I always thought the first Paolo Bacigalupi book I read would be The Windup Girl. I even have a copy of it on my bookshelf. But as these things usually work out, at least in my reading life, I was wrong. Windup Girl sits unread on my shelf still. After NerdCon in October and Bacigalupi mentioning several times his book The Water Knife, that is the one I ended up reading first.
You can’t really blame me. The book is all about water rights in the western United States; California versus Nevada and Arizona mostly. I wasn’t always a Minnesota girl. I was born and raised in southern California, the San Diego area to be precise. I went to college in Los Angeles. There were always droughts, though not as bad as the one going on right now, and there were always people arguing about water rights. And I remember wondering many times just how precarious the whole house of cards was and how long would it be before it all fell apart?
The scariest thing about The Water Knife is that Bacigalupi’s book is completely plausible. The story takes place in an undated but clearly not too distant future. Climate change has caused a series of huge weather disasters that have strained the resources of a federal government that now seems to be only nominally in charge in the western states. Between hurricanes and droughts and prolonged heatwaves Texas is entirely uninhabitable and refugees are streaming across the borders of neighboring states whose own resources are growing more and more scarce. Nevada and California have formed their own militias and closed their borders to anyone who does not have permits to cross. There is a kind of guerilla war going on between California, Nevada and Arizona over rights to the Colorado river. The war is being fought both in courtrooms and on the ground. Water pipelines to entire cities are shut off and hundreds of thousands of people are immediately turned into refugees with nowhere to go. The Red Cross sinks relief wells and tent cities spring up around it but the water is not free. Prices fluctuate daily and at one point in the book it costs $6.75 for a liter of water.
Meanwhile the Chinese are investing heavily in building arcologies in Las Vegas and Phoenix. An arcology is an almost self-contained living environment that recycles 95% of the water. And it isn’t just water that is recycled, pretty much everything is. In this way an arcology can be climate controlled, crops can be grown, the air can be filtered and kept clean and safe from the frequent dust storms outdoors, people living inside can almost pretend like life is normal. It is the poor and desperate who build the arcologies, the poor and desperate who never make enough from their work to live inside them. It is the wealthy and powerful who get to live in comfort and safety.
A Water Knife is one of those people only rumored to exist. A Water Knife is the one who does the dirty work for the people in charge of the water, the one who does what has to be done whether that is killing someone or blowing up an entire water processing facility. Angel is a Water Knife and he works for Catherine Case, the most powerful person in Nevada. She is in charge of the water and the existence of the state of Nevada, Las Vegas in particular, depends on her.
Arizona is pretty much a lost cause and the city of Phoenix will soon be drinking its last glass of water unless someone can find some water rights that trump those belonging to California or Nevada. Someone does. Digs them out of some old dusty files, documents well over 100 years old that trump every other right in existence. The person who has the rights in his possession can make billions from their sale and he plays buyers from California and Nevada off each other and pays with his life. But no one knows what happened to the documents.
It is a life and death race to see who can get the documents first. Angel is on the hunt and so is everyone else it seems with no one sure who is working for who. Lucy, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has been living in Phoenix for a number of years documenting its decline gets mixed up in all of it as she investigates who killed her friend, the guy who had originally found the water rights. Maria, seventeen, a Texas refugee and orphan living with her friend Sarah and forced to prostitute herself in order to not be fed to the hyenas of the local gang leader for being unable to pay her rent, also gets mixed up in the business.
The Water Knife is a fast-paced mystery/thriller but also more than that. It alternates between the point of view of Maria, Lucy and Angel until eventually all their individual story threads come together. It wasn’t so long ago that life was normal, that there was enough water to go around, but each one is forced in their own way to come to terms with the world as it is now not as it once was and not as it could be. And when it comes down to your own personal survival versus the potential survival of an entire city, what choices are you forced to make and who can really blame you for them?
Also running through the book is a refrain about how those who knew and could have done something long ago to make sure the present day of the story didn’t happen did absolutely nothing, or worse, precipitated the disaster and even profited from it. Bacigalupi does a marvelous job at character development and it is fascinating to watch each of the three main characters change over the course of the novel as their personal beliefs and illusions, hopes and dreams, are ripped away. And while the ending provides a conclusion, it leaves much up in the air. I appreciated that because given everything that came before an ending that tied everything up nicely would have been false.
I am pleased with my first venture in reading Bacigalupi and looking forward to reading more of his work. Perhaps The Windup Girl will be next!
Definitely sounds like a book worth checking out.
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Raney, it’s a good one for sure!
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This is an author who’s been on my radar for a while. Sounds like a fantastic read!
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Iliana, it is! It might be doubly interesting for you since you live in Texas!
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Paolo will be attending the Perth Writers Festival in Australia in mid-February 2016 to talk about this book. Great review! — Dan Bloom at the Cli Fi Report at http://cli-fi.net/
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Thanks Dan! It’s a good book. Cool that Bacigalupi will be in Perth. He is a really interesting writer to listen to!
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Wonderful review and I must get this book! Its a very scary premises, but considering how we have wrecked our world, it does sound plausible….but still very scary!
