wiki/The_Windup_Girl#Plot_summary
https://windupstories.com/books-short-stories/
In which I present the Wikipedia page for The Windup Girl in audio, and the stock art fever dream version that “AI” selected for each sentence:
This is a special one. For this story we leap into a world where fossil fuels are exhausted and Thailand’s flood barriers hold back a severely climate-changed world. We don’t get a lot of those details, but they shape the trade and politics of it.
What’s more, for a little flair, it’s written in present tense. Every time I think about that fact I do find other books in present tense, but this one’s delivery makes scenes a little haunted, like everything that should be at rest refuses to be quite still.
“Economic hitmen” is a phrase I still adore. Anderson Lake has a real job and real job. With fuels exhausted, energy is stored in springs for later release. This isn’t Bacigalupi’s invention—it’s the potential energy in the spring.
The cool-interfaced Anderson will be running a factory by proxy to make these kink-spring devices. This character is of two minds about his goals. He’s in Thailand to make them dependent on his company’s sterile seeds, but he also very much wants to unlock manufacturing for the behemoth of kink-springs, storing gigajoules.
Pardon a wiki interjection in the review narrative:
6 gigajoule is about the chemical energy of combusting 1 barrel (159 L) of petroleum.[22]
This blueprinted project of his could change his fortune no matter what else happens in the plot.
Thailand’s longstanding insistence on turning away the calorie companies’ sterile seeds is the important issue, but overcoming it is not just a matter of setting the date. He must create his own circumstances when none present. He’s a loyal man, and we’ll never see him falter. There is no telegraphed arc for Anderson—though his ending is as good as we can hope for him.
Via Anderson we meet his factory runner, Hock Seng, a Malaysian-Chinese man he intends to fail to supervise. Hock Seng is named differently in a prequel novelette called Yellow Card Man, but the hotly contested work that he secures is Anderson’s. If things go well, both of them could be having a lucky break.
We also soon meet Emiko, who may be positioned with information that puts Anderson’s too-clever goals that much closer to reality.
It is at this point that I will turn away from backgrounding the plot so that we can discuss Emiko and therefore this story more openly.
To read Emiko’s introductions, you must witness her perform in a sex club, and she is not like others. She is a genetically modified human designed to be a companion, or less. Not many details are on offer here, but we understand this “windup girl” was more likely grown than born. (She’s not a mechanical device.) The label makes her a toy.
Though Anderson’s perspective narrative may never spell it out on the page, his infatuation with her begins when he sees her as one of his sterile seeds: beautifully designed to be only what it is right now, to be useless otherwise.
Of course, he sees the depravity of this human object, who is also previously abandoned by a disinterested owner. Emiko’s kind are not legal here, which makes this something like an immigrant story. But she’s also young and appealing, our Lolita, and though Anderson has a good enough heart when he’s in company, we can say that he fails to contain his interest.
I’ve tried wondering at whether there is any attraction correctly suited to Emiko, and that’s the tragedy of her design. Nothing overcomes the layers of disadvantages she has been given. She is something else, like the sterilized seeds. She needs handling, or else she is not supposed to be here. There is nothing right to do with her.
To want Emiko is to err. I think that’s sufficient to extrapolate these characters. Men will want Emiko, though not frequently on the page.
Emiko herself is not often present on the page. We see Anderson and his ilk engineer the mirror dimension of good and bad, suing for the capitalistic crime of losing illegal goods that foreseeably impact the prices of honest goods. This is a political realm where up is down if the calorie men need it to be so. With only a figurehead leader and lessers to rule, Bangkok is prepared to fray and this is why the hitman has arrived.
Early, Anderson offers Emiko knowledge about a supposed refuge for Windup-like “New People” such as her. I would like to linger on this for a moment, because Anderson’s reverence for the sterile seed is powerful still. His desire that she be with her kind—which is genuine enough—is so strange. It’s possible he’s made the location up, but that’s not usually how we see Anderson behave. If he does fabricate stories, he is twitterpated.
As I read The Windup Girl, I saw in Anderson a man aroused by the irreversible objectification of a thing. The calorie men secure their markets with permanence. And yet Anderson saw some kind of future despite Emiko’s permanent objectification, that her potential energy contained additional beauty.
At some point I felt he may have been stoking his broken hope, wishing it would mend and apply to his contemporary fellows. I was led to feel this because I was triangulating from another hope, that he would reject his steadfast career in seed-killing. Maybe he would awaken to the realization that the taboo for one was the taboo lost for the other.
I’m left watching a man discover his awe for uncharted possibility. There is no component of regret that he missed this sooner. He’s caught up in a pure, seemingly original concept and he can’t get it out of his head. There was vacancy in him to feel this way and mistake it for something novel.
Perhaps simpler, his greatest eroticism is reserved for energy that is helplessly trapped. Owning its releases, winding it, and smothering it, his type is the final killer.
