n the last decade, debates and protests about GM crops have become familiar: we know about sterile seeds, new kinds of crops pests and reduced bio-diversity. We realise that food security is tied to questions of nationhood, biotechnology and global capital.

Paolo Bacigalupi's Hugo and Nebula Award winning debut novel The Windup Girl is therefore not a dystopia so much as a very likely near-future of our beleaguered world. In the Thailand of the novel, large parts of coastal Asia have been submerged by rising sea levels. The world no longer runs on fossil fuels and wealth is often measured by calories. Thailand is one country that has successfully withstood the several diseases that periodically ravage food crops and populations worldwide because of the kingdom's secret seed bank that corporations such as AgriGen covet and because of stringent environmental laws.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s award winning debut novel is therefore not a dystopia so much as a very likely near-future of our beleaguered world. If the warp and weft of the novel consists of political and ecological themes, there is a bright thread of religious belief that runs through the fabric of the narrative.

As the novel opens, Anderson Lake is in a teeming market having just discovered a fruit that he has never tasted before, which appears to be genetically pristine rather than 'generipped' or manufactured in a lab somewhere. Lake is a spy on the lookout for new genetic material but is undercover, because the Thai kingdom's Environment Ministry jealously protects its biowealth. The deeply nationalist white shirts that comprise the rank and file of the Environment Ministry under the leadership of Jaidee and his lieutenant Kanya, keep close tabs on factories, markets and what enters and leaves these spaces.

When so much else is bioengineered, it is not surprising to find that this world also has creatures that have been genetically modified. The windups are bioengineered creatures manufactured by the Japanese and the human windups are mostly trained geishas meant to be companions to rich Japanese businessmen.

Emiko is one such windup who has been abandoned in Thailand by her owner and lives illegally and in constant fear of being 'mulched' or recycled for precious calories. Not surprisingly, when the words 'illegal' and 'geisha' go together, we find that Emiko has become a sex slave who undergoes ritual sexual humiliation and abuse and thinks constantly of escape and freedom.

The last main character through whose presence the story unfolds is Hong Seng, a Chinese Malay refugee or 'yellow card' whose position (as refugee) is precarious and is, consequently, paranoid about survival.

If the warp and weft of the novel consists of political and ecological themes, there is a bright thread of religious belief that runs through the fabric of the narrative. This is not unusual in science fiction and fantasy: major works by Ursula le Guin or Frank Herbert have religious motifs; what is unusual, however, is the importance Bacigalupi gives to the Buddhist idea of karma (or kamma) as responsibility for ones actions and the consequences thereof.

Emiko's (the windup girl) dilemmas are as often philosophical as they are physical. Being sterile, she wonders if windups, or New People have souls and whether she will reincarnate. She prays to a bodhisattva for New People. Characters discuss the ghosts that crowd their world, and conclude nobody can have committed deeds bad enough to deserve being born into the world as it is; they speculate about the kind of souls that might deserve reincarnation as windups. (As ever, the idea of a soul itself confers a humanity that characters in the novel are reluctant to bestow upon manufactured creatures such as windups). Bacigalupi makes complex and beguiling connections between reincarnation and sterility that have both spiritual and ecological implications for the narrative.

At one point, the mysterious generipper Gibson, who is in the custody of the Thai kingdom, says, "Everyone dies. [...] but you die now because you cling to the past. We should all be windups by now. It's easier to build a person impervious to blister rust than to protect an earlier version of the human creature. A generation from now, we could be well-suited to our new environment."

Where Bacigalupi is less dexterous is in his descriptions of the humiliations Emiko suffers. These tilt dangerously towards the prurient and could have, with a little effort, been avoided. Also jarring are the frequent italicisations of 'foreign' words, most of them being Thai or Japanese phrases. If context and time are enough to reveal the meanings of science fictional concept words (such as 'windup' or 'blister rust') and these can escape italicisation, there is no reason I can think of that requires words from languages other than English to be italicised.

But these failings apart, the novel is rich in detail and completely absorbing to read. It's the kind of science fiction that one gulps down greedily in a day or two and then returns to again to savour more slowly. That The Windup Girl tied for the Hugo with China Mieville's much-praised The City and The City and won the Nebula outright last year should be a recommendation in itself.