The Windup Girl
I saw this novel by Paolo Bacigalupi at the bookstore and thought it sounded interesting, and it most definitely is as it's kept me up reading the past few nights.
Hadn't heard of him before I saw it - it's his first novel, released last year, and won the Nebula and Campbell and was in Time Magazines top 10 for 2009.
The setting is sometime in the future (probably 100+ years from now) when the age of oil has long been gone. Companies that develop GM food have released biologically engineered viruses to destroy other countries' food supplies in order to create markets for their products. By the time of the novel, most of the world has collapsed due to these viruses mutating every few years.
The story follows Anderson Lake, who works for one of these midwestern companies. He's in Thailand searching for new sources of genetic material that his company can exploit. He encounters Emiko, a Windup Girl. She's a Japanese creation - a genetically engineered being that's designed to do whatever her owner wants them to do. Her owner left her in Thailand when he returned to Japan as it was more cost-effective for him to just buy a replacement when he returns home(plus he then gets the latest model). She has no legal standing in Thailand, and, as a non-person, is in danger of being killed by the authorities and having her remains tossed into the methane generation facilities.
I'm about half way thru the book and suspect I'll be up late for the rest of the week :)
