the realdoll girl

[beaq]

Oh. God.

So I'm listening to The Windup Girl because, you know. I heard it was pretty good, as these kind of very detailed imaginative post-apoc cardboard people kinds of novels go. And I am a little uncomfortable with the portrayal of Chinese and Thai characters and cultures, but it's ... well, OK, that's not entirely my fight, but I'm

Comments

[hattifattener]

Yeah, that's where jinian stopped reading the paper copy, too.

It does get better after that, but I think Bacigalupi basically doesn't write novels that are pleasant or comfortable to read.

The characters aside, the post-apocalytpic setting is reasonably good, though I'm not sure it holds together if you think about it too much; I think biotech got shoehorned into a bunch of places that it doesn't quite fit. (Then again, the real world doesn't always seem much more plausible.) The setting is a marginal place that's not near technical equilibrium.

[submarine_bells]

It picks up a bit, yeah. I got through it, with some effort. I recall noticing that it doesn't pass the Bechdel test until some way in... like, a couple of hundred pages in.

I've never felt much of an urge to re-read it. I suspect it'll get freecycled during the next purge.

[shellynoir]

Is that why all his facebook friends are male? Ugh.

[boxofdelights]

I hear there's a "Why are there so many books about sex dolls?" filk on this topic.

I haven't read The Windup Girl but my SF book group did. They brought it up in our discussion of Oryx and Crake, which is also a crapsack world with miraculous bioengineering and oh, look at that, the female character is introduced as a sex slave. There's no violence in that scene, but she's eight years old.

[tylik]

I can't think of the right emoticon to express my concern and bogglement.

Fricking Margaret Atwood? (I haven't read any of her stuff in nearly twenty years, but I was pretty fond of some of it...)

[boxofdelights]

Yep. I think the point of that scene was to enable the reader to find some sympathy for the sociopath who decides that the human race is so terrible it would be better to wipe them out and start over.

This is not a recommendation.

[beaq]

If the revenge was going to be as dull as the rape, it's just as well.