not lose a second of plotting. It’s densely descriptive and the narrator is excruciatingly slow. The premise is great and the book and writer have won numerous awards I think it’s likely this is a read instead of a listen. Gave up.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

A wonderful, involving read

This book just grabbed me from the beginning. Although I didn't have huge sympathy for any of the characters, the world created - in the not-too-distant-future - is all too horribly believable. The results of global warming, over use of fossil fuels and genetic modification in the hands of giant corporations (Monsanto anyone?) have left Thailand as one of the only Asian countries that still has some freedom, with rampantly mutating diseases being kept at bay by harsh methods and humans only just managing to get enough to eat. The American 'calorie man' is a kind of spy, seeking genetic information, whilst getting involved with a japanese windup girl - a genetically modified human designed to help the aging population of japan. The story escalates as characters lives interweave and crisis piles on crisis for the people of Bankok. A satisfying, well plotted and beautifully narrated story, I was sorry when it finished.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

An Engrossing Adaptation

Bacigalupi's work is always a pleasure, and it was another to find that his work had been adapted to audiobook form. His descriptions, narrative and characters are deeply immersive, and his attention to details in his hypothetical-future-Thailand is praiseworthy. Most of the painful tropes of scifi (pseudoscientific handwaving, perfect heroic men, submissive/disempowered women, abrupt introduction of too many new concepts/ideas) have been neatly evaded and subverted with a grace that borders on the balletic.

Jonathan Davis is a consistent and skilful narrator, who puts a great deal of effort into his work. In a work that evokes so many of William Gibson's themes, it is only to be expected that this choice of narrator would please author and fans alike. However, in the setting of the novel, I would have greatly enjoyed an English speaker with Thai heritage/language for the majority of the narration, and an East Asian female narrator for Emiko/Kanya's parts.

In summary, I greatly enjoyed this adaptation of The Windup Girl, and it may become a regular listen- but not near as regularly as I reread Bacigalupi's books.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Good but lacked history.

loved the dystopian future stuff. Not enough history on the destruction of our modern day society to the future depicted.

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