Z/Web

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

This is a strange and fascinating book. While it’s beautifully written, it’s dark and depressing, with bad ends for just about every character. It’s science fiction set in a decrepit Thailand, in a future world devastated by food plagues that mean that calories are scarce. In this violent and unusual world, almost anything goes. There’s bribery and corruption everywhere, with everyone scheming on how to make a buck and get ahead.

Our characters include a Westerner, a “calorie man,” meaning that he works for a giant agrigen company that is seeking out disease-free seeds of fruits and plants that it can genetically modify and reproduce for world-wide distribution. There are also a couple of military people, an old Chinese man who is the foreman of the calorie man’s factory, and a genetically manufactured girl that is the source of the book’s title. She is “New People,” built and trained in Japan where her kind is accepted, but hated in Thailand where she lives in secret and where she’ll be destroyed on sight if anyone realizes she isn’t human.

The book has relatively little plot. While you’re reading it seems like much is happening — there’s political upheaval, a revolution being plotted, money-making and robbery scheme planned, escapes attempted and thwarted, and so on — but in the end nothing much has changed or happens.

I found much of the book confusing. Though I love science fiction and I thought the unusual Thailand setting interesting, the combination often left me baffled as to what was going on. There’s unfamiliar sci-fi technology as well as strange Thai customs and little of it is ever explained. (For instance, I never could figure out what the calorie man’s factory produced. They grew vats of algae but I have no idea what for.)

Some of the confusion happened because I listened to the audio book version: many times the narrator referred to “loading lamps with jewels” (apparently to charge them with power) which I thought was strange, and it was only much later I realized this meant “joules” as in units of energy.

The book is slow and ponderous, and while the writing is gorgeously descriptive, that sluggish pace, combined with baffling events, and the irredeemably depressing nature of the story, turned me off of the book. I did finish it, but man was I happy to be done!

Others may like it better than I did. It’s well-written and innovative, and the atmosphere and setting is certainly interesting. There were many individual scenes I thought were amazing. But endless descriptions of human filth, horrible violence and murders, vivid depictions of a ruthless world utterly without a conscience, and the hellish degradations forced on the titular character were just too depressing for me to enjoy much else about the book. It often left me feeling like I needed a shower or to go and look at something pretty just for the respite.