The Windup Girl won the Nebula for Best Novel in 2010, and was the joint winner of the Hugo for Best Novel along with The City & the City, by China Miéville. It also topped the Hugo nominations ballot.
This is the only tied result for the winner of any category for the regular Hugos since 1993. (In the forty years before that, there were eleven ties, including one for the then Campbell Award; but voter participation was much lower.) We also had a tie for the Retro Hugos in 2020; I remember vividly spotting it as I went through the results while driving through France (I was not at the wheel).
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Windup Girl is:
And then she wonders if she has it backwards, if the part that struggles to maintain her illusions of self-respect is the part intent upon her destruction. If her body, this collection of cells and manipulated DNA—with its own stronger, more practical needs—is actually the survivor: the one with will.
When I first read it, shortly after it won the Nebula, I wrote:
Emiko, the girl of the title, is an artificial human being of a near-future world ravaged by agricultural disaster, created as an escort for a Japanese businessman and abandoned by him in Thailand. She, like all her kind, is easily identifiable by her jerky body movements, and is subject to instant destruction at the whim of the law (not to mention the risks of metabolic overheating). Her personal dilemma, trading her body for self-preservation, intersects with a political and environmental crisis in Thailand, with fairly catastrophic consequences. It is a fast-paced book which beat out Miéville’s The City & The City for the Nebula, and I’ll find it difficult to choose; while Bacigalupi’s vision is less audacious, he carries it off rather more consistently. Some nasty sex and violence so not for all readers.
In the end, my thinking was matured by reading several feminist critiques of The Windup Girl, and I put it third on my ballot, behind both The City & the City and Palimpsest by Cat Valente (so mine was one of the 24 votes that transferred from Valente to Miéville on the third round). I also put it second last on my BSFA ballot the following year.
Rereading it now, I have to be honest, I really didn’t like it. The lushly imagined Thailand is rather Orientalist, and the protagonist is not just a whore with a heart of gold, she’s a robot whore with a heart of gold. (To be crystal clear: my objection is not to sex work, but to clichés.) There is a lot of sexual violence which doesn’t advance the story at all. Maybe it was just my jet lag in California, but I also found the plot difficult to follow. I’m dropping my opinion of it from mediocre to actively bad, as has happened occasionally in this sequence of reading.
But if you want to, you can get The Windup Girl here.
Incidentally I have also found that it is the best-known book set in Thailand, as measured by LibraryThing. (The Beach by Alex Garland has a lead on Goodreads.)
That year, the Hugo for Best Novella went to “Palimpsest”, by Charles Stross; for Best Novelette to “The Island”, by Peter Watts; and for Short Story to “Bridesicle”, by Will McIntosh. This was the last time (so far) that the four traditional fiction Hugo categories were all won by white men.
The Nebula for Best Novella went to The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, by Kage Baker; for Best Novelette to “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”, by Eugie Foster; and for Short Story to “Spar”, by Kij Johnson.
The following year, the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel both went to Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, but I am going to skip it as I wasted far too much time on reading it the first time round. That means that the next post in this sequence will be about Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie”, Kij Johnson’s novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, and Jo Walton’s novel Among Others.
