The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl is a science fiction novel by the American writer Paolo Bacigalupi, published in 2009. It was his first novel, and in 2010 it won the Nebula Award and shared the Hugo Award for Best Novel with China Mieville's The City and The City.

The world of the book has been shaped by two things: global warming, which has raised the sea level and drowned coasts, and the exhaustion of the carbon fuels that the twentieth century ran on. What remains is a set of city-states and trading companies that depend on manufactured food, engineered crops and the biological and genetic patents that go with them, and a merchant class whose wealth comes from controlling seed.

Bacigalupi had already written stories in this setting and returns to it here. The novel follows a group of characters whose interests run against one another in Bangkok, including traders competing for access to the gene banks, a Thai official trying to keep his country out of the hands of its neighbours, and Emiko, an engineered person made for a purpose she did not choose, who is the windup girl of the title.