The Windup Girl

Set in a future Thailand, Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel imagines a world of risen seas and spent fossil fuels, where wound springs store energy and calorie companies such as AgriGen control food with genehacked seeds and profit from bioterrorism. Thailand holds out with its own seedbank and closed borders. Anderson Lake, working for AgriGen, uses a factory as cover while hunting for that seedbank. Emiko is a windup girl, an engineered being made to serve a Kyoto businessman and then abandoned in Bangkok; New People like her serve as slaves, soldiers or toys of the rich. The novel won both the Hugo and the Nebula for best novel in 2010, sharing the Hugo with The City & the City.

Seth Godin grouped it with Pattern Recognition as novels full of images and ideas that stay with a reader for months.