[nquixote]

OK, I just had to complain about this somewhere, and here is as good a place as any.

I'm now reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and the parallels to Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl are just too many to ignore. The post-Peak-Oil-and-Global-Warming setting. The all-powerful bio-corporations that release plagues on purpose. The genetically engineered animals that displace local species. The brutality of the Southeast Asian sex industry.

Obviously the plot and (most of the) characters are different, but after reading Atwood, I am retroactively revoking a lot of the Creativity Points I had allotted to Bacigalupi...

[psikeyhackr]

Well that is a new perspective at least. Never heard that before.

I haven't read either one so I can't contribute an opinion.

But post-peak oil should become a popular setting, like post-nuclear war in the 50s and 60s.

psik

[Hobbit]

Well that is a new perspective at least. Never heard that before. Me neither: interesting point, though you are assuming that Paolo's even read Atwood. I suspect their circles of experience are quite different.

A lot of those ideas are in the zeitgeist, though: if they've both been reading New Scientist or Nature they might get the same ideas. As psik says, they are quite common at the moment.

Anyone else feel the two are similar?

Mark

[Crusader]

I've read both, and while the premises (or elements thereof) are similar they were completely different in approach. I would definitely not call either one a ripoff of the other.

[psikeyhackr]

You know how we have these best sci-fi lists and people talking about what is THE BEST sci-fi story. I am really not into that so much but something just occurred to me the other day related to this.

This idea of resource depletion and the economic and social effects.

In Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, ice was kind of like oil in the world now. It was the driver of the lunar economy and controlled by Earth policies. So the likelyhood of its depletion eventually triggered war.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dillgroup.ucsf.edu%2F~grockli n%2Fpdfbooks%2Fthe%2520moon%2520is%2520a%2520harsh %2520mistress.pdf&ei=xcR7TqyqCaWOsAKzzLymAw&usg=AFQjCNGBWldz8XakPer4LAQACW_LyRLq4Q&sig2=4KTtbFtCC2DextDUO3UNYw

http://dc168.4shared.com/img/2TffrZ2Y/preview.html

I only made that ice/oil association in my mind a few days ago and started doing searches on that to see if others made that connection. So I'll promote TMIAHM as the best sci-fi book because it is so old and yet provided such a great analog for near future reality like Windup Girl but that was written close enough to see the reality.

psik

[nquixote]

OK, it wasn't really a massive ripoff.

But also, the general motif of "everyone is a hard-bitten selfish bastard (except when they feel protective toward a SE Asian prostitute)" is very similar.

The Windup Girl seemed wildly original when I read it, the freshest thing in near-future sci-fi since Neuromancer. Now I think it was just a pretty good, pretty standard installment in a genre that Atwood pioneered...

[KatG]

Atwood did not pioneer anything. There are oodles of Earth destroyed or decaying by viruses, nuclear blasts, meteor strikes, global catastrophe such as flooding or earthquakes and plate shifts, core heating, scientific experiments gone awry from bacteria to genetics to pollutants to nanotech to electronic, famine and drought, etc., stories. And prostitution has been a staple of dystopian and post-apocalypse SF since the 1980's -- Atwood's prime era. I'm pretty sure Heinlein wasn't first with the scarcity of global resources either. It was a constant post-WW II preoccupation of a good chunk of SF. And post-apoc from wipe-out forces goes back to Mary Shelley's The Last Man and before that.

When I read Orxy and Crake, original ideas or setting were not the things that came to my mind. It's a basic Cain and Able tale, which is one of those things along with Adam and Eve (which was in there too,) that SF mags routinely ask submitters not to send because they've been getting them for fifty years. Like McCarthy, Atwood took a standard SF premise and used it for a pro-feminism, pro-environmental exploration. The sequel to Oryx and Crake even more so. Which is not to say it wasn't a good book. But it's far more likely that Bacigalupi was more influenced by World SF and things like Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain.

Where I find Atwood more groundbreaking was her The Handmaid's Tale, which has had more impact. It was not charting off a new course from feminist SF, but it hit the head on the nail on a lot of social issues, especially in the 1980's and it was beautifully structured. I could see a lot of the influences of The Handmaid's Tale in Orxy and Crake. In a way, it's a dialogue that Atwood is simply continuing. Whereas Bacigalupi is much more over in the macho cyberpunk area and Asian SF and robotics. Despite the storyline with Oryx, Atwood remains more centered on the Western view of the world. And despite his focus on the exploited wind-up girl, I suspect Bacigalupi is more interested in things like seedbanks and politics.

[Contrarius]

I loved Oryx and Crake in a big way, but it never struck me that her basic world setup was all that groundbreaking. You can see more-or-less similar ideas in many dystopian tales -- Bladerunner comes to mind, but there are many others.

[KatG]

Well who knows -- maybe Bacigalupi was inspired by Atwood using Thailand as a setting, but there seems to be a growing interest in using Asia again for stories. And we're definitely going to get more environmental disaster stories in the next decade, I think.

Wind-Up Girl has sounded to me as very connected to Bladerunner in terms of concepts -- the replicants that serve, rebellion, current world falling apart environmentally, etc. Did it seem like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

[Luke_B]

I think the originality of The Windup Girl has been somewhat overstated, but I still found it a really good read. I think Bacigalupi was writing short stories in this milieu before Atwood wrote her book and it's unlikely that he ripped her off intentionally. "Massive rip off" is a phrase that sounds intentionally provocative and exaggerated. Also, though I haven't read Oryx and Crate, from what has been described, the concepts in that book don't sound particularly groundbreaking.

I think Bacigalupi's concept of a calorie economy is very interesting and probably the most unique idea in his work, unless someone can point me to an author that's done it before.

Wind-Up Girl has sounded to me as very connected to Bladerunner in terms of concepts -- the replicants that serve, rebellion, current world falling apart environmentally, etc. Did it seem like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Not much. I think it's possible to trace the genome of The Windup Girl back to cyberpunk and the aesthetic of the film might be in its DNA, but it has very little in common with Dick's book, except for the very superficial elements you have listed. It does have elements of Gibson and McDonald.