A New Expansion: Climate Change, Posthumanism, and the Utopian Dimension in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

Abstract

ABSTRACT Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) is set in twenty-third-century Thailand, in a world in which climate change and the depletion of the oil supply have led to a collapse of the global economic system. Disease and famine are rampant. And yet, in this seemingly postapocalyptic world, there are numerous signs of hope. This text, in fact, contains strong utopian energies, driven partly by the motif of genetic engineering, which suggest the possibility of rebuilding the world in a way that overcomes many of the limitations of the past in terms of the politics of race, gender, and class, but also in terms of more enlightened attitudes toward the relationship between humans and the natural world.