Paolo Bacigalui - The Windup Girl

Can you understand spanish? Take a look at this video, then:

If not, stay with me a little while.

Welcome to the twenty-second century. Anderson Lake is the right-hand man of AgriGen in Thailand, a kingdom closed to foreigners in order to protect their precious ecologic reserves.

But Anderson's job as a factory manager is actually a cover. Anderson combes the street stalls of Bangkok in search of the most precious booty for his masters: the food that mankind believed extinct. His mission is to discover the seed stock of unmodified plants disappeared many years ago in the rest of the planet, who mysteriously has been preserved in the isolated Asian kingdom, and deliver them to the multinational of biotechnology for which he really works.
 
And then he finds Emiko...

Emiko is a «windup girl», the last link of genetic engineering designed to serve. Accused by some of lacking a soul, accused by other of being devils incarnate, they actually are slaves, soldiers o sexual toys to satisfy the rich in a future disturbingly close.

John Crowley - Engine Summer

Title in Spain: "El verano del pequeño San John" which, again translated into English would be "Little Saint John's summer".

The title (Engine Summer) is a pun on "Indian Sum-mer" and, indeed, the culture that emerges after the disaster that this book describes keeps a vague resemblance to that of North Americans Indians. The narrator is called Rush that Speaks, and other characters have names like Painted Red and Seven Hands, and all of them live together in a peaceful drug using community called Little Belaire.

Although I found the book really hard to follow from the beginning and then soon got lost in its twisted topography, I did my best to finish it because I had seen it described as: "a novel of exceptional sensitivity and beauty", "peaceful, lovely and autumnal story", "prose poetry", "most lyrical and poignant book", 

The Synopsis, according to Wikipedia:

The novel tells the story of a young man named Rush that Speaks and of his wandering through a strange, post-apocalyptic world in pursuit of several seemingly incompatible goals.

The story is set in a post-technological future. Our own age is dimly remembered in story and legend, but without nostalgia or regret. The people of Rush's world are engaged in living their own lives in their own cultures. Words and artifacts from our own time survive into Rush's age, suggesting that it is only a few millennia in our future. Yet we are given hints that human society and even human biology are significantly changed. Even such basics as reproduction and eating have been altered, one by industrial-age genetic tampering, the other by contact with extraterrestrial life.

Rush comes of age in Little Belaire, a mazelike village of invisible, shifting boundaries, of secret paths and meandering stories and antique bric-a-brac carefully preserved in carved chests. The inhabitants are divided into clans called cords based on personality traits. Over the centuries, the people of Little Belaire have perfected an art which they call truthful speaking: communication so clear and accurate, so "transparent", as to leave no potential for deception or misunderstanding. Perhaps as a result of this practice, Little Belaire appears to be free of any violence or even serious competition. Another result of truthful speaking is the existence of the saints, those whose stories speak not only of the specifics of their own lives, but about the human condition. Yet even with the benefit of truthful speaking, secrets and mysteries remain.

Rush's journey is set in motion when the girl he loves, Once a Day, elopes from Little Belaire to join another group, an enigmatic society called Dr. Boots's List. In his search for her, Rush befriends a hermit and an "avvenger" and shares the secrets of the List. Ultimately he discovers a transparent sainthood stranger than any story told by the gossips of Little Belaire.

And the synopsis, according to entrelectores:

A thousand years after the Storm, which destroyed the industrial society, survivors are divided into isolated communities, with their own and tiny cultures. Little Belaire is an enclave of "Truthful Speakers" who practice an ethic of total openness and mysticism fueled by intoxicants, and a serpentine style of life and conversation. Nearest neighbors are the people most secretive and puritanical of the List of Dr. Boots, fond of cats, and descendants of a feminist organization that came to announce the end of the world.

