''The Water Knife'' is a 2015
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
novel by
Paolo Bacigalupi
Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi (born August 6, 1972) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, John W. Campbell, Compton Crook, Theodore Sturgeon, and Michael L. Printz awards, and has been nominated for the Na ...
. It is Bacigalupi's sixth novel, and is based on his short story, ''The Tamarisk Hunter'', first published in the news magazine ''
High Country News
''High Country News'' is a monthly independent magazine based in Paonia, Colorado, that covers environmental, social, and political issues in the Western United States. Syndicated stories from ''High Country News'' have appeared in ''The New York T ...
''. It takes place in the near future, where drought brought on by climate change has devastated the
Southwestern United States
The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States that generally includes Arizona, New Mexico, and adjacent portions of California, Colorado, Ne ...
.
Central characters
*Angel Velasquez was born in Mexico and fled the country with his father after gang members murdered his mother and sister. After being released from prison by Catherine Case, Angel now works for her as her most trusted "water knife"; a hired henchman, assassin and spy who sneaks into the water boards of Nevada’s rival states, California and Arizona, sabotaging and destroying their water supplies.
*Lucy Monroe is a Pulitzer winning journalist who has stayed in Phoenix longer than she intended to, making a dangerous living reporting on the water wars. She can’t seem to abandon the chaos that surrounds her, hoping for that one big story. She knows far more about Phoenix's water secrets than she admits.
*Maria Villarosa is a young Texas refugee and orphan, doing her best to survive just one more day. She is trying to get enough money together to leave the drought stricken region, and has dreams of escaping to the north where water still falls from the sky.
Major themes
Major themes include:
water shortage and drought,
climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...
,
corporate greed
Criticism of capitalism ranges from expressing disagreement with the principles of capitalism in its entirety to expressing disagreement with particular outcomes of capitalism.
Criticism of capitalism comes from various political and philoso ...
,
social hierarchy
Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power (social and political). As su ...
,
refugee crises and
fabricated arcologies.
Glossary of sci-fi terminology
*
Arcology
Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology",. is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated and ecologically low-impact human habitats.
The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who be ...
: High-tech, highly coveted living spaces with advanced water recycling capabilities. They are largely self-sufficient buildings that can support hydroponic farms and refuge from the desert heat.
* Clearsac: A ubiquitous technology used to recycle urine into drinking water.
* Fivers: A person of high status. According to an interview with the author, "Fivers are people with five-digit addresses, desirable addresses, which means they live in the Taiyang Arcology, the only rich place in Phoenix."
* Merry Perrys: Religious zealots actively recruiting Texan refugees to their faith. According to an interview with the author, "The Merry Perrys are based on Rick Perry. Back in the 2011 drought, he was the governor of Texas and a presidential candidate. In the middle of this terrible drought he was organizing prayer circles, urging people to pray for rain."
* Zoners: According to an interview with the author, "Zoners are people from Arizona who are down on their luck."
Reception
Hugo Award
The Hugo Award is an annual literary award for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year, given at the World Science Fiction Convention and chosen by its members. The Hugo is widely considered the premier a ...
winner Jason Heller said "Bacigalupi plays on a grand scale, but he does so with a keen eye for detail, from the designer dust masks worn by the rich to the construction printers used on an industrial scale (like giant 3-D printers), for the building of Southern Nevada Water Authority super resorts. His big triumph, though, is never forgetting that ''The Water Knife'' is a thriller at its pounding heart. Even amid reams of deeply researched information about the economy, geology, history and politics of water rights and usage in the United States, he keeps the plot taut and the dialogue slashing".
In his review for ''The Washington Post'',
Héctor Tobar
Héctor Tobar (born 1963, Los Angeles) is a Los Angeles author and journalist, whose work examines the evolving and interdependent relationship between Latin America and the United States.
Life
Tobar is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. His long ...
writes that "Bacigalupi is a grim, efficient and polished narrator" and creates a "twisted fictional landscape" that is a "vision of the near-future that borrows heavily from the strangeness and conflicts of the present". Tobar also states that some of the inventions used in the novel reek of stereotypes: "Mexico, for example, has devolved into a series of political entities called the Cartel States...but a powerful journalist named Lucy Monroe and a refugee from Texas named María Villarosa provide feminine wiles and a much-needed antidote to the book’s relentless bursts of testosterone-driven prose". Overall, Tobar suggests that fans of Bacigalupi's previous novel, ''
The Windup Girl
''The Windup Girl'' is a biopunk science fiction novel by American writer Paolo Bacigalupi. It was his debut novel and was published by Night Shade Books on September 1, 2009. The novel is set in a future Thailand and covers a number of contempo ...
'', will surely "enjoy losing themselves in these nearly 400 pages of climate sci-fi, or cli-fi, as it’s now called".
''
The Denver Post
''The Denver Post'' is a daily newspaper and website published in Denver, Colorado. As of June 2022, it has an average print circulation of 57,265. In 2016, its website received roughly six million monthly unique visitors generating more than 13 ...
'' called the novel a "blockbuster" writing that the characters in the book are "dragged together by fate, make bargains with each other and with themselves, and sometimes manage to rise to the level of anti-hero...there’s a little more techno-jargon, there are explosions and helicopters, breathless action and genuine suspense...this is a rich and, yes, gritty world from a smart author who knows the American Southwest well and knows readers better".
Denise Hamilton
Denise Hamilton is an American crime novelist, journalist and editor of the Edgar award-winning anthologies ''Los Angeles Noir'' and ''Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics''. Hamilton's five Eve Diamond crime novels have been short-listed for many awa ...
said that the book brought to mind the movie
Chinatown
A Chinatown () is an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside Greater China, most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Austra ...
, saying that while "one is set in the past and the other in a dystopian future, both are
neo-noir
Neo-noir is a revival of film noir, a genre that had originally flourished during the post-World War II era in the United Statesroughly from 1940 to 1960. The French term, ''film noir'', translates literally to English as "black film", indicating ...
tales with jaded antiheroes and ruthless kingpins who wield water as lethal weapons to control life - and mete out death". Hamilton further opines that "Bacigalupi's use of water as sacred currency" evokes the novel ''
Dune
A dune is a landform composed of wind- or water-driven sand. It typically takes the form of a mound, ridge, or hill. An area with dunes is called a dune system or a dune complex. A large dune complex is called a dune field, while broad, f ...
'' and the "violence and slang" may also bring to mind the film, ''
A Clockwork Orange
''A Clockwork Orange'' may refer to:
* ''A Clockwork Orange'' (novel), a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess
** ''A Clockwork Orange'' (film), a 1971 film directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel
*** ''A Clockwork Orange'' (soundtrack), the film ...
''. However, Hamilton notes that the book is not a
pastiche
A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche pays homage to the work it imitates, rather than mocking it ...
; "Bacigalupi weaves an engrossing tale all his own, crackling with edgy style...and he makes water politics sexy, laying down the jargon and technical details early, then hurrying back to the action-filled streets...the ultimate villains here aren't the hired assassins or lowly water engineers but the faceless corporate owners who play God, deciding if entire regions live or die".
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References
External links
Wind Up Stories
- Fiction by Paolo Bacigalupi
{{DEFAULTSORT:Water Knife, The
2015 American novels
2015 science fiction novels
American science fiction novels
Dystopian novels
Biopunk novels
Climate change novels
Novels set in Phoenix, Arizona
Novels by Paolo Bacigalupi
Water scarcity in fiction
Deserts in fiction
Alfred A. Knopf books