Location Lit: Paolo Bacigalupi's Bangkok masterpiece, The Windup Girl

I love to read novels about a place while visiting it, and I'm always looking for good ones. You can enjoy a book about Bangkok without having a mental picture of Sukhumvit, or knowing what a soi is, but the pleasure is amplified when you do.

Bangkok travelers, or people following the story of the political unrest there, will enjoy, then, the American short-story writer Paolo Bacigalupi's brilliant first novel, The Windup Girl. You could call it science fiction, but really it falls into the new category of smart, speculative literary fiction that's increasingly making un-sense of the category.

As does your first arrival in Bangkok, the novel starts with overwhelming sun, sweat, a cotton-dampening bath of hot, humid air, and teeming, melty-asphalt streets crowded with vendors of every kind of tropical fruit. That's really what it's like today, but in Bacigalupi's world, set unspecified years in the future, the protagonist is a corporate spy from a big agribusiness company, come to Bangkok to discover the secrets to the Thai Kingdom's outlaw-genetic-code foods.

The action is set in a post-oil world, post-global warming, post-"contraction" when globalization fell apart, a world where power, and the computers and phones and cars that depend on them, is something even the rich and the governments have in preciously small quantities. From there, you plunge into Thai politics, the worlds of spys, slums, refugees and genetically engineered Japanese "wind up" people designed as soldiers or sex toys.

Laying out the premises could make the book sound didactic, but the information takes its sweet, disorienting time to come clear. This was a great book on the level of prose, and also for twisted & surprising views on our hot-button topics. It has a very light touch in terms of references to today's Bangkok, which makes the locations the reader recognizes or suspects might be familiar, more psychologically effective. The genius is in how this transformed, futuristic, barely recognizable Bangkok feels just like the real thing. Read it by the pool at the Oriental, while meditating on the joys of ice and air-conditioning.

Also, there's a Bacigalupi short story online at Pyr books, here. And, people who like the Location Lit concept are directed to the Rough Guides, which have great "Context" sections in the back, recommending destination specific books and movies.

How to choose a hotel in Bangkok

When I'm choosing a hotel, I'm usually trying to find the most "real" neighborhood—I like to stay where I'd live, if I lived in the city I'm visiting. That means out of the tourist ghetto, not as close as possible to the local Gucci store, away from anything labeled Marriot, and so on.

Except in Bangkok. In Bangkok I—and you, if you are taking my advice—want to stay in one of the insane luxury towers on the Chao Phraya River. The towers are close to some major temples, the little streets surrounding them are stuffed with Thai Silk stores, jewelers, one-hour photos, tailors copying clothes, and every other tourist amenity. Any taxi that picks you up around here can take you to Kao San Road, no problem. (That's the backpacker mecca immortalized in the movie The Beach; more on how difficult it is to communicate with cab drivers and get around Bangkok, later). When I was in my 20s, these hotels—The Oriental, the Shangri-La, among others—were the most luxurious places I'd ever been able to afford to stay. Rooms these days are around $350 a night, maybe less depending on how/when you book. These are perfect, gleaming, travel-magazine-porn-shot hotels. Silk carpets and enormous air-conditioned lobbies and uniformed porters and people in livery handing you orchids when you walk in, rooms with marble shower stalls and beds with bolsters and a concierge on every floor to greet you and hustle down the hall to open your room door for you. They're really, really nice. And the view—of the slow, gray, churning river far below, of boat traffic and bridge traffic and other luxury hotel-high rises, and the enormous city all around you—is probably not what you'd be looking at every day if you lived in Bangkok, but it's so wonderful, I don't care.

Also, I find arriving Bangkok from NYC to be overwhelming, and I like to hide out in an oasis like the Oriental and acclimatize to the heat and humidity and time difference for a little while.

Still, people who want the same level of luxury for less $$ could try any of the big hotels that aren't on the river. My brother once got a great deal at Le Meridian, and he felt that it compared favorably to the Oriental and didn't cost as much. At some point, it's all so luxurious, what's one orchid or view or slightly more favorable location for a pool more, or less?

Bangkok becomes ever more amazing

So, it doesn't happen with every destination, but I sometimes start researching a place and find so many great bloggers and cool beta-test websites and interesting literary people talking about the language or the culture that it's really quite exciting. It doesn't happen with every city--and sometimes not with the ones you'd expect (Paris? Why not Paris, people?), or even with most cities, but it turns out that Bangkok is one of the happy few. Maybe eventually I'll get a feel for what kind of cities sponsor lively and loving coverage, and which don't but so far it's always a not-surprising surprise.

Not surprising because Bangkok has always seemed like a place I could almost live. You know that travel thing where you start imagining what your life would be like in every new place? I've sort of dreamed of Bangkok days with the cool arts people I would meet and the jaded Aussies and even the awful spectacle of the sex tourists, these terrible lone men like dinosaurs or deep-sea creatures, pale and wattled...I've seen them in hotels. Anyway, a lot of blabber to say that from the online profile, one, it seems like there are a lot of cool people speaking English in Bangkok and two, it seems like the hotels and the bars and the restaurants are creative, fascinating, very Thai but also accessible to tourists. I'm looking forward to going again.

And, in the meantime, before my city page is up, check out this great blog by Marcel Barang, a translator of important Thai literary works into English and French. It's called "the written wor(l)d en deux langues" and you could live your cool Thai life just by following in his footsteps.