"The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi

"The Windup Girl" is the first novel by Paolo Bacigalupi, and at first it reminded me of the Murakami mind-blowing, world literature classic "The Windup Bird Chronicle", but the resemblance is only in the title.  Luckily. This is an explicit, dark, unrepentant novel.  There are no good characters.  Every single character kills, tortures, rapes, cheats, lies or otherwise acts like a piece of shit.  Nobody is likable.  Not even the titular Windup Girl, Emiko, even after she's repeatedly and brutally raped on stage as a spectacle for leering human-animals.  She is used as a rental sex toy for johns who, as she says, "fuck me then spit on me." The novel is set in 25th century Thailand, which is one of the few surviving countries after global warming/flooding, GMO plagues that destroy most of the world's plant life, famines, mass deaths and destruction of pretty much the entire developed world.  What remains is controlled by a handful of GMO Conglomerates with their own private armies to monitor the usage of their "intellectual property" and destroy anyone and anything that stands in their path.  They are also called "Calorie Companies."Anderson Lake is a "Calorie Man" working for AgriGen and despite posing as a "kink spring" factory propriator - is actually hunting for the last remaining seed bank in Thailind, that he wants to appropriate and destroy so that AgriGen gets market advantage over the other calorie companies.  Hok San is the "Yellow Card" Malay Chinese refugee who manages the factory for Lake, and also tries to steal the plans for the latest advanced kink spring, to sell it to the Dung Lord in order to restore his shipping empire destroyed in Malaysia by the muslim nationalist "Green Bands" who gang raped his daughters and tortured and killed his sons.  Only 1% of the Malaysian Chinese population survives the genocide.  Another story line is of the rivalry between the two strongest Thai ministries, Trade and Environment, with their own private armies, black shirts and white shirts, while their top leaders vie for supremacy at the Thai Royal court and the Thai Child Queen.  Jaidhee is a captain of the White Shirts, Environment Ministry's army and is betrayed by his lieutenant Kanya, and brutally killed by Trade (they push him of a roof of a building, then cut his head off and put his penis in his mouth).  This unleashed a civil war which Trade eventually wins, but the destruction of Bangkok follows, so nobody really wins.  At the end, Gibson (Gi Bu Sen), former Agrigen scientist, meets Emiko and promises to help her have genetic clone children.  They stay together at the flooded Bankgok with Emiko and Gibson's lover, the lady-boy Kip.This book won all the Sci-Fi awards, but is definitely hard to swallow.  Expect no mercy.  

"Woken Furies" by Richard Morgan

The third part of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, definitely better than the second one (not a great achievement), but not as good as the first one.  No wonder Netflix is basing its series only on the first volume, "Altered Carbon".

Kovacs is old here, both physically and definitely mentally, starting the question what has he done with his life and could have he made better choices.  It happens on his home planet, Harlan's World, the only planet orbiting the Glimmer star system, and, of course, located by the human kind based on the "Martian" astrogation charts.  The "Martians" being the ancient alien sapient race that populated large swaths of the Perseus Arm, home to the human race, and disappeared somewhere about 500,000 years ago.

The book also gives us the Morgan's most interesting creation, Quellcrist Falconer, or Nadia Makita, the revolutionary leader who overthrew the Harlan's world first families 320 years ago, for a short while, and got killed by "Angelfire' from the "Martian" probes orbiting the planet.  The big reveal in the end has to do with what "Angelfire" does besides vaporizing.  Also Tak seems to have been copied during his early UN Protectorate Envoy years and now this younger Tak, who hasn't been to Sanction 4, is working for the Harlans and tries to kill the old Tak, whom he despises, but only manages to kill, pretty much, all of his friends and collaborators.

The book is slow at parts, but overall works well.  Not at the level of the first volume, Altered Carbon, but well nevertheless.  Seems like Morgan tried to experiment with too many different genres in the three volumes, probably would'be been better to stick to the first volume formula, cyberpunk, hard-boiled detective story.