Can Paolo Bacigalupis novel The Windup Girl save the world?
In The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books, $24.95), Paolo Bacigalupi’s first novel, a novel you could drown in, a tale so tidal with the Near Future that any claim to stake out the territory it surveys might seem Canute-ish, there does remain a least one human who still hopes to hold on to the world. He is a character, it follows, from the planet-shattering past we all remember, as residents of this planet who remember the 20th century, and as readers of science fiction, the literature that said the 20th century was going to work. He is (of course) male, white, smart, old. Like so many of the mad scientists and realpolitiking consiglieri who claimed sovereignty over the rest of us throughout the literature of the past century, he is a Faustian entrepreneur, a transformer of the planet for gain. He is selfish, rapacious, cunning, loquacious, profoundly cynical. His fingers are in the pie, even now, in what seems to be the early 22nd century, in Thailand, a country sanisealed from global dev
