Recommend: No
I wasn’t going to review this book. Not every book gets a review. However, I read this book immediately before Starfish by Peter Watts (see review here) and wanted to reflect on what made that so good in comparison to this book. I finished Starfish in 24 hours, this book dragged out for a few months. Starfish left me thinking thoughts I had never entertained before. This book seemed more like someone had pulled out some paint and presented old tropes as something novel and exciting. The Windup Girl is not necessarily a bad book, but as Marie Kondo would say, it just didn’t spark me with Joy.
The Windup Girl is set in a near-future Earth in the midst of a global-warming trauma where genetic corporations control the planet. And, that’s it… There’s not much more to it than that. As mentioned before these are all established tropes now. You’ve got the climate refugees, merciless Western corporate-states and the question of android ethics.
The book is based in Thailand, the sole surviving nation state in South East Asia. This is refreshing and gives a bit of flavour to some of the characters (although 2/3 of the main characters are Western or Chinese expats), but nothing really unique is done with it. It didn’t feel Thai in the way that parts of the Three Body Problem trilogy felt Chinese.
The eponymous windup girl is a Japanese android, wholly unsuited for life in the tropics, but forced to live a degrading existence after being abandoned there. She is presented, fait accompli, as fully conscious and intelligent, but just trained to obey. There’s no subtlety here. She is abused by people who fail to (or refuse to) see her as human and has genuine emotional reactions to this. Unfortunately, that’s just not very interesting as a concept. It’s all very human and could just as easily be any other minority. Just because it’s an android, doesn’t make it interesting.
As mentioned in my Starfish review, I think great sci-fi reaches out and makes you think about the world differently. This book is basically just a setting with a generic plot. It makes you think it is doing something novel with talk of genehacks and blisterrust, but after a few hundred pages you realise that’s all there is. A piece of fruit with good marketing and some interesting colours, but tasteless and bland within.
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