American sci-fi author Paolo Bacigalupi tells Stephen Jewell how his ruthless corporations’ environmental impact could be mirrored in real life.
Travelling through Southeast Asia at the height of the Sars epidemic about eight years ago, Paolo Bacigalupi felt the world was closing in around him. The Colorado-based author channelled the traumatic experience into his impressive début The Windup Girl, which won both the 2010 Hugo and Nebula awards for best science-fiction novel.
A dystopian tale of industrial espionage and political conspiracy, it takes place in a 23rd century Bangkok that has been devastated by genetically engineered seed plagues and fossil fuel shortages.
"I ended up in Thailand, feeling extremely sick and dehabilitated," he recalls. "I was having these strange heat reactions. My hands were swelling up with an eczema-like rash and it seemed like some kind of tropical rot was setting in. I was in this weird paranoid space, where you have no control over your health and no understanding about what's going on around you.
"Then suddenly a really serious pandemic breaks out and everyone was being quarantined. If the person standing next to you started coughing you'd think, 'oh God, I don't want to die'. Everything became really uncertain and it stuck with me for some reason."
Bacigalupi's condition is reflected in title character Emiko's inbuilt inability to cope with high temperatures. An artificial member of the New People who have been specifically engineered to obey, she is abandoned in Bangkok by her Japanese owners. Forced to dance in the city's seedy nightclubs, she comes to the attention of economic hitman Anderson Lake.
"There's this period around April when the humidity and heat in Thailand is just so epic," he says. "Just being outside seems astonishingly brutal. It's something we're not adapted to at all. It was kind of killing me. You can see that in the book with Emiko being so unsuited to her environment. I was playing with some of my own discomfort."
With its futuristic Asian setting and noir atmosphere, The Windup Girl has been compared to William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer and Ridley Scott's influential film, Blade Runner. However, Bacigalupi is equally inspired by the post-colonial fiction of authors like Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, who highlighted the uneasy relationship between the privileged colonials and the oppressed locals.
"We're currently entering a new period of imperialism where a corporation can control the profits of a particular country," he says. "They're not taking over a political system but a piece of the economic pie. You now have these corporations that can operate anywhere and they want to move in on it all. It snapped into focus for me on The Windup Girl with this idea of natural interest versus economics."
Employed by calorie company AgriGen, Anderson Lake secretly searches the city's bustling street markets for foodstuffs previously believed extinct.
"The core of the idea comes from the area where I live," says Bacigalupi, who resides in the small town of Paonia on the west side of the Rocky Mountains. "There's a lot of anxiety amongst the farmers here, who are extremely concerned about what companies like Monsanto are doing and how they use GM food to manipulate seed stocks and control feeds. I did some research about these big agricultural corporations and the more I read about them, the more cynical I became. That was the jumping off point for the novel."
According to Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl is very relevant to New Zealand, which is still proudly GE-free. "It's rife in our food supply here, especially corn products," he says. "There's continual attempts by these companies to push their products. They say they want to feed the world and we have to innovate our way out of our population growth. The Terminator gene comes up quite a lot in the book and it's actually a real technology. They can create sterile seeds that they sell to farmers who then have to come back to them year after year because you cannot physically replant them. When a company goes out of its way to create a technology like that, it really tells you a lot about their values."
While he mentions the fate of various Northern Hemisphere nations in his post-apocalyptic future, Bacigalupi doesn't reveal what happens immediately due south of Asia in New Zealand or Australia.
"Quite a few people have complained about that," he laughs. "But there was a point where I realised that I just didn't have enough space, so when I mentioned that a particular country is devastated, it had to be pretty tightly connected to the story. If India or Burma has been crushed by the calorie companies, it's an indicator of what Thailand's fate could be. But I'm actually wondering about going back and exploring what is happening in other parts of the world."
The Windup Girl (Orbit $27.99)
