The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl was written by Paolo Bacigalupi and published in 2009.  It won a Hugo and a Nebula award and is the most current offering reviewed on Modernmoonman so far.  It's taking me forever to slog through this book; seriously, I hit a wall here: this book (and Snow Crash) brought this blog to a halt.  It's written well, but there's no tension, no motivation to turn pages, no characters to care about, and it's hard to care about genetically engineered fruit, no matter how beautifully it's described... I dunno; still, there is some nice writing:

     "Ngaw.
     Piles of them.  The little red fruits with their strange green hairs sit before him, mocking him from within a photo of a farang bargaining for food with some long ago Thai farmer.  All around them, brightly colored, petroleum-burning taxis blur past, but just to their side, a huge pyramidal pile of ngaw stares out of the photo, taunting.
     Anderson has spent enough time poring over ancient pictures that they seldom affect him.  He can usually ignore the foolish confidence of the past--the waste, the arrogance, the absurd wealth--but this one irritates him:  the fat flesh hanging off the farang, the astonishing abundance of calories that are so obviously secondary to the color and attractiveness of a market that has thirty varieties of fruit: mangosteens, pineapples, coconuts, certainly...but there are no oranges, now.  None of these...these...dragon fruits, none of these pomelos, none of these yellow things...lemons.  None of them.  So many of them are simply gone.
     But the people in the photo don't know it.  These dead men and women have no idea that they stand in front of the treasure of the ages, that they inhabit the Eden of the Grahamite Bible where pure souls go to live at the right hand of God.  Where all the flavors of the world reside under the careful attentions of Noah and Saint Francis, and where no one starves.
     Anderson scans the caption.  The fat, self-contained fools have no idea of the genetic gold mine they stand beside.  The book doesn't even identify the ngaw.  It's just another example of nature's fecunfity, taken entirely for granted because they enjoy so damn much of it.
     Anderson briefly wishes that he could drag the fat farang and ancient Thai farmer out of the photograph and into hid present, so that he could express his rage at them directly, before tossing them off his balcony the way they undoubtedly tossed aside fruit that was even the slightest bit bruised."

There's also a "Windup Girl," a robot who is all too human and she gets humiliated a lot and is a combo of Asimov's Caves of Steel "Olivaw" Robot and Spielberg's A.I. pleasure robot....

I'm slogging through this sad and depressing novel, and as of pg. 67, I still can't wait to get back to the Van Vogt, but maybe I'll change my mind...(to be continued...)  I really wish this book would make me want to read it.  Farang this.