Recommendations from our site
“This is a book I encountered when it was doing the rounds the first time, and yes, it did extraordinarily well, and deservingly so. It is set in a near-ish future, post an energy and climate collapse. It’s set in Thailand. The windup girl of the title is, to be blunt, essentially a sex-bot who is wandering around feral through a lot of the story. It’s not really about her – or it – that’s just an extra interesting thing that Bacigalupi is looking at. There is a dystopian regime running Thailand, and the whole world is in a fairly poor situation. This book gives you the cold equations of what happens if you’re trying to run a state after the collapse of globalism: what it comes down to is calories. You don’t have fossil fuels – what fossil fuels you do have are very carefully hoarded – so all of your physical power is coming out of animal and human labour.” Read more...
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Novelist
