here<\/a>) 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\u2019t spark me with Joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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\u2019s it\u2026 There\u2019s not much more to it than that. As mentioned before these are all established tropes now. You\u2019ve got the climate refugees, merciless Western corporate-states and the question of android ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t feel Thai in the way that parts of the Three Body Problem trilogy felt Chinese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s just not very interesting as a concept. It\u2019s all very human and could just as easily be any other minority. Just because it\u2019s an android, doesn\u2019t make it interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s all there is. A piece of fruit with good marketing and some interesting colours, but tasteless and bland within. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
He’s met calorie executives like this. Men intoxicated on their power and influence, their ability to bring nations to heel with the threat of a SoyPRO embargo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":976,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions\/976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}