Bio war

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Biokrieg (English title The Windup Girl , like: "The Aufziehmädchen") is a science fiction -novel the American writer Paolo Bacigalupi , of the genre Biopunk is attributed. The English original was published in 2009, the German translation by Hannes Riffel and Dorothea Kallfass in 2011 by Heyne . By September 2013, 200,000 copies had already been sold. The two short stories Yellow Card Man (English, roughly " Yellow Card Man ") and The Calorie Man (English, roughly: " The Calorie Man ") by the same author are related to the content of the novel and are included in an expanded edition.

Setting

The newly created Cheshire Cat displaced the other cat species and caused the demise of the songbirds

The stories are set in a dystopian world. The depletion of oil and global warming have made energy scarce. Biogas is used for lighting and the burning of coal is considered a luxury. Energy is stored in coil springs. These are raised by animals or humans and used to drive engines, rifles and the like.

The Grain Belt has become home to large food groups ("calorie companies") such as AgriGen, PurCal and Midwest Growers Group. On the Mississippi River , the setting for "The Calorie Man", large barges transport the harvests of new, genetically modified wheat varieties with names like SoyPRO, NutriWheat and U-Tex to New Orleans , from where they are shipped all over the world. IP policemen ( "intellectual property" Intellectual Property ) attempt to stem the "calorie smuggling" and to prevent the thwarting of license payments. Shortly after these new varieties were created, most crops were wiped out by novel epidemics. The calorie companies thus have oligopolies on food and energy supplies.

Otherwise, the era of globalization (referred to in the book as "expansion") has come to an end. Multinational companies and nation states have collapsed, Thailand alone still exists. Tucked here is the only seed library that is not under the control of the calorie companies. The capital Bangkok , the scene of bio-war and “Yellow Card Man”, is protected from the sea by high levees and coal-fired pumps. The country is in a fragile equilibrium: the Ministry of the Environment, the “White Shirts”, is trying to seal off the country from the rest of the world, while the Ministry of Commerce is seeking a free trade policy.

The fauna is also subjected to genetic manipulation. For example, elephants were enlarged to "megodonts". For the aging society of Japan, "new people" with higher disease immunity and speed and a will to obey have been developed.

content

The story of Yellow Card Man takes place before bio war . The temporal connection between the two stories and The Calorie Man remains unclear.

The Calorie Man

In a nameless village on the Mississippi River, the antique dealer and smuggler Lalji has the springs of his boat charged. The village is surrounded by calories, in the form of wheat fields, and he doesn't want to attract unnecessary attention. Therefore, Lalji is neither impressed by a begging child nor by a subsequent request for recharging, but gets the owner to feed the starving genetic mules, which were used to raise the feathers, again.

Lalji risks traveling further upstream than usual. His chess partner, and buyer of smuggled grain, Shriram hired him to smuggle a calorie man, an old geneticist, downstream to New Orleans. Since he is not carrying any contraband, he only has to hold back his trigger-happy helper Creo.

reception

Adam Roberts describes the book in his review for the Guardian as about "100 pages too long", but at the same time the book manages to stimulate thought and it is vividly remembered.

Awards

The author's debut novel has received numerous awards. The book won three of the most important prizes in 2010: it won the Hugo Award (shared with The City & the City ), the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award in the first novel category. It also received the Compton Crook Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel . The translations were also awarded, the German translation won the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis 2012 as the best foreign work, the Japanese the Seiun-Preis , the French the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire , the Prix ​​Une autre Terre and the Prix ​​Bob Morane as well the Spanish the Premio Ignotus .

literature

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Casper Bruun Jensen: Wound-up worlds and The Wind-up Girl: on the anthropology of climate change and climate fiction , in: Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 1st volume, 1st edition (2017), p. 186-200.
  • Sean Donnelly: Peak Oil Imagining in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl , in: English Academy Review, Volume 31, Edition 2 (October 2014), pp. 156–169
  • Andrew Hageman: The Challenge of Imagining Ecological Futures: Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl , in: Science Fiction Studies, Volume 39, 2nd Edition (July 2012), pp. 283–303.
  • Derrick King: Biogenetics, The Nation, and Globalization in Paolo Bacigalupi's Critical Dystopias . in: MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, 1st volume, 1st edition (2016)
  • Uwe Neuhold: Biokrieg , in: The Science Fiction Year 2012 , edited by Wolfgang Jeschke , Sascha Mamczak and Sebastian Pirling, Heyne, Munich 2012, pp. 320–323. ISBN 978-3-453-52972-4 .
  • Scott Selisker: “Stutter-Stop Flash-Bulb Strange”: GMOs and the Aesthetics of Scale in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl , in: Science Fiction Studies, Volume 42, 3rd Edition (November 2015), pp. 500-518.
  • Juliane Straetz: The Struggle of Being Alive: Laboring Bodies in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl , in: Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies 18th year, 1st edition (2017)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julie Bosman: Knopf Acquires New Paolo Bacigalupi Novel . In: New York Times online , September 6, 2013. Retrieved January 26, 2019. 
  2. ↑ Adam Roberts : The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - review . In: The Guardian , December 18, 2010. Retrieved January 26, 2019. 
  3. ↑ http://www.nightshadebooks.com/book/the-windup-girl-expanded-edition/