Oil is gone, the seas came up, and the world runs on calories — which means the agribusiness companies that own the seed patents own everything. Thailand has held out, protected by seawalls, a ruthless Environment Ministry, and a hidden seed bank of genes nobody else has. Into that come a company man hunting the seed bank, a Chinese refugee scraping by after his community was slaughtered in Malaysia, and Emiko, a Japanese-engineered woman abandoned in Bangkok and treated as property. Everything is powered by springs wound by genetically built elephants. It won the Hugo and the Nebula, and the world-building is the reason.
The Windup Girl