The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
I usually reserve five stars for stories that I greatly enjoy, or those that evoke strong emotion. By those criteria, The Windup Girl is somewhere between a three and a four on my scale. So why a five? Good question. Here goes.
This novel is absolutely jam-packed with incredible concepts - enough to make my head spin. In that respect it reminded me of William Gibson's Neuromancer, opening a new world of thought about a very plausible and well-constructed future. Calorie plagues, calorie corporations, kink spring power supplies, imperfect androids, biological manufacturing agents - the list goes on and on of novel ideas fleshed out with amazing realism by the author. All of that is set against a future Malaysian metropolis that seems so bizarre yet achingly familiar that I feel as if it is a real place, here and now. The author expertly executes the telling through multiple points of view but in a present tense that gives immediacy to the action.
So, yes, I did not absolutely love this story, nor did I shed tears over the darkness of it. But this novel stretched my brain, and for that I will never forget it.
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