The novel “The Windup Girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi was published for the first time in 2009. It won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, John W. Campbell Memorial and Compton Crook awards as the best science fiction novel of the year.

Anderson Lake is a representative of AgriGen, a mega-corporation in the field of biotechnology. He works in Thailand, in theory running a local factory but in fact his purpose is to find a seed bank created by the Thais to allow their nation to survive the various diseases generally artificially created that affect plants all over the world.