Rush that Speaks, from Little Belaire, wants to be holy, have a life of transparent texture in which all people can see themselves. So he travels from one place to another, examining the mysterious and unique artifacts created by the "angels ", who now live in cities floating in the sky, sharing the arboreal life of a hermit, rejecting the ways and customs of the List. He meets the Looters, who still revere the remains of technological civilization. Finally he meets Mongolfier, sent by parachute from a place of angels, and records with him the vicissitudes of his own hagiography into eight-sided crystals. And reaches an  ironica potheosis: the autumnal acceptance if unhappy consciousness in a book entitled "The Little Summer of St. John" who will instruct the angels -we- on the virtues of the people of the surface.

This is a different John Crowley, but has an interesting story nevertheless

John Crowley (born December 1, 1942) is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer. He is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by Harold Bloom.

Justin Cronin: The Passage

A scientist leading an expedition deep in the jungle, discovers a miracle substance that may allow to increase the life expectancy of mankind and destroy most diseases. At least that is what he believes but time proves him wrong and no man comes out alive from the expedition. Those who survive are no longer human beings.

In a top secret U.S. government facilities the unthinkable happens: a security flaw allows the escape of monstrous beings that were the subject of a military experiment with a virus. In an incredibly short time, they unleash chaos and destruction in its wake.

Not far from there, Amy, an orphan girl, barely six years old, begins a treacherous journey. Amy is a very special girl and that is well known by the bloodthirsty beings chasing here, and so do those who have ordered the FBI agent Brad Wolgast you to get her at all costs.

But Wolgast disobeys his orders and instead, decides to protect Amy. Knowing that she is the key to stopping the horror that has gripped the planet. As the Earth as we know it is approaching its own end at a terrific speed, Amy and Wolgast begin their peculiar odyssey through a world transformed by man's darkest dreams, waiting for that moment they can end what should never have happened.

People affected by the virus turn into vampire-like creatures and children have to be evacuated from the cities, carried to fortified settlements, colonies, where they can be protected.

Born to be a bestseller, people complain about its size, more than 1000 pages. For me, 1000 pages are O.K., no objection at all provided they are good or even only funny such as these are. Low pace at times, specially in the middle.

As read in libro-génica:

"The Passage"is a grand narrative full of characters very finely drawn that as it progresses, becomes a discussion between several voices on human society, their dialogue ranging between individualism and solidarity. Also, it is seen as a study of human behavior to hostile conditions: an internal struggle that almost all the book's characters manage to beat - their road punctured by difficult choices and the ongoing duel between the magnet of madness and the strength of survival.

Angela Carter: Heroes and Villains (1970)

 
After a nuclear war, there are three surviving societies: the Professors, an elite group of survivors who form scattered enclaves of civilization sustained by farming; the Barbarians, nomads who have survived outside the bunkers, raiding the Professors' villages for supplies and food; and the Out People, mutants who have been mutilated by the radiation, inhabiting the ruins. The protagonist, Marianne, is a Professor's daughter. As a child, she witnesses an attack on her village during which a young Barbarian kills her brother. She grows more and more bored with life among the Professors, so at the age of sixteen, following her father's death, she willingly helps a Barbarian warrior during another attack and runs away with him to his tribe. After her attempted escape and rape by her dark companion Jewel, she is forced to marry him and discovers that he is the one who murdered her brother. Their relationship is ambiguous--erotic and antagonistic--but eventually, when Marianne gets pregnant, she allies herself with Jewel to overthrow the power of Donally, the renegade Professor and the tribe's shaman as well as Jewel's tutor, who introduced the Barbarians to the power of myth and ritual. When Jewel is killed in an ambush, Marianne decides to become a new leader of the Barbarians, a Tiger Lady determined to "rule them with a rod of iron"   (This synopsis and a deep and philosophical analysis that I can't fully understand, you can find in Highbeam)

I personally don't find this post apocalyptic world convincing, perhaps the book has not aged well. I didn't like it, I find it simple, needlessly brutal and Manichean, and won't spend more time with it. 

Please, if you liked it, tell me why because I admit that sometimes I'm unfair to certain books that I've read at the wrong time in my life, and knowing they are worthwile, I can retake them in another time and be able then to acknowledge the merit and grace in them.