Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl presents a vision of a world critiqued by binary systems: global corporations versus national governments; natural biology versus genetic enrichment; and progress against fundamentalism. The Windup Girl, which won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel in 2010, is set in a vision of Thailand in the 23rd century. Thailand is both the trading post and warground for a multitude of international forces such as Thai, Japanese, Pakistani and American figures representing businesses, governments and traders who intersect in Bangkok at all levels of power. But as universal as it is, the Thai kingdom is not the symbol of the mythology of 20th and 21st century globalization: a tale of growth, travel and expansion. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Two hundred years later, Bacigalupi predicted that the world would be in decline. Major agricultural corporations are calling on Agrigen and fighting to produce a dwindling global food supply. Bioengineered foods have almost entirely replaced organic food stocks, and crop diseases have even destroyed many of these modified crops. Global warming has tripled ocean swells and Bangkok now lies below sea level, protected by a series of locks and sea walls built around the city. Thailand has a natural seed bank, hidden from giant calorie companies desperate to exploit its stocks and open Thailand's limiting trade tariffs to Western companies. Crop shortages and corporate misconduct inspire the story. Bacigalupi was certainly aware of these protests and shortages, and has said in interviews that the Deep Water Horizon (BP) spill in the Gulf of Mexico has become an important way to think about corporate influence on a globalized world as it wrote in The Windup Girl: “When you look at something like BP, it's a scenario that shouldn't have existed. They didn't see that step-by-step actions would turn into something much bigger than themselves. I feel like this really applies to almost all of our environmental issues. I get on a plane and fly here to Boston – this has bigger and more complex consequences than I can comprehend. The BP story - in the supposed scenario, we're going to dig, we're going to get oil and everyone is going to make money - suddenly becomes something else, the scenario goes completely away. And that moment when the story slips away and you realize we haven't really understood our own history, that's what's fascinating. Fear of corporate power is an expression of anxiety about this realization he describes of not knowing our own history. In these recent corporate dystopias, production and consumption are driven at a rapid pace, trampling the natural world and climate as everything expands until entire human populations are forced to contract when resources are exhausted. As Bacigalupi said in a separate interview: "It feels like there's something happening in the zeitgeist and because of that, the themes of The Windup Girl resonate with people [...] the global warming and [genetically modified] foods apparently resonate strongly, as does, I think, a certain unease about the direction we are taking in terms ofwealth and prosperity. The story is told from several angles, although most often through the voice of Anderson Lake, ostensibly manager of a giant bent spring factory, but in reality an AgriGen spy trying to locate the seed bank. Everywhere Anderson looks, he sees the world shrinking: “The world is shrinking again. A few turns of the airship and clipper and Anderson is roaming the dark streets on the other side of the planet. It's astonishing. In his grandparents' time, even traveling between an old Expansion suburb and downtown was impossible. His grandparents told stories of exploring abandoned suburbs, scavenging for trash and remnants of sprawling neighborhoods that were destroyed in the oil bust. (Bacigalupi 114-115) There is an important distinction to make here. Many authors describe the process of globalization as a shrinking of the world – a bringing together of different places through travel and technology. Maxwell Garnett, secretary of the League of Nations, said that in 1924 New York was indeed closer to London than Scotland had been a hundred years earlier. In other words, travel technology had made the world smaller. And there is some of that sentiment in the quote above; but when Bacigalupi speaks of "contraction", he does not just mean "the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole", to use Roland Robertson's famous expression. Instead, it describes a world ravaged by overconsumption and overexploitation of its resources and its people. The world is shrinking in this novel because it can no longer support the lives of its inhabitants. The binaries that Haraway sees in the world are immediately evident in The Windup Girl, as a set of opposing powers argue for control of the Thai kingdom and what remains of it. natural resources. Alongside Anderson and agribusiness companies, Commerce Minister Akkarat wants to sell the seed bank and open the kingdom