The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

     I have recently been reading the novel "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is a science fiction story set in Thailand, where the amount of work you can do is the currency. The Child Queen oversees everything, with strong influencers such as Akkarat that work behind the scenes. This book is a very powerful book that shows just how wrong the world can turn out if we continue to genetically engineer everything.

     One of the main characters, Emiko, a being similar to a human who was engineered in Japan and abandoned in Thailand, is tortured and belittled at the whorehouse where she has to work now if she doesn't want to die. She has many influencers who use different tactics to influence her. One, a farang (foreigner) named Anderson Lake, uses niceness where others treated her so poorly to influence her, though I believe that he truly does love her and want to help her. Another influencer, a woman at the whorehouse, uses pain and fear to get what she wants, which seems to just be the humiliation and torture of Emiko.

     I can relate to Emiko in that a lot of people influence me in life, but I have never been hurt or embarrassed for no reason at all just because someone hates me because of what I am.