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The Windup Girl

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Calories, power, and engineered lives in a near-future Bangkok

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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Nebula Award winner for Best Novel

    Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel, as stated in the supplied description.

AlbakiReads Editorial

Calories, power, and engineered lives in a near-future Bangkok

Set in a Bangkok shaped by the end of the oil age, food scarcity, and bio-engineered plagues, the novel brings corporate competition over food supplies into contact with the lives of engineered people. Anderson Lake searches for foodstuffs believed extinct while Emiko, abandoned in the city, faces a society that treats New People as property. Their intersecting circumstances frame questions about who controls essential resources and how biotechnology can be used for profit and power. This edition also includes two related novelettes, “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man,” along with a Q&A with the author.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in near-future dystopias involving food scarcity, biotechnology, and corporate power.
  • Readers who enjoy science fiction centered on social questions about engineered life and resource control.
  • Those seeking a novel accompanied by related stories and an author Q&A.

Themes

Food scarcity and control of resourcesBiotechnology and engineered lifeCorporate powerSocial status and exploitation

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, the break-out science fiction debut featuring additional stories and a Q&A with the author.

Anderson Lake is AgriGen's Calorie Man, sent to work undercover as a factory manager in Thailand while combing Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories.

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. Emiko is not human; she is an engineered being, grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in this chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits and forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? Bacigalupi delivers one of the most highly-acclaimed science fiction novels of the twenty-first century.

In this brand-new edition celebrating the book's reception into the canon of celebrated modern science fiction, accompanying the text are two novelettes exploring the dystopian world of The Windup Girl, the Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning "The Calorie Man" and "Yellow Card Man." Also included is an exclusive Q&A with the author describing his writing process, the political climate into which his debut novel was published, and the future of science fiction.

Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
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