In his award winning speculative novel The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi depicts the devastating effects of western capitalism with its neoliberal policies on the third world countries in relation to ecological issues. Thailand is the only nation that has developed new gene-hacked produces and fruits on their own and resisted this foreign pressures that demand opening the market for the agricultural crops which have been biotechnologically developed by global companies. Embedded also in this ingenious infiltration of foreign global companies are scientific and technological products such as windup girls that are specially created cyborgs for many purposes by Japanese due to the dwindling number of people and work forces. Bacigalupi not only warns the rivalry between western companies that only strive to gain profits in every corner of the world but he also suggests that we renew the way of our life and the understanding of the world we live in so that we can transform the naïve attitude towards environmental issues and nation/state policies that have contributed to endangering the earth. This paper examines the way in which the author represents the neoliberal drives of western countries that have complicated the order of international economic and trade within the third world nations and how that move has caused internal conflicts and problems in the affected nations as it struggles to defend nation/state and political capability. It also tries to understand the author’s reflection on how we can maintain our human nature in the posthuman era in which we will have to coexist with new people of novelty like windup girls in the midst of some contradictions inherent in the economic and political forces of the North world. The author helps us to confront new challenges we may face when the new technological revolution leads us to recognize ethical issues on human nature.
저자
Jongjin Noh [ Korea Maritime and Ocean University ]
