The Water Knife by
Paolo Bacigalupi has a compelling and believable premise. Set in the near
future, water shortages in the west have reached critical levels. In many
places, it no longer rains. The states are fighting for what water is
available; Texans have become refugees that struggle to cross state borders
(often ending up dead and strung up as a warning to others). Catherine Case is
a powerful woman who controls much of the water in the west, ensuring that
Nevada drinks while other states thirst.
Case employs many people to help her retain her power and
her water. One of them is Angel, a former gang member she rescued from prison.
He looks like a scary tough guy, scarred and tattooed, but he is a complex and
loyal individual. He goes on a mission to Arizona, in its death throes but
still hanging on, and gets mixed up in subterfuge over water rights that date
back two hundred years. He crosses paths with Lucy, a Pulitzer-prize winning
journalist in Phoenix to report on the crisis, and Maria, a Texas refugee
determined to survive on her own terms.
The world building is all too easy to believe. Americans
have been wasting fresh water for decades in ways that are completely
unsustainable. As Angel observes:
“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska,
Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a
century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from
ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They’d played dress-up-in-green and pretended
it could last forever. They’d pumped up the ice age and spread it across the
land, and for a while they’d turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn,
soybeans – vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going.
Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They’d had
aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late
that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.” (p. 80
of the advance reader copy)
In Bacigalupi’s world, the Red Cross provides water, and
refugee camps spring up around them. The tension between Texans and Arizona natives
is palpable. The Chinese build oases for those with money and power. Young
women sell their bodies to survive and take drugs to provide false courage.
While the characters are not particularly original types,
they are well drawn. They have depth. The intrigue was twisty but not so
complicated that it was hard to follow.
Bacigalupi hit only a few false notes for me. For example,
Angel thinks about Lucy: “He wanted her. He wanted her like he’d never wanted
another woman.” (p. 231 of the ARC). Really? Time to slip into the overblown language of
a genre romance? There are descriptions of graphic torture and violence. Angel
survives gunshots and trauma that would kill anyone else except maybe Indiana
Jones.
Still, I found the book gripping and the future world realistic.
If you enjoy dystopian fiction and don’t mind veering off into Hollywood movie
territory occasionally, I recommend The
Water Knife.
I read an advance reader copy. The Water Knife will be published on May 26. It will be available
in the Galesburg Public Library’s New Fiction area after that date.
