I wanted to love this novel, really I did. Broken nearish-future after environmental disaster, a world still struggling to adapt and survive and progress, mostly post-carbon tech, the beginnings of posthumans - and set in one of my favourite parts of the world, Thailand!

Okay, I knew I was going to have problems with that last part, because on page 1 we've got women wearing pha sin, a traditional outfit-part phased out in the 20th C. No woman shopping in a soi (side-street/lane) market is going to wear what's nowadays costume dress.

I read on, nonetheless, and I did end up liking the core plot quite a lot. There's an American calorie man who works for a big food-producing firm that's pissed off that the Thais are getting by without American help, so he's been sent to Bangkok to help change this situation. Meanwhile, two opposing factions in Thailand come to fighting point over whether to open up to foreign trade or stay more inward focused, to preserve what's kept Thailand from sinking into true disaster like its neighbours. An unexpected political disaster occurs, complicating matters for everyone as the city descends into a war zone, and I very much liked how it all resolved at the end. It's quite a surprisingly happy ending, given the tone of the book beforehand. SPOILERS: It looks like the Americans are going to get their own way, but the Thais turn around and, in destroying Bangkok and rushing away their secret seed-bank stock under cover of that, refuse to let the Americans compromise Thailand's major mechanism of defence and independence.

I also just want to get this in now, before I talk much more about the book's failures: I thought the cheshire cat-things were awesome, a SF novel with ghosts walking around in it deserves praise for not be afraid to genre-mix, and the plague plot was awesome for all of the 5 seconds it was relevant (SPOILER: Seems it was mostly there to kill off Anderson Lake, which, hey, I'm glad he died, but who wastes an awesome plague plot on something so small? It makes sense for it to fade out of the foreground when Bangkok becomes a battle zone, but it pretty much disappears and that felt a bit too convenient.)

There's just so much else that I didn't like.

Let's divide this up into clear categories.

Hock Seng (and Muslims)

Hock Send is a Malay Chinese refugee, forced to flee when Malay Muslim fundamentalists took over Malaysia. This is the only time we hear about Muslims, in the context of this horrible incident; there's one Muslim who gave Hock Seng a little time to run away, but he is nonetheless in this incident's context and shaped by it, and is it possible to imagine a future with Muslims unaffected by fundamentalism? Please?

Hock Seng spends most of his time in deep paranoia, working for the American, Anderson Lake, while planning his own lucrative (he hopes) future. When not doing this, he's referring to Lake as a "foreign devil" or "devil" or freaking out over his pasty pale terrifying eyes. Even if there are still Chinese people who use terms like this, Hock Seng does it so much it veers deeply into stereotype. He also uses the term "daughter mouth" several times to refer to small dependent girls, first a grand-daughter and then a Thai factory girl he works with and helps. I'm assuming this is a translation of a Chinese term, but it comes across just weird, even more callous than suits Hock Seng's thoughts at the time - a case of terms not translating well, I suppose.

Then there's this moment on p202 when Hock Seng's explaining something to Mai: "When the brown people turned on the yellow people in Malaya..." I get using racially unpleasant terms for a group of people who killed everyone you loved and ruined your life - although it seems the Tamils of Malaysia are being completely ignored, seeing as they're also quite brown but not Muslim - but would a Chinese person refer to their own people as yellow? It seems very unlikely.

Emiko (and women)

Emiko is the titular windup girl, one of a Japanese servant class of augmented humans who was abandoned in Bangkok and has been forced into prostitution. (It's worth noting that we barely see any Japanese people and so lines like "Yashimoto-sama speaks correctly. We [the windup people] are more Japanese than even the Japanese. We must serve within a hierarchy." speak quite louldly. Another stereotype not given enough page-time to move into real, true nuance.) Eventually Emiko finds out there might be a better life for her, in sanctuaries of windup people to the north, but cannot get there; she snaps, develops some agency, though at the very end it's unclear whether she'll truly be free or if someone new is going to start using her. I hope the former.

I hope but am not too confident, because with Emiko the focus is so much on how victimised she is, how terrible her life is, how her altered genes make her suffer (her pores are small to make smooth skin so she can't sweat/cool properly and overheats in Thai heat; her genes are doglike and make her subservient and she falls under this sway often). Almost all of her personality and thoughts rotate around this. There are one or two moments when you get a sense of Emiko-the-person not Emiko-the-victim, but they're fleeting. And then.

When she finally snaps and kills a roomful of men who just raped her with a champagne bottle, among other things, we're not actually shown this moment, only its after-effects. We're not shown her triumph. We were, of course, shown a sizeable chunk of her rape, plus the rape scene in her first chapter. This just makes me fucking sick. I don't think authors should never show rape - sometimes you've just got to tell the truth of how terrible a situation is - but I want to read stories of women and men who triumph over this adversity, I want that to be the focus. I don't want to read two skanky, lovingly detailed rape scenes and barely see the bits where the survivor actually gets to survive.

Augh.

