Thursday, February 25, 2010
The Windup Girl
Over at i09 they've begun their book club on Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.
The book meets a categorical need in science fiction for novelty, which I appreciate particularly after the last decade of relatively trouble-free and bodiless singularities, (not to mention the still-popular warhorse starship captains living out their midlife crises among weird galactic fauna). The Windup Girl, by contrast, is willfully Earthbound, set as it is in a grimy, superflorid Thailand, which is itself an uncommon enough setting in science fiction to fulfill the fickle standards of novelty. Most interestingly, Bacigalupi's novel deals with the special mash-up of political and scientific anxiety represented by current concerns over global warming, peak-oil and AgriGen profligacy, and which is not really represented anywhere else in science fiction. There is no question of a singularity occurring in Bacigalupi's future. There is hardly any electricity. Instead, joules are counted to the last, and are most powerfully produced by genetically modified megodonts and by high powered mechanical "kink-springs."
I'm on the fence regarding his style, and from the look of i09's message boards, I've got company. On one hand, he's a great handler of SF wonkiness. Lines like "mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-finned plaa" practically squiggle with undergrowth. On the other hand, the prose becomes laden with this stuff. One solution to world building in SF is to glide past the particulars elegantly and to leave some things mysteriously unexplained. The other tack is Bacigalupi's: leave no info undumped. One character will say one thing, there will be some exposition about the manufacture of kingsprings, and then a few pages later he will get an answer. This is not Proustian recall, either: the dude's meticulously cataloging the world. Nonetheless he owns this world, and is not only proud to display it, but wants its constituent parts underfoot and overhead. His style betrays a desire to wed life with the information we use to explain it.
Still, what a world to own. To say The Windup Girl is resolutely Earthbound is not to say it doesn't have a beautifully realized unreality. The cheshires and megodonts and genetically modified humans in this world should delight any SF fan in need of something strange to snack on. Aliens abound here, and betray the fact that Bacigalupi's achievement is defiantly unliterary, in a context in which the literary is synonymous with the dull and apparently unfashioned. Which is to say that the political responsibilities charged to any reader of The Windup Girl still remain political and not confused with the author's inventions, even when the book garishly reminds you of them. Apocalypse should be so much fun in every fiction. ¶ 2:20 PM
Over at i09 they've begun their book club on Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.
The book meets a categorical need in science fiction for novelty, which I appreciate particularly after the last decade of relatively trouble-free and bodiless singularities, (not to mention the still-popular warhorse starship captains living out their midlife crises among weird galactic fauna). The Windup Girl, by contrast, is willfully Earthbound, set as it is in a grimy, superflorid Thailand, which is itself an uncommon enough setting in science fiction to fulfill the fickle standards of novelty. Most interestingly, Bacigalupi's novel deals with the special mash-up of political and scientific anxiety represented by current concerns over global warming, peak-oil and AgriGen profligacy, and which is not really represented anywhere else in science fiction. There is no question of a singularity occurring in Bacigalupi's future. There is hardly any electricity. Instead, joules are counted to the last, and are most powerfully produced by genetically modified megodonts and by high powered mechanical "kink-springs."
I'm on the fence regarding his style, and from the look of i09's message boards, I've got company. On one hand, he's a great handler of SF wonkiness. Lines like "mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-finned plaa" practically squiggle with undergrowth. On the other hand, the prose becomes laden with this stuff. One solution to world building in SF is to glide past the particulars elegantly and to leave some things mysteriously unexplained. The other tack is Bacigalupi's: leave no info undumped. One character will say one thing, there will be some exposition about the manufacture of kingsprings, and then a few pages later he will get an answer. This is not Proustian recall, either: the dude's meticulously cataloging the world. Nonetheless he owns this world, and is not only proud to display it, but wants its constituent parts underfoot and overhead. His style betrays a desire to wed life with the information we use to explain it.
Still, what a world to own. To say The Windup Girl is resolutely Earthbound is not to say it doesn't have a beautifully realized unreality. The cheshires and megodonts and genetically modified humans in this world should delight any SF fan in need of something strange to snack on. Aliens abound here, and betray the fact that Bacigalupi's achievement is defiantly unliterary, in a context in which the literary is synonymous with the dull and apparently unfashioned. Which is to say that the political responsibilities charged to any reader of The Windup Girl still remain political and not confused with the author's inventions, even when the book garishly reminds you of them. Apocalypse should be so much fun in every fiction. ¶ 2:20 PM