to intensive Western trade. On the other side, General Pracha heads the Ministry of Environment and enforces the kingdom's strict environmental laws and tariffs with the help of Jaidee Rojjanasukchai, captain of the Ministry of Environment's armed militia. Finally, as Thailand is still apparently a monarchy, Somdet Chaopraya is the regent of the child queen and the most powerful person in Bangkok. These men replace the historical forces that are working furiously to secure their control over the post-Expansion world. Anderson represents corporate supremacy and prey on the world's resources. It is no surprise that everyone in the Thai kingdom, even partners like Akkarat, views Anderson, PurCal and AgriGen not as titans of industry, but as bioterrorists and capitalist overlords: they are the future robber barons, overexploiting the world. And while they attempt to present themselves as progressive agents of a globalized world, Anderson describes numerous cases in which industrial agriculture and food engineering have led to food shortages and mass riots: Meanwhile , General Pracha and Jaidee rely heavily on the mythology of Bangkok as a progressive agent of a globalized world. holy city and the monarchy as a holy institution. They see themselves as opposing a wave of corporate hegemony, even if it's a losing battle: “But it hurts. They hunt and beg for scraps of knowledge abroad, scavenging like Cheshires to survive. So much knowledge is found within the Midwestern Compact. When a genetic thinkerpromising talent arises somewhere in the world, he is bullied, intimidated and bribed to work with the other best and brightest in Des Moines or Changsha. It takes a strong researcher to resist PurCal, AgriGen or RedStar [… But] we are alive. We are alive when entire kingdoms and countries have disappeared. When Malaysia is a quagmire of killings. When Kowloon is underwater. When China is divided and the Vietnamese are broken and Burma is nothing but famine.” (Bacigalupi 214) Anderson, AgriGen, and PurCal argue throughout the novel that the Thai kingdom is old-fashioned: it ardently retains its identity as a protectionist nation while the rest of the world has opened itself to a cosmopolitan ideal of culture and commerce. GeetaKapur theorizes that: “Where I speak from, there is still room for debate about the nation-state. For all the slander it has received, it may be the only political structure capable of protecting the people of the Third World from the totalitarian system established by the oligopolies – ironically, thanks to the massive state power of advanced nations” (193). Pracha, Jaidee and others see Bangkok as a last refuge from corporate oligopoly. As The Windup Girl progresses, these tense binary forces create a breach in the Thai kingdom. The relationship between the advanced and the original – between technical calorie substitutes and a natural seed bank; between the forces of global capital and tribal extremists; between the monarchy and transnational corporations; between a dying human race and the cyborgs it constructs, it is the gyre that widens and widens. The gap between the forces of expansion and contraction eats away at the center. Bacigalupi dramatizes the destabilization of the systems of power he describes by focusing on places that might be generally overlooked or isolated from historic seats of power: fly over America, a smaller nation on the Indochina peninsula, the rusting slums of Bangkok . And yet the most aggressive destabilizer in the entire novel is, ironically, a cyborg who spends much of the plot being violently abused and controlled. Emiko is a Japanese "Windup", a genetically modified humanoid used as a slave and programmed to obey her owner. The Windups, who go by the name New People, are illegal in Thailand, and Emiko is forced to work for the owner of a sex club (Raleigh) who bribes the police to ignore her presence. Emiko's pores are modified to make her skin particularly soft and cool to the touch, meaning she overheats easily and must stay indoors during the day to avoid Thailand's sweltering climate. For most of the book, her humiliation and abuse are acute, as she is forced to put on degrading shows at the club and sleep with whoever Raleigh directs her to. At the same time, as the main attraction of Bangkok's most famous sex club, she meets a host of powerful people looking for tactful sex, including Somdet Chaopraya and Anderson, who becomes obsessed with Emiko and tells her about a safe haven secret in the north of Thailand where the Windups live free. Raleigh promises Emiko that she can work to buy her freedom and get to the shelter, but it soon becomes clear that he never intends to free her. This realization, coupled with her continued degradation at the club, culminates in a dramatic scene in which Emiko ignores her programming and kills Somdet and his men in the club: “Her first is very quick. Raleigh-san's throat is soft. […] By the time Raleigh hits the ground, Emiko is already running across the room, towards the VIP door and the man who hurt her the most [Chaopraya]...