The Windup Girl - Dystopia and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

       One of the things that I found myself thinking about while reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Windup Girl” was whether Bacigalupi’s vision of the future could be termed fully post-apocalpytic instead of just dystopian. A dystopia is “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding” (Dictionary.com), while post-apocalyptic describes a society after “ imminent disaster and total or universal destruction” (Dictionary.com). “The Windup Girl” certainly falls into the first category. It is debatable whether or not the destruction in the book can be considered “universal,” but to me the essence of post-apocalyptic fiction lies beyond the simple definition. Post-apocalyptic fiction in essence portrays the end of one world and the beginning of a new one. I came to the conclusion that even if “The Windup Girl” portrays a dystopian future, it is thematically consistent with post-apocalyptic fiction. Labelling the book under this genre is not arbitrary but based on some of the book’s central themes of rebirth and reinvention.

       I evaluated the book this way because of a book I had previously read, Claire P. Curtis’s 2010 “Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: We’ll Not Go Home Again.” Curtis’s book examines several post-apocalyptic stories through the lens of various political philosophers’ ideas about the social contract. She evaluates post-apocalyptic fiction for stories of how new communities form after a world-ending event, and shows that many of those stories align with the idea of a social contract as conceived by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In evaluating post-apocalyptic fiction with these concepts, Curtis shows that post-apocalyptic fiction is less about the end of the world than it is about the start of a new one. What form that new community takes reveals which school of social contract theory the author and their story subscribe to: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, or possibly an original theory.

       I think that Bacigalupi’s dystopian novel exhibits a key trait of post-apocalyptic fiction, which blurs the line between which genre the book belongs to. First, and most obviously, is the fact that a great catastrophe has taken place before the events of the book, creating a future that is both unrecognizable and alarmingly similar in some ways to our own world. This destruction, of course, is a necessary hallmark of post-apocalyptic fiction. “The Windup Girl” differs from most post-apocalyptic stories in that some form of government is still functioning. At the same time though, the sense that an old, easier way of life has become irretrievably lost in one catastrophic moment underlies the events of the book and matches the atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic story.

       However, that is not what really marks “The Windup Girl” as post-apocalyptic fiction. What truly earns the book that genre is its focus on themes of reinvention and new beginnings. This theme is visible on both a micro and a macro level, for individual characters and society as a whole in the book. Hock Seng, for example, seeks to reestablish himself as a successful businessman after escaping the Malayan killing of ethnic Chinese. Emiko wants to find a community of New People and live as an autonomous being. Kanya ultimately protects the Thai seedbank and wishes to use it to create a better future for Thailand. Most powerfully, the creation of the actual windup girl, Emiko, and all the New People like her, can be seen as humanity’s unconscious attempt to create offspring that can last in a world increasingly inhospitable to natural humans. This is explicitly stated towards the end of the book, when Emiko meets the old generipper, who tells her “Someday, perhaps, all people will be New People and you will look back on us as we now look back at the poor Neanderthals” (358).

       So although it might sound at first like labeling “The Windup Girl” as post-apocalyptic is an arbitrary and depressing prospect, it is actually well-earned and means that the book leaves us with some sort of hope for the future.