Anderson is not a predator on the page, but this unique book will make you unsure what you think about it for a bit. Not even mostly about Emiko, The Windup Girl is likely to provoke the reader’s own guilt for identifying with Anderson’s gaze at any point, although perhaps not so much if no part of Bacigalupi’s magic works on you.
Maybe a concept can be too damaged to be remarked on with any kind of straight face.
But I had allowed into my eyes this world of devotion to killing food sources, and I’d already found my revulsion. Emiko’s concept was a violation of humanity using the same sterilization vector, but her presentation harbored the only remaining taboo. At minimum, I read to know what a world like that deemed fair for Emiko in the end.
We judge imperfect things all the time to steer towards value. A windup girl is attached to tragedy, and if you can feel that when she dances, you can decide what her fictional life means to you.
The Wikipedia text lyrics follow:
Anderson Lake is an economic hitman for the AgriGen Corporation, working in Thailand. He owns a factory trying to mass-produce a revolutionary new model of kink-spring (the successor, in the absence of oil or petroleum, to the internal combustion engine) that will store gigajoules of energy. However, the factory is a cover for his real mission: discovering the location of the Thai seedbank, with which Thailand has so far managed to resist the calorie companies' attempts at agro-economic subjugation. He has heavily delegated the running of the factory to his manager, Hock Seng, a refugee from the Malaysian purge of the ethnic Chinese. Hock Seng was a successful businessman in his former life and longs for a return to his former status. To this end, he plots to steal the kink-spring designs kept in Anderson's safe.
When Anderson visits a sex club, he meets Emiko, a "windup girl" - a genetically modified human created as a servant and companion. Windups are illegal in Thailand; Emiko was brought to Bangkok and abandoned by her owner, a Japanese delegate on a diplomatic mission. Emiko lives in fear of being discovered and murdered by the Environment Ministry, and is currently in bonded servitude to Raleigh, the owner of the club. She reveals to Anderson information she has learned about the secret seedbank. In return, he tells her about a refuge in the north of Thailand where people of Emiko's kind (the "New People") live together. She becomes determined to escape to this place by paying off Raleigh.
Meanwhile, the Environment Ministry' enforcement wing, known as the White Shirts, intercepts and destroys a valuable shipment of contraband. Anderson and others in the foreign trading community demand that Jaidee Rojjanasukchai, the zealous and honest captain of the White Shirts, be punished; to force Jaidee's compliance with these measures, Akkarat has Jaidee's wife kidnapped. Jaidee initially submits and is sentenced to nine years in a monastery. However, he soon realizes that he will never see his wife again, and she has likely been murdered. He escapes, but is caught and killed when he attempts to assassinate Akkarat. The other White Shirts declare him a martyr and rise up against the Trade Ministry.
At the same time, Hock Seng learns that factory workers are falling victim to a new plague originating from the kink-spring factory and has the bodies disposed of surreptitiously. As the White Shirts take control of Bangkok, he escapes from the factory into hiding. Anderson discovers Hock Seng's flight and does the same.
Jaidee's replacement and former protégé, Kanya, discovers the new plague and sets about trying to contain it while dealing with guilt of being Akkarat's mole and betraying Jaidee. She reluctantly seeks help from Gibbons, the scientist at the heart of the Thai seedbank, who is revealed to be a renegade AgriGen scientist. He identifies the new plague and gives Kanya clues that lead her to Anderson's factory.
Anderson meets with Akkarat and the Somdet Chaopraya. Anderson offers to supply a new strain of GM rice and a private army from AgriGen to repel the White Shirts in exchange for access to the seedbank and lowering of the trade barriers. Knowing of the Somdet Chaopraya's addiction to sexual novelty, he takes him to Emiko's club. When the Somdet Chaopraya and his entourage later sexually humiliate and degrade her, Emiko snaps and kills them. She escapes and seeks refuge with Anderson. Akkarat accuses General Pracha of orchestrating the Somdet Chaopraya's assassination, and the capital is plunged into civil war.
Having failed to steal the kink-spring designs, Hock Seng tries to capture Emiko for ransom. However, Anderson makes a deal with him: Hock Seng will be patronized by AgriGen and Emiko will remain with Anderson.
In short order, Pracha and most of the top Environment Ministry men are killed. Akkarat, now all-powerful, appoints his spy Kanya as the new chief of the Environment Ministry. He also opens up Thailand to the calorie companies, and grants Anderson and AgriGen access to the seedbank.
Kanya accompanies the "calorie men" to the seedbank, where she reneges and executes the AgriGen team. She then directs the seedbank's monks to move the seeds to a pre-arranged secure location. With the hidden military arsenal in the seedbank, she orchestrates the destruction of the levees around Bangkok, flooding it.
Bangkok's people and the capital relocate to the site of Ayutthaya. Akkarat is stripped of his powers and sentenced to servitude as a monk. Anderson dies of the plague originating from his own factory while he is in hiding with Emiko. Emiko is found by Gibbons, who promises that he will use Emiko's DNA to engineer a new race of fertile New People, thus fulfilling her dream of living with her own kind.