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This sounds like a pretty scary read and I’ll probably get around to reading it. I wonder if the winter of 2015/16 with (here) endless deluges and eerily high temperatures will be the season where people finally get climate change and how we are going to have to find a way of living with it.
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Ian, I wonder too but cynical me says probably not. Everyone will blame it on El Nino or make some other rationalization. Sigh
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cirtnecce, thanks! It is very scary and you know most of us would be the poor people on the outside of one of those arcologies just trying to scrape by. One of the interesting things about Maria is how she felt like all the adults in her life have done nothing but lie to her, telling her things will be ok, things will get better even when things were clearly getting worse. Sometimes when I listen to the talking heads I feel very much like Maria!
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I completely agree!
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This sounds utterly ace. I wonder if anyone’d make it into a film or a miniseries? It has all the elements of an excellent one!
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Elle, it would make an excellent movie or miniseries! The book was just out in 2015. I’ve not heard any news about movie rights but then you never know!
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Visiting Tucson last August gave me a glimmer of what it would mean for other parts of the country to have problems getting enough water. It’s still hard to imagine, though, living in Ohio. It’s so wet here.
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Jeanne, it’s fairly wet in Minnesota too, land of ten thousand lakes. Since I grew up in CA I am hyper-conscious about water use and I am constantly appalled by how much water people waste here without even thinking about it. But even in wet climates, there might be a day when we all have to start thinking about it!
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I realize The Water Knife is a work of fiction. But in reality so much isn’t being done to alleviate the water problems in the West. There are only one or two desalination plants, the same for recycling waste water into drinking water, nor is there an overall water conservation plan for the area. There have been heavy rains in California this year, the snow pack is increasing, and people seem to be reducing their water consumption somewhat. I’d look to what Israel is doing to solve its water problems for a guide to address this problem. Once faced with serve drought conditions, they are now producing enough water to export some of it.
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Richard, You are right not much is being done. My parents still live in the house I grew up in and they aren’t allowed to water their lawn anymore and that’s pretty much it. No one has had to make significant cutbacks and farmers haven’t done anything to reform their water-wasting practices. Even with El Nino this year they aren’t going to make up for the drought. It’s like everyone is just waiting for several years of rain to make everything okay again but the likelihood of that happening is slim. Which means Bacigalupi’s imagination might not be so far off. I’ve heard Israel has really good water saving solutions. Had no idea they were doing so well that they can export some of it!
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Interesting. It sounds dystopian, very much like Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh – the events seem so close in the future, it’s scary.
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Delia, it’s really good and very east to imagine it as a possibility, a kind of natural extension of events that are already happening. Don’t know about Love Minus Eighty, will have to look that one up!
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The very best of science fiction/dystopian type writing always frightens me silly simply because you can really imagine a world in which the events described might very well come about. I don’t read much in this genre these days for that very reason. Head in the sand, that’s me. Maybe I should pull my head out and at least read a novel that sounds as though it is very good indeed.
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Alex, look at them as a good source of survival tips 😉
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Hahahaha, I, like, panic when I try to read books in which water shortages are a going concern. That is my most serious fear about the near future. I drink more water than anyone I’ve ever, ever met — like easily eight cups a day, usually more like ten or twelve — and I can’t imagine having to cut back. I LOVE WATER SO MUCH.
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Jenny, I drink a lot of water but not as much as you do! Goodness. Pretty much all I drink is water or coffee. So yeah, a water shortage is a big concern for me too. Or something like what is happening in Flint, MI right now. Those poor people and the kids! It’s an outrage and I haven’t figured out why people aren’t in the streets demanding the heads of city officials on stakes.
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Sounds good–and scary–so maybe not the best for me and the dark days of gloomy January. You are right that the scariest books like this are the ones you can totally imagine happening right now–bit of a wake up call!
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Danielle, the story might be scary but since it takes place in Arizona it is scorching hot with temperatures approaching 120 at times! Just the thought makes me limp and thirsty.
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I’ve heard great things about this book and will definitely pick it someday soon. I read The Wind-Up Girl not too long ago, and really enjoyed it — fantastic world-building.
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Isabella, it’s a good one and I hope you like it when/if you get to it. I think I remember when you read Windup Girl. I am looking forward to getting to that one!
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This sounds great, Stefanie. I particularly love the title. 🙂
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Deepika, it does have a great title doesn’t it?
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I’m back from the tennis, wonderful restaurants and a great exhibition of Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei, and ready to read my favourite bloggers again. (I gave my son the Ms Marvel book, but he opened it after our return so am not sure what he thinks. Fingers crossed).
Anyhow, this sounds like an interesting book. I’m in the process of writing a book review but I’m giving you advance notice of two quotes I’m including! Here they are: ‘You know how while we’re enjoying reading dystopian fiction, for half our population this society is dystopia?’ and ‘You know how people are worried their kid’s going to turn to them and say, What did you do to the biosphere, Daddy?’ It’s not about climate change – more about 21st century life, but it’s good to see writers raising these issues.
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whisperinggums, So glad you had a great time at the Open!
Love those quotes! I agree, it is definitely good to see writers raising these issues.
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And now I’m away again for four days – it’s SO hard being retired. Will check your new posts on my return.
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Uh, yeah, I can see retirement is super tough! 😉 Have a good trip!
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