Three book reviews

It's book review time! Now, I've been reading so much -- and writing so little -- recently that I thought it might be interesting to see if I could fit not one, not two, but three book reviews into this post. Don't worry; they won't be all that long. I hope. You never know with these things.

Anyway, a word of warning: Because of my own natural inclinations, all three have a decidedly sci-fi bent. However, there is much more to these fellas than meets the eye.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
This is a pretty complicated narrative, set in Bangkok, Thailand after the world has warmed and the seas have risen. It's a time of global upheaval as huge numbers of species, both plant and animal, have gone extinct and plague and famine are widespread. Civilization is hanging on by its fingernails only because of the rise of massive multinational conglomerates that specialize in genetic engineering; many extinct species are extinct only in their pure form, having been spliced with other species to create hardier hybrids. Those hybrids are then priced upwards by the corporations holding the patent on their genes, making them available only to the wealthy or larcenous. Energy is also scarce and is often obtained by the use of "kink-springs" -- a new technique of constructing wind-up metal springs that require tons of elbow grease to collect and store energy, which is then discharged to run everything from televisions to cross-country trains. Because of the kink-spring technology, the most precious form of energy is now kilocalories, stored in human bodies and discharged through physical work.

In the middle of all this is a "calorieman" -- an agent of one of those giant bioengineering corporations -- who's in Thailand illegally in order to sniff out any extinct plant or animal species that may have been resurrected in its pure form by famed Thai bioengineers. For example, plants in the nightshade family -- including chili peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes -- grow wild everywhere in Thailand, but are extinct everywhere else, and fetch a high price on the global market. Thailand's laws strictly forbid the import or export of biological specimens of any kind, so he manages to get wrapped up in a nest of intrigue when he falls into a failed venture attempting to develop a new kind of kink-spring, and ends up making a significant difference in the future of the Thai government, which just happens to benefit his employers.

Wandering throughout this story is a genetically-engineered Japanese geisha -- the windup girl of the title -- who holds a few secrets of her own, including what may be the eventual future of the human race.

As I said, complicated! But recommended.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Another bioengineering-gone-wild tale, this book is brought to you by the author of A Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, which is sort of the sequel to Year of the Flood. In this book, the apocalypse has already happened; in a society where biological engineering is rampant and easy enough to accomplish in a 15-minute bathroom session, a plague breaks loose and wipes almost everyone out. Those who are left have to figure out how to cope in a world which not only suffers from a scarcity of food, but also from an abundance of dangerous animals that have been much-changed from the ones we know now.

The story itself follows several survivors who are refugees from God's Gardeners, a sort of tree-hugging cult that consisted of both hippie rooftop gardeners and anticonsumerist shoe-bombers. They believe in the sanctity of all animal life and eat nothing but plants, but see nothing wrong with accomplishing their ideal world by the judicious application of a few pieces of C4.

It's a fairly slow-paced book, alternating between the flashbacks of two characters, Ren and Toby, and their present lives; things don't really start to get exciting until you're close to the end of the book. Still, it's a fascinating exercise in world-building, reading about the society Atwood imagines springing out of our penchant for plastic surgery and fiddling with our cell phones, and how quickly it can all go incredibly wrong.

Even more interesting is its relationship with Oryx and Crake. I said it's sort of a prequel, but the way both books are written, it really doesn't matter which you read first. The three central characters in Oryx don't show up often in Year of the Flood, but when they do, it's telegraphed clearly enough that you know that this is a missing part of the history of Crake and the end of the human race. And it's all written in Atwood's style, which is both stark and reflective; she really has a unique turn of phrase all her own.

Recommended for people with patience and a willingness to spend more time wandering through events instead of plunging through them; I loved it, but it's not for everyone.

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem
This is actually a re-read. It was one of my favorite books when I was younger, and it really was the last book I was expecting to find anywhere, much less right here where I work! No bioengineering here; it's a classic collection of short stories by a famous Czech science fiction writer who also wrote Solaris, which was adapted to film for the third time a few years ago, starring George Clooney. The fact that we have this book, plus many others by Lem, only proves what I've been saying all along; one of my predecessors must have been a huge sci-fi buff.

Anyway, the stories in The Cyberiad are not so much short stories as they are fables. Fables about robots that can construct almost anything demanded of them, and of the strange -- and invariably funny -- consequences that result from their actions. This book is, above all, funny, whether you're reading about the Femfatalatron built to deinfatuate a robot prince in love with a rival kingdom's princess or, my favorite, the machine that could make anything beginning with the letter n, including Nothing.

Actually, this book's author may have been insane. It reads like a combination of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, and Dr. Seuss. It's funny and breaks whatever expectations you might have in the process of telling its stories, which invariably have some kind of lesson at the end.

A fabulous read overall; if you're looking for something light, funny, and fascinating, it's hard to go wrong with this one.

That covers it for now. I'm off on Friday, so I may not have time to put up another post before then, but I will if I can. Next week, the vlogs return!