The Windup Girl

De: Paolo Bacigalupi

Narrado por: Jonathan Davis

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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

• 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)

Good and also Frustrating

The good about this book: Jonathan Davis, who did a great job, as usual. The plot was intricate and fascinating, the characters were all very complex and multi-layered. It's a very scary and creepily possible sounding future, so this book was great, except for...

the bad: I could only listen to a little bit of this each day, and as result, it's taken forever to finish it. I know it's supposed to be dystopian, but good heavens...it was such a relentess bummer, I had to turn it off and go listen to some current news (war in Iraq, bank failures, rising foreclosures rates, jellyfish invasions, etc) just to lighten my mood. In addition, this novel is so crammed with repetitive exposition, it made me scream more than once in the car, "She's obedient and she doesn't like it...he's an incorruptible fighter and a hero to the people...he's afraid he'll get killed with a machete before he buys his clipper ship...I got it, I got it, I GOT IT!"

It took a lot of patience to finish this, so I can't exactly call it gripping--but it was a very fascinating trip.

Rated in halves

No doubt, the first half of this book is paced more slowly than the last half. It was interesting, and very detailed, which sets a good stage for the latter half where things pick up exponentially. If you can be patient with an initially slow plot, you'll be ok. Coupled with this slower plot pace in the beginning, I also agree with the previous reviews that much of the content in the first half is unnecessary to the finish. It felt to me as if the last half of the book was written first, and the beginning of the book was added for context. I give the first half three stars, and the last half five stars.

The "prologue" by the author is great backstory, and you can really see the parallels and motivation behind his tale, based on his real life experiences.

The narration was good -- but some of the section breaks within chapters weren't noted by a long enough pause, or something. Two characters would be in a discussion one moment, and the next, it would be two totally different characters in a totally different place.... On a printed page, the section breaks are clear and anticipated, but this audiobook needed a little more of a pause in between to make it easier to transition from scene to scene. Aside from this nitpick, very very good narration.

Overall, it's a very interesting book comprised of a rich near-future world set in a compelling location, with love-hate characters. If you're patient with the first half, you'll be well rewarded.

Bangkok Struggling

Paolo Bacigalupi has written a book set in Bangkok inspired by a visit he made there. In this grim science fiction work, he presents a bleak story that will not turn the listerner loose. Social, economic, technological, and biological issues all come together to propell a story of and study of the human condition.

This is my first foray into science fiction and I am impressed. This is one mind bending ride. I would think that SF fans would find this volume a step apart. Those who are willing to approach this book with an open mind and willing to get through some dry parts (for me) will be rewarded.

The narration is excellent.

Brilliant new sci-fi voice, superb narration

This book deserves its Nebula. Set in Thailand in a post-petroleum future where Western "calorie companies" unleash genetically engineered plagues to force the rest of the world to buy their seeds, The Windup Girl tells the story of Thailand's struggle to remain free of the grasp of greedy farang (foreigners), from the POV of several characters. Although the multiple POvs are sometimes annoying (especially since most of the characters aren't very likeable), each one has a compelling story in the end. The narrator does an excellent job of giving each character a distinct voice and pronouncing the Thai words which are unfamiliar to most English-speakers' ears.

Great Audio Book

I really, really liked this audio book. The narrator did a fantastic job with giving each character a unique voice. But the best part was the story, it was very intriguing and I found myself listening to this book every moment I had. Great science fiction.

I got Wound Up by this Dytopian Future

Calories as currency. Engineered beings regarded as soulless replicants.
A bleak future well defined and recorded in endless detail.
I hope the future is not so bleak for my grandchild's sake but I can see it coming.
Those who like the stories of Gibson, Stephenson and Morgan should enjoy the premise of The Windup Girl even if the style is more Morgan than Stephenson or Gibson.
Well worth the time served it still haunts my memory

good stuff, recommended buy even at 3 star

solid, pleasurable narration with good mix of voices and great audio; excellent concept and well-defined world...a good listen and worth a credit. Negatives for me is it seemed to go on and on with little strength of content, could have been wrapped up 3 hours earlier with no loss of effect and impact. Great characters that were often fully fleshed out but with plot lines that never reach their potential. Cool characters appear and disappear and never get their due; and in the end The Wind-Up Girl, while somehow the focus of the story, doesn't seem to matter all that much.

