Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel, The Windup Girl is fantastic

Allow me to fawn for a moment.  I’ve just finished reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl which is, I have to say, one of the best books I’ve read this year.  On a line by line basis, it has the beauty of a well-crafted short story and then you get into the big sweep of the novel.  The science fiction of it is thoroughly and frighteningly believable, but that isn’t what makes this a great book.  What makes Windup Girl beautiful and terrifying is its convincing portrayal of humanity, both as a society and as individuals.

Without giving away spoilers, The Windup Girl is set in a future after a collapse of an oil based economy. The most important energy source in the world has become calories which causes high tech wars to be fought over food, and over the right to grow food.

Now, I’ll admit that part of the reason I found this so chilling is that I was about five chapters in and went to see the documentary film Ingredients which deals with, in part, the crisis that big business agriculture — and specifically monocropping — has created by introducing proprietary seedstocks. The line between where this film starts and where Paolo’s novel ends seems like a direct prediction of the future.  It is scary, scary stuff.

So — read The Windup Girl. See Ingredients. Then buy food from your local farmer.

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