The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel, The Windup Girl , reads like an extended version of his short stories. It is set in the future introduced in his 2005 short "The Calorie Man," in which the global economy has been brought to its knees by oil collapse, and genetically engineered plagues have killed many people and most naturally occurring grains and crops, creating a 'calorie monopoly' of biotechnology companies who sell their disease-resistant, sterile strains, whose copyrighted genomes they protect with ruthless efficiency, to the starving nations of the world. It takes place in the same Bangkok which was the setting of Bacigalupi's 2006 story, "Yellow Card Man." Its characters are either transplants from these stories or parallels of their protagonists, and its themes are the same grim fare that permeates all of Bacigalupi's output. This is both a very good and very bad thing. It's a good thing because Bacigalupi is one hell of a writer, ...