paperback, 384 pages
Published May 26, 2015 by Alfred a Knopf.
In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.
A lot of interesting material here. Scenarios which are credible in many regards. Reasonably fast paced and a solid story. Slightly slow start for me but an enjoyable read overall, thought provoking
the world this book portrays seems....all too possible, really
content warning, if you want to read it, for just about every kind of violence possible
i had a good time reading it! wasn't sure how the various plot threads were going to link up most of the time, but they eventually did and it was amazing
I've completely enjoyed every book I've read by Paolo Bacigalupi and the undertones of his futuristic vision are not at all lost on me. I get it, Paolo, I get it.
The Water Knife, for me, is the weakest of all his books I've read so far. It is a story about people, as all his books are, and how they react to, and survive, a crisis, again, like in all his books. This one differs in that the events occur in the near-future whereas most of his other books happen deeper into the future. As the title suggests, the crisis in this book deals with access to water.
The story is good. It paints a bleak and dry future for common folk and an opposite future for those with money and power. It does not follow a typical rebellion versus the empire story line. This is one of those …
I've completely enjoyed every book I've read by Paolo Bacigalupi and the undertones of his futuristic vision are not at all lost on me. I get it, Paolo, I get it.
The Water Knife, for me, is the weakest of all his books I've read so far. It is a story about people, as all his books are, and how they react to, and survive, a crisis, again, like in all his books. This one differs in that the events occur in the near-future whereas most of his other books happen deeper into the future. As the title suggests, the crisis in this book deals with access to water.
The story is good. It paints a bleak and dry future for common folk and an opposite future for those with money and power. It does not follow a typical rebellion versus the empire story line. This is one of those things that sets Mr. Bacigalupi apart from other writers. He simply tells a story, usually the most likely actions and reactions to a crisis over a resource and how greed, survival, humanity and belief are effected. It is what it is. You can blame or you can press on to survive another day.
The scope of this story is narrow compared to his other stories, such as The Windup Girl, which paint a very imaginative world deeper into the future. The crisis here is more eminent and perhaps closer to becoming non-fiction, thus lacking some of the technology seen throughout his other works. In this aspect, Paolo Bacigalupi has maintained a good time-line in relation to his other works.
Well done sir, well done.
the plot was pretty standard pot boiler, with some scenes that I have seen before a bunch of times. But the setting was amazing, totally believable resource scarcity.
Rather more uneven than his previous efforts.
Solid
Terrifying reality that feels oddly appropriate in today's climate struggle. Very compelling through most then tapers into more traditional plot towards the end. Still a fun and haunting read
Good now-future thriller commentary, the lawlessly corrupt refugee narco states of MX transposed into water-desperate western U.S. states. How much of what we're creating and ignoring is solvable or the new normal?
Another vividly imagined broken future, here focusing on water depletion and drought. Bacigalupi spins another tense thriller that at times feels it has shades of Gibson in it. Bacigalupi's excursions into sexual abuse feels gratuitous, though, and detracts from the tautness of the story.
Hits pretty close to home here in Reno, 4 years into drought and Tesla booting up east of town. The vision is amazing. The sex and violence are overdone for my taste, but it seems like subtlety is out of favor these days in those departments.
I liked this much better than his previous book, largely because I found it more plausible. While it probably will play out differently than he writes, there's clearly some sort of reckoning coming for the long-term use of water to make the SW United States a hospitable place for millions of people to live.
Scarily plausible, and well-written.
I have enjoyed (if that’s the right word) Bacigalupi’s vision of the near future in his young adult works, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities. In The Water Knife, he returns to adult fiction and by adult I mean that the story is reasonably complicated and deals with mature concepts.
The Water Knife depicts a near future where state and corporate factions fight for water rights in a crumbling South West America (Nevada, California, Utah, Texas Arizona). The situation is not quite open warfare, a federal government still exists but states act to protect their borders from refugees (Texans get it bad in this future) moving from the poorer states.
The story focuses largely on a reporter and a water knife(a trouble shooter / trouble starter for one of the states) as they become embroiled in a search for old water rights that could upset the well laid plans of …
I have enjoyed (if that’s the right word) Bacigalupi’s vision of the near future in his young adult works, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities. In The Water Knife, he returns to adult fiction and by adult I mean that the story is reasonably complicated and deals with mature concepts.
The Water Knife depicts a near future where state and corporate factions fight for water rights in a crumbling South West America (Nevada, California, Utah, Texas Arizona). The situation is not quite open warfare, a federal government still exists but states act to protect their borders from refugees (Texans get it bad in this future) moving from the poorer states.
The story focuses largely on a reporter and a water knife(a trouble shooter / trouble starter for one of the states) as they become embroiled in a search for old water rights that could upset the well laid plans of powerful entities. It’s fast paced, full of shootouts between gun toting Texans, Hispanic gangs and agent provocateurs from any entity in the market for making money off of misery. There’s torture and violence of the kind you’d expect in a world of failing states who can’t supply their populace with clean water or sewerage and who have really given up on caring.
The Times anointed Bacigalupi as a successor to William Gibson, and while The Water Knife, isn’t cyberpunk, it’s a future unevenly distributed, with corporations and foreign powers beginning to carve out influence for themselves in a union that is slowly failing. A slow apocalypse, an eco-thriller, an action adventure,The Water Knife is a fast paced and dirty look at what might happen when the water all but dries up and the lawyers are all but finished determining who owns the rights to what’s left.
I suspect that the novel is firmly grounded in some of the issues surrounding water rights in the South Western states today and The Water Knife has that edge of realism, the world seems only to have been extrapolated out by a number of decades. Indeed the kind of jockeying for access to rights observed in The Water Knife doesn’t appear to be that much different to what occurs with companies exploiting exploring for fracking opportunities in a number of countries.
It’s not message fiction (unless perhaps you don’t think there’s any climate change), it’s firmly bedded down in moral greyness Indeed talking about distribution, it wouldn’t be hard to find situations and themes presented in The Water Knife existing in third world countries now or in the last 20 or 30 years, the difference here is of course the setting is the US.
It was a quick read, enjoyable and interesting for its focus on a more plausible slow apocalypse. This is good sci-fi examining the issues we face now and suggesting where we might end up.
The book provided was an Advanced Reading Copy.
