I did find it a bit slow in getting going but once you're fully in his world it's riveting right through to the twisty turny end. Please let there not be a sequel - I really liked the various words/things/incidents/technologies referred to obliquely but left unexplained, and I'd like what happens next to stay like that too. ( )

Interesting and provoking. Misleading title; I kept waiting for the story to focus more on the wind-up girl. Perhaps it should have been called The Company Man.

It's one of those dystopian allegories where she represents something or other to a guy that is involved in exploiting the world. I think. I should have wrote a better review. Interesting message, uncomfortable delivery.

His vision of the future is very dark, and I think he spends a lot of time, in all his works, exploring the fractures in humanity. There's a lot of casual violence, oppression and filth--much like the real world. I think he does it on purpose as part of the message and world-building, but it easily becomes overwhelming.

Update to self: I did finish, but wasn't up to the task of reviewing. Complicated and uncomfortable.

I think I'll get rid of it when I'm back home. I prefer to keep The Water Knife as an example of his works. ( )

Because of Data Mutt's review.
.........
Sorry. Wanted to love it as I love hard SF, ideas, world-building, "What If" questions. But I just couldn't care about the characters, and was turned off by the violence & gore & rape. Put it down at page 60, then read the Epilogue, and decided I'd pretty much gotten to gist of it.

I really gotta be careful about picking up things that are "beautifully written explorations of human nature & thoughtful explorations of humanity's future" because they're all too often dystopias and I'm just not into that negativity. [b:Stand on Zanzibar|41069|Stand on Zanzibar|John Brunner|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1360613921s/41069.jpg|2184253] was a good book... a few others... enough.

Though it gets a bit slow in the middle, this book presents a fully-realized future where oil is a thing of the past, and trade is in calories. Epidemics from created organisms have swept the world, and in Thailand the task is to protect its library of native seed stock. Against the fast-moving story of conspiracy and revolution is the story of the Windup Girl, Emiko, a New Person, created by genetic scientists who made things like huge megodonts and cheshire cats. There's an awful lot going on in the book and sometimes the exposition feels like it will dwarf the plot and characters, but the payoff works. ( )

‘The Windup Girl’ is a novel of exemplary world-building and characters who exist only to suffer. It depicts Bangkok struggling to survive in a dangerous future of runaway climate change, famine, and pandemics. The details make it vivid: monks praying to keep the back the rising seas, treadle-powered computers, and genetically engineered beasts of burden. Against this bright and detailed backdrop, the main characters seem strangely flat. Particularly, I was rather disappointed to find, the titular character. Emiko is an artificial being who has been abandoned in Bangkok by her Japanese owner. To avoid being quite literally turned into mulch, she is a sex slave. It’s all very depressing and, frankly, unoriginal. How many times have I read a cyberpunk novel in which an underage (or underage-looking) female sex worker suffers in unpleasant detail until a Slightly Better Man becomes obsessed with saving her from her pimp? Too many. Emiko’s narrative was thus rather frustrating. Turning her into an amateur sex assassin was hardly innovative, either.

More original, albeit not much less grimly depressing, were the tales of a Chinese refugee’s attempts to survive and of white shirted Environment Ministry enforcers. I found the backdrop to these individual struggles rather more engaging: parallel power struggles between government factions and between Thailand and Western agribusiness. Somehow these conflicts work better in the abstract than when personified in the main characters. Two reasons for this particularly suggest themselves: the characters do nothing but angst and several very significant plot developments occur off-page. Most notably, the destruction of Bangkok after the flood defences fail! It was a very odd choice to brush past the denouement like this. Bangkok was evidently the main character and the one I took most interest in, so killing it off so unceremoniously did not sit well with me. Especially as this was no short, fast-paced novel. There was enough time for several horrible scenes of Emiko being raped, but none for catastrophic flooding? While I love it when novels extrapolate the effects of climate change in thorough and imaginative manner, the plot seemed so similar to 90s grimdark cyberpunk that it didn’t live up to its setting. Rather than examining the implications of artificial life through Emiko’s story, ‘The Windup Girl’ seems merely to say that one way or another everyone is fucked. ( )