Animal Death: Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi’s Nebula award-winning novel The Windup Girl (2009) sets up a dialectical situation which it then disrupts. This is important for two reasons. First, dialectic formations are often also assemblages or networks, meaning that their constituent parts are defined by how they interact with each other rather than by the essence which is withdrawn from such interactions. In the previous chapter, symbiosis was seen as a powerful tool for change. However, the way it was described often bordered on a dialectical structure, as did the doubling of double-vision and the contradiction of crisis energy. The Windup Girl offers a different strategy, the short circuit. In brief, this means that one of the terms of a symbiosis disrupts the symbiosis. This disruption takes the form of spatial and temporal tensions, as described above and developed below.