The Water Knife

Water’s a commodity we take for granted. Imagine if it cost more than fuel? Imagine if your town was completely cut off from the life-giving pipes because it didn’t have rights to the river that flowed downstream to cities with more money, more power?

The Water Knife is set in south west America following who knows how many years of drought. I found it particularly topical reading it in California, a state currently experiencing a drought. You don’t notice much other than lots of signs asking you to conserve water, but we spoke to a lady at a winery who said they’ve got about a year of living normally. If they don’t get the rain (or snowfall) by then, they’ll have to start changing how they use water. Although California appear to be one of the bad guys in this book.

It’s a sad state of affairs to find it so believable that a few companies would hog the water, use it to turn a profit, fight each other for the rights to it. If not water companies, then those who build contained cities, where water is recycled within and kept plentiful, but only for those with the money to pay the high price tag. Las Vegas, always portrayed as a city of indulgence, is no different here. They are at the top of the water hierarchy and ensure their casinos can keep their fully flowing fountains.

The main male character wasn’t very developed, and whilst he gets shot at a bit, that’s nothing compared to the horrors the two main female characters have to go through. The women are more rounded characters, and in a very violent world it’s naïve to imagine that violence towards women has got better. When people are on the brink of survival, they so often turn to crime and violence. However I found it hard to fathom that someone, after surviving bad torture, would want to have sex with someone they barely knew, the same day. And it was a pretty cringey sex scene too.

The character of Angel is what let this book down for me. I could accept the violence due to circumstance, even if it isn’t to my taste. The ideas behind it were thought-provoking and so scarily could be real and I thought the world-building was excellent. But it’s kind of ruined by some man with zero personality, and apparently a callous water knife, running round suddenly going a bit soft and saving women.

Angel doesn’t have faith in humanity. People have always done horrific things to each other, they always will. Maybe he’s seen too much. He contrasts with Lucy who holds out for a better life. She stays in Phoenix reporting when she could move to a life of comfort with her sister in Canada. But instead, she holds on for something that will help the city.

Young Maria was an interesting character. It took me a while to realise she was just a teenager, she lives in such a tough world, she keeps striving to do better, to not get dragged down to the levels of her friends. She had to move from Texas, a state whose residents have gained refugee status, and lost her parents. There are some absolutely heart-breaking moments throughout the book, so much so I completely forgive her for her final decision.

Review copy provided by publisher.

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.