The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi – review

Last year, two novels divided pretty much all the big SF literary prizes between them. China Miéville's fable of urban duplicity, The City & the City, won the BSFA and Arthur C Clarke awards; and Paolo Bacigalupi's energetic future-thriller The Windup Girl won the John W Campbell and the Locus first novel. The duopoly of merit was reinforced when the genre's biggest prize, the Hugo, split its novel award between Miéville and Bacigalupi: a pretty much unprecedented event. Evidently, it's the wisdom of SF crowds that these two novels represent the best contemporary writing the genre has to offer.

Accordingly, readers interested but not expert in contemporary SF and wondering where to start – the sci-fi-curious, we might say – could do a lot worse than these titles. Of the two, The City & the City is probably the better novel, partly because it is more formally ambitious. But The Windup Girl is a very accomplished piece of writing, all the more impressive given that it's Bacigalupi's first novel.

Its strongest feature is the worldbuilding – the intricately believable portrait of a future Thailand fighting back from environmental collapse. Crops are regularly devastated by genetically engineered blights, cities threatened by risen sea levels. Post-oil, society is powered by calories; spring-driven motors are wound up by bioengineered mammoths on treadmills. Merchants still trade, politicians still jockey for position, and fundamentalism still thrives. Bacigalupi's Bangkok is corrupt, riven, brawling and volatile, but also suffused with bustling, exhilarating energy.

The protagonist is Anderson Lake, an American ostensibly in Bangkok to develop a new variety of motor-spring, in fact secretly scouting for blight-resistant foodstuffs. A hard-bitten company man, Anderson is as surprised as we are when he falls in love with the "windup girl" of the novel's title, a bioengineered artificial human called Emiko. Though created as a geisha for the executive Japanese market, Emiko has ended up in a ghastly Thai brothel. Her relationship with Anderson is often touching, and Bacigalupi generates real poignancy out of her degradation, though I'm not sure he quite gets the balance right between critiquing Emiko's sexual objectification and simply reproducing it.

The Windup Girl has been compared to William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, and it's easy to see why. The plot-twists, the bursts of violence and a noir stylishness are all here. Perhaps the very qualities that make it a good entry-level text for SF newcomers may make it a little overfamiliar for more hardened fans. It's hardly the first novel to swap the "cyber" in cyberpunk for genetics (Paul McAuley's superb Fairyland did that in 1995); and Ian McDonald has already staked out the "westerners writing developing world SF" territory.

But there's no doubting the intelligence of Bacigalupi's imagination, or his readability. The narrative alternates between passages of blasting action and lower-key character interaction: a convention of thriller plotting that, though a little cheesy, is certainly effective. At 544 pages, it's probably 100-or-so pages too long, and a much-anticipated encounter with a genetic wizard called Gibbons reads slightly anticlimactically at the end. But when it hits its sweet-spot, 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.

Adam Roberts's Yellow Blue Tibia is published by Gollancz.