Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand.
Undercover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets
in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty
of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko....
Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the
New People, Emiko is not human; she is an engineered being, crèche-grown
and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but
now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by
some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the
rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the
world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered
plagues run rampant across the globe.
What happens when calories become currency? What happens when
bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said
bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human
evolution? Award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers one of the
most highly acclaimed science fiction novels of the twenty-first
century.
