The Windup Girl

Bangkok, in the twenty third century. The oil is gone, the seas have risen, and the city survives behind levees and pumps kept running by a king's decree. Calories are the currency, because engineered plagues have killed most of the world's crops, and the calorie companies of the American midwest own the only seed stock that resists them.

Anderson Lake runs a factory making kink spring energy storage as a cover. He is really hunting for Thailand's seedbank, the last uncatalogued genetic library on earth. Hock Seng is his manager, a Chinese refugee from a pogrom in Malaya, working every angle because he has lost everything once already. Jaidee and Kanya are Environment Ministry enforcers burning contraband and losing a bureaucratic war against the Trade Ministry.

And Emiko is a windup: a Japanese engineered human, obedient by design, abandoned in Bangkok when her owner went home, working in a club where the abuse is the entertainment. What she does when she stops obeying sets the last third of the book moving.

Bacigalupi builds the economics and the biology carefully, down to the megodonts turning the factory spindles and the cheshires loose in the alleys, and the result is one of the most convincing collapsed futures in the genre. Nobody in it is a hero, and every character is pursuing a rational strategy that makes the whole worse.

Be warned that Emiko's chapters contain repeated and explicit sexual violence, which some readers consider dwelt on rather than depicted, and that the novel's use of Thai setting and language has been criticised as an outsider's Bangkok.

Around four hundred pages, hot, dense and grim, with several viewpoint characters and no easy entry point.

Best for readers who want climate fiction with the ledger shown rather than the disaster described.