Signed
The Windup Girl
Signed first edition, 2009
Published in 2009, The Windup Girl is Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel, establishing the ecological and biopunk themes he would return to in The Water Knife (2015) and the young adult Ship Breaker series. Set in a sweltering, isolationist Thailand of the late twenty-second century, the narrative imagines a post-oil world where "calorie companies" have supplanted nation-states as the primary holders of power, enforcing intellectual property rights through genetically engineered plagues and sterile seed stock. The novel was the joint winner of the Hugo Award and the winner of the Nebula Award.
Signed copy. Signed by the Bacigalupi on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, brown paper-covered boards with yellow lettering on spine and front panels. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2009. Hugo Award winner (2010). Nebula Award winner (2010). John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner (2010). ISBN: 9781597801577. #10553.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Signed copy. Signed by the Bacigalupi on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, brown paper-covered boards with yellow lettering on spine and front panels. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2009. Hugo Award winner (2010). Nebula Award winner (2010). John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner (2010). ISBN: 9781597801577. #10553.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
The Windup Girl presents a dystopian future driven not by digital networks or artificial intelligence, but by biological control and ecological collapse. Set after the global "Contraction," a breakdown of fossil-fuel infrastructure, the novel imagines a world where energy is scarce, food is weaponized, and survival depends on calories rather than code. Internal combustion engines are obsolete, replaced by kinetic energy stored in "kink-springs" wound by human labor and genetically modified megafauna, creating a society that is technologically regressive yet biologically sophisticated.
Power in this world is exercised primarily through economics. The dominant forces are not authoritarian states but the "calorie men" of multinational corporations such as AgriGen and PurCal, which deploy engineered agricultural plagues, cibiscosis and blister rust, to wipe out unlicensed crops. Their patented, disease-resistant seeds become the only barrier between populations and starvation, effectively turning the global food supply into a system of corporate dependency. Thailand, one of the few remaining sovereign nations, resists this pressure through strict quarantine laws and a secret seedbank, positioning itself as a fragile holdout against biological imperialism.
At the center of the novel is Emiko, the titular "windup girl," a genetically engineered "New Person" designed in Japan for servitude and abandoned in Bangkok when her owner returned home. Marked by her stutter-stop movements and an inability to regulate body heat, she is biologically programmed for obedience and engineered to be visibly, unmistakably non-human. Hunted by the Environment Ministry and treated as an invasive species, Emiko occupies the novel's moral center: a being with consciousness and suffering who has no legal standing in the world that made her.
Power in this world is exercised primarily through economics. The dominant forces are not authoritarian states but the "calorie men" of multinational corporations such as AgriGen and PurCal, which deploy engineered agricultural plagues, cibiscosis and blister rust, to wipe out unlicensed crops. Their patented, disease-resistant seeds become the only barrier between populations and starvation, effectively turning the global food supply into a system of corporate dependency. Thailand, one of the few remaining sovereign nations, resists this pressure through strict quarantine laws and a secret seedbank, positioning itself as a fragile holdout against biological imperialism.
At the center of the novel is Emiko, the titular "windup girl," a genetically engineered "New Person" designed in Japan for servitude and abandoned in Bangkok when her owner returned home. Marked by her stutter-stop movements and an inability to regulate body heat, she is biologically programmed for obedience and engineered to be visibly, unmistakably non-human. Hunted by the Environment Ministry and treated as an invasive species, Emiko occupies the novel's moral center: a being with consciousness and suffering who has no legal standing in the world that made her.