All things are connected and have consequences

Any additional comments?

The most important thing a science fiction novel must be is believable, if it can do that then it can get away with anything else and The Windup Girl pulls this off wonderfully. Paolo Bacigalupi has created a future world, Thailand, so dense and teeming with life, with heat, and with mystery that you can almost smell this imagined city, feel the sweat on your body, hear the noise of the over-cramped city. This is a fully realized world that never once loses its internal consistency; everything that happens is a natural extension of the world Bacigalupi has created.

What most stuck me about this novel was how terrifying the actual possibility of this world he creates is. While we imagine we have total control over genetically modified seeds and crops, or no matter how certain we are that cloning is perfectly safe, Bacigalupi taps into that uneasy feeling we all have deep down that we're not totally convinced we are masters of science. How do we know for certain that we aren't creating something that could go horribly, horribly wrong? Whose to say that a real company like Monsanto won't accidentally produce a strain of genetically modified wheat that winds up killing all the natural strains or infects some beetle that begins a plague? How can we really know all the possible consequences of our actions?

And this book is all about consequences and how each action effects another, seemingly unrelated action, how what one character does in an act of self defense can actually send an entire city into civil war. It's a valid point to think about because it speaks of responsibility.

One of Bacigalupi's great skills is in how he presents information in this world he has created. The names he's given to the various blights, diseases, companies, and people feel absolutely genuine: blister rust, cibiscosis, calorie-men, yellow cards, white shirts, kink springs; Bacigalupi gets the feel of this future just right. He also draws on a lot of recognizable themes from other great science fiction stories: I could sense he was inspired a lot from 'Blade Runner', 'Ghost In The Shell', and the brilliant but little seen 'Texhnolyze', but that he's also part of a new trend in science fiction to get away from urban American settings and make it a more global genre - District 9, Halo, and Junot Díaz's short story 'Monstro'.

This book is also part of another trend in science fiction where it takes its themes seriously to tell a story worth paying attention to: Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go' and McCarthy's 'The Road' both come to mind as stories that are warnings about our own future and, like any good sci-fi story, what it means to be human. And the final scene of this novel, the epilogue scene, is a wonderful scene where old meets new amid total devastation.

And though I am by no means an alarmist concerning the advancement of science, Paolo Bacigalupi makes a strong case for always siding with caution because you can never be to sure what trouble you might get yourself into. In that way this book is somewhat similar to Lovecraft's 'At The Mountains of Madness' in that you better be careful about messing with a nature you do not fully understand or else you might unleash something so terrible as to never be able to go back.

This is a fantastic novel full of great ideas, beautiful imagery (Bacigalupi is a helluva writer in that regard), and terrifying possibilities. The book is a tad too long, but never dull and no opportunity is wasted to continue building the Thailand in this story.

STUNNING! Richly imagined and artfully revealed!

Where does The Windup Girl rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

In my top ten. The Windup Girl outdoes some of the great classics of a dark future.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Windup Girl?

Pick almost any scene, Mr. Bacigalupi creates such believable detail you can hear and smell his Bangkok after the

Which scene was your favorite?

The epic chaos that leads to the fall of the government paints a broad picture filled with intimate detail.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

... a vision so rich, terrifying, and real, your head will spin.

Any additional comments?

I can't wait for Mr. Bacigalupi's next work.

Real Good But Not As Good As Hyped

Dang, I wanted to love this book. With all the good reviews and awards the thing got I was looking forward to this as a new favorite that I could go back to every couple of years. Don't get me wrong - I really really liked it. But it's not going down in history as an all-time fave. The characters are great - the sci fi dystopic vision is thought provoking and feels real. It's not just a good genre book - it's a good novel. But in the end - I wasn't blown away with the way the plot resolves. I think I wanted to see what happens after the novel ends - maybe there is a sequel to come but it feels like an ending that is meant to be the ending. The narrator does a good job of creating a bunch of different accents for characters without calling attention to himself - enhancing the words rather than making it about the performance. Definitely a worthwhile listen - I think my expectations were a bit too high.