Global warming has raised the levels of world's oceans, carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices.

Frequent catastrophes, such as deadly and widespread plagues and illness, caused by genetically modified crops and mutant pests, ravage entire populations.

It maintains its own reserve of genetically viable seeds, fights off engineered plagues and other bioterrorism, and keeps its borders firmly closed against the calorie companies and other foreign biological imports.

He owns a factory trying to mass-produce a revolutionary new model of kink-spring (the successor, in the absence of oil or petroleum, to the internal combustion engine) that will store gigajoules of energy.

However, the factory is a cover for his real mission: discovering the location of the Thai seedbank, with which Thailand has so far managed to resist the calorie companies' attempts at agro-economic subjugation.

He has heavily delegated the running of the factory to his manager, Hock Seng, a refugee from the Malaysian purge of the ethnic Chinese.

When Anderson visits a sex club, he meets Emiko, a "windup girl" - a genetically modified human created as a servant and companion.

Windups are illegal in Thailand; Emiko was brought to Bangkok and abandoned by her owner, a Japanese delegate on a diplomatic mission.

Emiko lives in fear of being discovered and murdered by the Environment Ministry, and is currently in bonded servitude to Raleigh, the owner of the club.

Anderson offers to supply a new strain of GM rice and a private army from AgriGen to repel the White Shirts in exchange for access to the seedbank and lowering of the trade barriers.

Akkarat accuses General Pracha of orchestrating the Somdet Chaopraya's assassination, and the capital is plunged into civil war.

[7] Adam Roberts, reviewing the book for The Guardian, concludes "when it hits its sweet-spot, The Windup Girl embodies what SF does best of all: it remakes reality in compelling, absorbing and thought-provoking ways, and it lives on vividly in the mind.

[9] In SF Signal, Jason Sanford praised the novel as "expertly crafted with beautiful writing, sympathetic characters, and a fast-paced plot", and commended Bacigalupi for "combin(ing) a perfect ear for language with wonderful ideas and world-building", noting that the "moments of horrific violence" are "never gratuitous" but instead are "integral to the novel's plot".

[10] In Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison stated that the novel was "irresistibly readable for long stretches", due to "the frantic excitement of uncertainty", but described its plot as "slightly creaky".

Harrison also compared Bacigalupi's "exploration of the submissiveness that shapes Emiko's responses in so many situations" to Richard K. Morgan's depiction of an equivalent situation in the 2007 novel Black Man, observing that the transition between Emiko's compelled behaviors and her independent actions is "unconvincing", with the result that she "feel[s] like a short story character, rather than a novel character: an argument rather than a person."