The wife got me a cool gadget for Christmas. It's a LED flashlight that is powered by turning a little crank on it so I won't be cursing a lack of fresh batteries when I need it. In The Windup Girl, I could make some money by cranking that flashlight for someone. 
 It's set in Thailand after corporate warfare between agricultural firms went biological. In the process of trying to taint the other guy's crops, most of the world's food supply is now perpetually at risk of being overwhelmed by the next genetic modification. Global warming is causing massive restrictions on carbon output and oil based fuels are gone. With limited coal and methane allowed to be burned, most energy comes from muscle power. Kinetic energy is harnessed in kink-springs and released as needed. The springs are wound by genetically modified elephants called megodonts or old fashioned human muscle power. With food limited and muscle power at a premium, calories are the new currency. 
 A 'calorie man' named Anderson Lake is under cover from one of the corporations trying to find untainted foodstuffs to use as the basis for further modifications, and he thinks he's got a line on a rogue geneticist and Thailand's seed bank. His life is complicated when he gets infatuated with a New Person named Emiko. She's a windup girl, genetically engineered to serve by the Japanese and abandoned in Thailand by her former master, and she's now essentially a slave at a sex club. Anderson's ambition to get his hands on Thailand's seed bank conflicts with several other characters such as a Thai environment official desperately trying to keep corruption from allowing his country to be overwhelmed like the rest of the world and an exiled Chinese factory foreman who wants to rebuild his shipping business by stealing plans for a new type of spring from the factory that Anderson runs as a cover. 
 Bacigalupi did some serious world building in this book. A Thai society that barely managed to save their food supplies when most of the rest of the world wasn't so lucky, but is about to be undone by the corruption within it's own government was fascinating in itself. Add in the idea of an energy starved world clinging to the remnants of high technology, and some unique and fully formed characters and you've got one helluva good sci-fi story. 
 My only real complaint is that the author never offers any explanation as to why solar or wind or water power aren't utilized. He put so much thought into creating the rest of this rich and detailed setting that it's a little odd that nothing is ever mentioned about it, but that's a minor complaint about a great story.