Women in general are not brilliantly treated in this novel, with (mostly) the exception of Kanya, a Thai woman who works for the Environment Ministry. I like her a lot: tough, a survivor of her own (non-sexual) traumas, torn between loyalties, haunted (literally). She's interesting. She's also gay, which is handled pretty decently. Except, hmm. Due to her conflict of loyalties she doesn't feel she can commit to a relationship with a woman she likes, or something, so she doesn't get to be happily gay. Meanwhile Emiko's frequent tormentor is another woman, Kannika. Can't be having happy gay relationships, now can we? (Not that straight people seem to get happy times either in this book - oh, except the white dude who's given kathoey to keep him content in his prison - awesome - but as part of a bigger picture of how gay people often get depicted in fiction, this is bugging me a lot.) Still, the moment when Kanya is admiring the kathoey Kip is pretty cute, and in my head they somehow manage to have happy sex. Kanya also gets to save the day, sort of. Her loyalties sub-plot doesn't quite seem to resolve, though.

Aside from Kanya, the important women are Emiko, see above; a male character's wife, who is kidnapped and killed to prove a point; Mai, the factory girl, but she's young enough I expect her to be subject to adults' whims; and the Child Queen, oft-mentioned but never seen, who is a puppet to a male Somdet Chaopraya (protector/regent/something like that). The list of male characters does not have quite this trend; although they suffer a lot too, they generally have more agency and none of them are stuffed in that much-abused refrigerator.

A final note about Emiko: the only men who treat her with some (although not perfect) decency, Anderson Lake and the man in the epilogue, are white. Hmm. Anderson Lake is generally shown to be "above" the racist attitudes of the Thais, by showing more generosity towards Emiko and the Chinese immigrants. Meanwhile awesome Kanya sees the windup girls as not really human. I like that she's not perfect either, so I'm not quibbling that, but Mr. Whitey being better than some of this nasty Asian prejudice is problematic, to put it politely.

Thailand

To state my position clearly: I'm a white Brit who's probably spent about 2-3 months in Thailand, in various smaller chunks. Some of my favourite friends live there, 1 Thai and 2 expat. I probably know the country better than most travellers, but I'm far, far from an expert. Still.

The pha sin, which the book never explains. I can't imagine they're any easier to produce than shorts and t-shirts, especially as everyone else seems to be running around in clothes we'd recognise now, so why are the regular Thai women suddenly wearing old-fashioned costumes?

Several times Anderson mentions reeking durians in the street. Durians are only reeking when they're cut open, and I've never seen a durian stall that displays its fruits cut open. One fruit, maybe, to show its health; you might also pass a stall as the vendor's cutting one open for a customer and catch a whiff. This is not enough for it be a reeking pile of durians.

If I'm noticing aesthetic details like these, I dread to think what a Thai reader would pick up on.

More generally, the city just never quite felt like Bangkok. I'll grant that it's changed tremendously in 200 years, it offers a far harder life to all its people. I still don't think it would be quite so... bland. It never quite feels alive in the way all cities are, or in the way Bangkok specifically is. Bacigalupi knows his street/area names but surely it's another city with a Sukhumvit and a Ploenchit.

Some details are nice, though, like a mention of lizard-noises, night-time street stalls, incense sellers outside shrines, flower garland sellers (although they drape them over their arms in 200 years' time instead of just laying them on little tables, but I think that might be to convey that they're more desperate for sales than today's garland sellers); I liked that garland flowers, jasmin and marigolds, are re-engineered pretty quickly for religious use; I liked the ghosts, as I said above, and how shrines are set up for environmental heroes and how Kanya hates that some of these heroes aren't Thais; I liked all the references to the previous monarch, King Rama XII, who was instrumental in saving Bangkok from rising sea levels.

Bacigalupi also knows some Thai and he likes to use it. Sometimes he never really explains it - you're left to infer what a kuti (monk's cell) is. Sometimes he writes "Mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles [sigh] and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-fin plaa." And anyone who knows that "plaa" means fish is raising an eyebrow. He really likes the phrases jai rawn and jai yen (hot and cold heart) and applies them regularly to the Thai characters Jaidee and Kanya. I can't say how much real Thais use these phrases, but like Hock Seng's "foreign devil" they get over-used. He also punctuates some sentences with untranslated Thai phrases, such as: "Down! Map lohng dieow nee! On your face!" You obviously don't need to know the Thai to infer what's going on. Which is handy, because my Thai friend doesn't know what that's meant to be either. Transliterations of Thai aren't great but he evidently didn't pick the best ones. He also, apparently, gets titles wrong. Again, I can't start picking at this stuff in detail, but it seems there are many more problems to be found by the more knowledgable. I did like seeing some bits of Thai, but I think "less is more" works far better with using foreign languages.

That got long.

In the end, I loved aspects of the worldbuilding. I'd even be mildly interested in a sequel, just to see if the windups truly become more dominant like the cheshires, to see what Kanya does after the novel's climax, and a wider, global book (side note: Is European Union so difficult to write that he has to mention the Union of Europeans instead? Why call it that when we already have a shorter version of the exact same name?) would be quite interesting instead of just focusing on Thailand, especially as there are hints that the Japanese are dealing with things quite differently. But the book bugged me far, far too much when it came to its depictions of Asia and Asians. I'm not going to state that westerners should never write about Asia, because I don't agree with that (and it'd make me a raging hypocrite). It's just that "getting there" or "close" is not good enough.