Book Review!

Huzzah! Today's post will be a book review! A welcome deviation from the usual (and a happier post than the last, no less!).

The subject of this review is The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is, as of this writing, one of the nominees for the Hugo Award, one of the more popular awards for the science fiction novel. The voting is actually taking place in August and may have already zipped by for all I know. What I do know is that the novel selection for the Hugo has yet to be announced. The Hugo actually is given out to all sorts of media types.

Anyway, The Windup Girl. Yes. Actually quite short by sci-fi standards at 360 pages (I think the average sci-fi book is about 600, or so it seems...), it follows several characters who are all connected at some point throughout the story. TWG, as I will refer to it, is plot driven to the point where it doesn't seem like the characters are dynamic unless the plot requires them to be dynamic. Out of five main characters, only two at best, one at least, are dynamic. Emiko, the inspiration for the title, is a created being who genetically mimics humans, otherwise known as a windup, is the most dynamic, which is interesting, because she's the last main character to be introduced and doesn't get a lot of 'exposure' (she starts off in a whorehouse) until the second half of the story. Meanwhile, the first and second characters introduced, Anderson and Hock Seng, are perhaps among the flattest characters outside of a one-chapter villain that I've ever read. Especially Hock Seng. Then there's a character I can't even remember what her name is, whose dynamicity extends only so far as the last two pages in the book. Jaidee is sort of dynamic, because he doesn't really change until just before he dies (and then he haunts what's-her-name, since she is promoted in his place in government organization).

As for setting, TWG is quite different and hard to believe until it's read, so that's a big plus for sci-fi selection. It's future earth but after several military and natural disasters have ravaged resources to the point where calories have become a commodity. Anderson is trying to find new species of foodstuff that can survive so that he can have his genetics company make a profit. There are also several genetically modified creatures that play a prominent role in the local flavor of the story.

By the end of TWG, the only character any hard information is given up for is Emiko, whereas Anderson has a definite ending, if you know what I mean. Hock Seng and what's-her-name are given implicit fates (as far as we can tell...), and then Jaidee is already dead for half the story, but you never know if he finally departs for the next life. I say next life, because the story gets a lot of local flavor out of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as italicized sayings in Hindi or Thai. Therefore, there is a lot of mention about the next life among the native inhabitants. Anderson is an American, Hock Seng is a Chinese refugee, and Emiko is, essentially, a piece of discarded Japanese technology.

The language in TWG is bland in that trying-not-to-be-bland way. You know, as if simpler words that easier and quicker to process wasn't enough of a hassle when writing the book, but the flipside is that it sounds like any other authors' attempts at trying to 'freshen' up vocabulary in that very romanticized notion of how we believe Shakespeare revolutionized the English vocabulary with twisting words into new usages and / or meanings.

Overall, I'd give TWG a 3.5 out of 5 (or a 7 out of 10 for you more precise literary worrywarts), since the ending is unforeseeable until it happens (although I'm not so sure that's a good thing or not) and the plot was good enough to get me to read more and more as it moved along. The characters were flat, but the story worked well enough with such (strength of story or weakness of storytelling? You be the judge) and ended up with the uber-realistic conclusion - one of one part hope, five parts misery.

My current read, the steampunk genre novel Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, is also up for the 2010 Hugo Award, but it's already better than TWG, and I'm not even 90 pages in, yet. I already have in my head two actors for the two main characters - Charlize Theron as the mother and Max Records (Max from Where the Wild Things Are) as the son. Fun fun!

I'll try to complete the second part of the L5R post next time. Stay tuned.