Book Club November 2021 - The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi's 2010 novel The Windup Girl takes place in Bangkok in the 23rd century, in a world which has been ravaged by climate change, food scarcity, gene modification, and a dominance of companies owning the patents to seeds that can become much-needed crops. Add to that a plot with intrigue, betrayal and action, and you get a complex, dense read that has biopunk, dystopian overtones. We get into the story and science of The Windup Girl with Kenneth Chai, co-founder of Parti SAINS. And then in Footnotes, we unpack what it means when genre fiction engages in references and tropes.