Up the Rebellion: The Windup Girl Book Review

At its heart, The Windup Girl is a book about rebellion. In subtle and some not so subtle ways, everything and everyone involved is in some way rebelling against something else. The titular character rebels against the genetic programming that compels her to be subservient to humans. The foreign calorie companies attempting to strike up trade with the isolationist Thai government rebel against the restrictions by trying to fund an actual rebellion. The “white shirts” of the Thai Environment Ministry rebel against the corporate vultures of the calorie companies who have inflicted so many genetically modified diseases on the world. Everywhere the characters are resistant to their loyalties, from the yellow card Hock Seng constantly betraying whoever he must to get ahead, or the farang Anderson risking deportation by striking up a relationship with the windup girl Emiko, or Kanya attempting to broker peace between the Environment and Trade Ministries, despite being paid by the Trade Ministry to betray the white shirts.

The Windup Girl reads like a disparate collection of short stories through most of the narrative. I wondered through most of the story if the author could pull all the threads together into a cohesive whole, and was pleasantly surprised when he did just that. Though the story could be classified as both steampunk or cyberpunk, or even just science-fiction, the sci-fi part of the story really takes a back seat to the real human (and extra-human) drama. One could easily have recast the story in a 19th century colonial setting with the windup girl as a slave and not skipped a beat, and in that lies its true brilliance. The story doesn’t rely on the sci-fi trappings to be worth reading, it is worth reading regardless of the reader’s interest in science-fiction.

Though well-written, the book does drag a bit in the middle, partly because of that feeling of disconnected short stories I mentioned above. The book demands patience from the reader, but it rewards that patience with a satisfying story. I look forward to more from this author. I would give the book 4 out of 5 stars.

January 17, 2012 at 8:25 pm | Books | No comment

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