The first meeting of the Scifi/Fantasy Book Club on the 7th was great. Six people came; a great turnout for our first effort. We’ll be meeting the first Tuesday of every month. I invite you to join us next month, on October 5th at 6pm, for Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Since it’s a book club book,we have it for 20% off!
We read Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Well, actually, two of us read the Windup Girl, two got partway through, one bought it and never started, and one only heard of the club the afternoon we were planning to meet. But we had a great discussion anyway. The main focus of the book is the intersection of evolution, engineering, and politics, which gave us a lot to talk about outside specifics of the plot.
The Windup Girl’s world has been overrun and largely destroyed by bio-engineered species who out-compete their naturally evolved counterparts. The same day as the meeting, NPR broke a story about a genetically engineered salmon species seeking approval from the FDA. In response, the Grahamites (“niche-ists”) in the book believe that it is a sin to transport species outside of their natural niche and geographic origin, much less engineer them to be more useful to humans. They want to return to the “Eden” of natural diversity and separate ecosystems, each creature to its niche. This is clearly the logical extension of the “locavore” movement, which has been growing more prominent (and more strident) the last few years. These trends grow together and react to one another even now - in The Windup Girl, as now, the Grahamites are fighting a losing battle.
The world of the book has been devastated by plagues, man-made and “natural.” I personally was unsettled by an experience I had in my local pharmacy. You see, the characters in the book are intimately familiar with the variations and waves of the major diseases - somebody says, yeah, my wife died of cibiscosis a.1099a2, and then somebody else says, that was a bad one, sure enough. I read The Windup Girl all in one day, and then right after I finished it I went to pick up my prescriptions. What do you suppose I heard over the loudspeaker? “Get your flu vaccine here, only $15, covers the three most common strains this season including H1N1.” (!!!)
This is only a small sample of our conversation- come next month to hear the whole thing!
