The Windup Girl
Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; she is an engineered being, crèche-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 and Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and "Yellow Card Man" (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these important questions. Paolo Bacigalupi's short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the environmental journal High Country News. His fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best sf short story of the year. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated in numerous western newspapers including the Idaho Statesman, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Salt Lake Tribune. He lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he is working on his next novel. Praise for Paolo Bacigalupi: "The most anticipated science fiction novel of the year. Bacigalupi takes the ideas and themes from his award-winning short fiction and explores them in greater complexity and depth than ever before. The results are spectacular. You won't see the future the same way ever again." "Paolo Bacigalupi is the best short-fiction writer to emerge in the past decade; he's the Ted Chiang of the new millennium. He combines beautiful prose, startling imagery, and shocking ideas in unforgettable ways." "Paolo Bacigalupi is quite simply one of the best young writers to come down the pike in the last decade. For anyone who hasn't gotten the news yet, Pump Six is a wonderful introduction to a singular and remarkable talent whose work will be around for years to come." "Ferocious, intelligent, and precisely rendered, these stories include some of my favorite contes cruels and cautionary tales for the twenty-first century. Paolo Bacigalupi is clearly the fifth rider of the Apocalypse—you know, the one who writes science fiction in his spare time." "I hate this guy. All of a sudden he comes out of nowhere, writing like a weird angel, and winning awards, and knocking us old pros out of the box with stories about stuff we hadn't gotten around to thinking up yet. (Like that stupid bio dog!) Plus he's young and good looking. Luckily, he has an unpronounceable name." Cover Art by Raphael Lacoste |
|
|
First printing, September 2009 Distributed by Night Shade Books Printed in the United States of America |
ISBN-13: 978-1-59780-157-7
|
For Anjula |
|
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... 