The Windup Girl Book Cover

The Windup Girl


A Dystopian Novel


Subgenres:

  • Biopunk,
  • Near-Future
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This book is for you if you're into...

  • Biopunk futures where calories are currency and food is power
  • Genetically engineered beings struggling for autonomy in hostile societies
  • Bangkok settings with seawalls, floodgates, and environmental collapse

From Little Stack

Emiko is a “New Person”, genetically engineered to be obedient, beautiful, productive, and flawless. Though biologically superior, she’s treated as sub-human—a grim insight into how easily the creations of mankind can be dehumanized, abused, even reviled.

The story looks at the dangers of treating such beings as intellectual property, designed to be controlled and serve, with no autonomy or free will. I love how it posits the hypothesis that if humankind could create the perfect genetically engineered person, it would see them only as someone to dominate, someone beneath them on the hierarchy of existence. To quote Rick and Morty, “it’s slavery with extra steps.” 

Publisher Description

Anderson Lake is AgriGen's Calorie Man, sent to work undercover as a factory manager in Thailand while combing Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories.

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. Emiko is not human; she is an engineered being, grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in this chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits and forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution?

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