The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (my science fiction example)

          The backdrop for Paolo Bacigalupi's 2009 science fiction novel The Windup Girl (New York: Night Shade Books) is 23rd-century Thailand. Anderson Lake works for megacorporation AgriGen’s Thailand branch. His job is to create markets for his company’s trademarked genetically modified foodstuffs. Global biotech corporations like AgriGen, known as “calorie companies,” have made non-genetically modified foodstuffs almost extinct and have created a dependent global market on their products in the process. However, their products have been genetically modified to be sterile, and soon the world, already plagued with global warming, slavery, big business, and literal plagues, will run out of food. In this food-strapped future, calories have become the global currency, and whoever controls food and food production controls the world.

          Lake’s job is to go out and find foodstuffs that are believed to be extinct in order to ensure AgriGen’s profits and dominance. On his mission he finds Emiko, a genetically modified/engineered person known as a “Windup Girl.” She, and others like her, were built as slaves, but after being cast aside, Emiko now lives illegally in the slums of Bangkok. After her path crosses with Lake’s, she looks to him to help her to safety.

          Bacigalupi’s novel deals with a lot of dark themes in a deep, thought-provoking way. These themes include: maintaining and expanding food production to keep up with an exponentially growing global population; maintaining food quality when faced with genetically modified organisms and the ramifications of these engineered food products and animals (and people); the existence of artificial intelligence and engineered people and their treatment in society; global warming getting worse; growing overconsumption and materialism despite a lack of global resources; the rule of big business in place of governments; the use of terror and war to gain access to and control over these resources; and, plagues and illness running rampant. And what makes this novel more chilling – and therefore more important to read – is that these are all themes running through modern-day society. Bacigalupi uses scientific and social issues that concern societies in the present and plays them out in the fictional near-future to provide his readers with a haunting “what if” scenario that feels much less far-fetched than it should. Like young adult dystopian novels set in future societies, such as The Giver, The Hunger Games, and Divergent,  The Windup Girl serves as an ominous warning of what could be if we stay on our current path. It is a novel that forces its readers to reflect on the present and to (re)think their, and their society’s, choices and actions. Recommended for ages 14 and up.

--Ashley Cleeves