In honor of the Water Knife being basically a near-future Western, I’m going to break my review down into the GOOD, the BAD, and the FUGLY (future ugly).



The Good



When I cast my mind back to Paolo Bacigalupi’s other more famous book, The Windup Girl, which I read about six years ago, I find what I primarily remember is not plot, the characters, or the writing, but the setting. Bangkok’s sea walls. The giant beasts being used to wind up energy coils. Calories as currency. Agricultural corporatocrac

In honor of the Water Knife being basically a near-future Western, I’m going to break my review down into the GOOD, the BAD, and the FUGLY (future ugly).When I cast my mind back to Paolo Bacigalupi’s other more famous book, The Windup Girl, which I read about six years ago, I find what I primarily remember is not plot, the characters, or the writing, but the setting. Bangkok’s sea walls. The giant beasts being used to wind up energy coils. Calories as currency. Agricultural corporatocracy. Mutated GMOs running amok. For all its faults, The Windup Girl evoked a climate changed future in a way that I’d never encountered up to that point. It felt real and perilous and in many ways kind of wonderful and beautiful, like some glittering dragon rearing up, moments before it annihilates you with its fiery exhalation.In The Water Knife, Bacigalpui’s talent for world-building remains intact. The book is set in southwest United States, in a future where drought has made water scarcity the prime issue of the time. Plumbing has become non-existent, so vehicular porta-potties called Jonnytrucks travel around, collecting people’s wastes so as to reclaim their water. Most people carry around a ‘Clearsac,’ which can filter urine on the fly. The wealthy elite either move north where there’s more water or live in Arcologies, these massive condo complexes designed to be self-sustaining with a genetically customized indoor ecosystem that is able to filter and re-use 99.9999% of water (I visualized them as something like the Opryland Hotel). The poorest, however, cluster around Red Cross sponsored Charity Pumps, where they can buy their water one liter at a time. It all seems real and well-considered, but whereas the world of The Windup Girl felt exotic and interesting, this one feels far more oppressive. Despair, thirst, anarchy pervades everything.Meanwhile, the geopolitical landscape has changed considerably.Texas has become all but inhospitable, so that the word ‘Texan’ is synonymous with ‘Refugee.’ In fact, the United States has become rather more like the ‘Dis-United States’, so that every state strives against every other state in a battle royale to secure sources of water. California, in particular, plays the role of the nemesis. It’s never really explained why, but they pretty much do what they want when it comes to water. Still, the Federal government looms over all, as a sort of boogeyman. It’s occasionally trotted out as this, “Well we individual states have to be careful to avoid OBVIOUS conflict – or else the federal government will send in the troops.”Actually, this role of the Federal government is probably the weakest aspect of the plot, which involves a MacGuffin of the highest order. Basically, ‘legal’ access to water involves one entity demonstrating that it has ‘senior’ water rights. So if California can show that they have a ‘legal’ claim that predates Nevada’s claim to, e.g., Lake Tahoe, then they get first dibs on that water. Well, The Water Knife is set primarily in Phoenix, Arizona – which is running perilously low on water – and revolves around the discovery of some SUPER OLD & therefore ‘senior’ water rights. But in order for that to mean anything, there must be some larger federal apparatus to enforce them, i.e. the federal government. But we NEVER see the federal government in the book. EVER.So the world-building – insofar as its ability to evoke a real and tangible culture of water scarcity – is great. But the world-building when it comes to believable, yet thrilling plot mechanics is a little less impressive.Have you ever seen Red Letter Media’s review of The Phantom Menace? It’s great (if bizarre). Well, anyway, at one point, he challenges people to describe the characters in the early Star Wars versus the later Star Wars . Without referring to their costume, looks, profession, or role in the story. In other words, describe their personality. So I’m gonna do that with Water Knife’s three Point of View characters.The titular ‘Water Knife’: He’s an ex-con, so he’s um tough. Book constantly describes him as tough. Definitely a psychopath. But he’s very trusting? Well, not really. Selectively trusting. Are tough people trusting or are they cynical? He’s not really cynical though, not like other hardboiled protags. In some ways, he’s almost childlike. Rationally, he’s very clearly an evil person, but the book struggles to paint him in a sympathetic light. So… not sure., the Texan teenager: She’s naïve. Except she’s got a friend & roommate, Sarah, who is Maria’s foil and is really naïve. So Maria is supposed to be clever. A survivor. But she follows up her cleverness with dumbness. She’s a teenager – even though I had to be told that she was one to realize it – and I think ultimately she’s meant to represent the corruption of innocence, or of the innocent worldview, anyway. But that’d be describing her role, not her character. So maybe she’s not naïve, but optimistic, and that optimism rots away throughout the book., the New England journalist: She’s a thrill-seeker in denial. And ummm… she has a dog? Yep, the author did actually use the ol’ “give a character a pet to make em sympathetic” trick. Classic! I’m tempted to call Lucy ‘brave’ but really she’s just stubborn, like a good journalist. Won’t let the story go, follows it to the end. She’s from New England (which still has water) but has sorta gone native since coming to Arizona to work. Ostensibly, she’s a force for good but doesn’t really stick by those convictions. So a realist maybe? But not really. Idealism motivates her pretty heavily. So… not sure again?So I wouldn’t say the characterization is terrible. Certainly not Star Wars prequels quality, but I found it pretty lackluster. Angel, in particular, is wholly unsatisfying as the leading man. It’s really difficult to write a sympathetic psychopath, and I don’t think Bacigalupi succeeds. Angel comes across as inconsistent rather than complex. One minute he’s remorseless about condemning a whole city to death by thirst, the next he’s risking his neck to help out a rando stranger. One minute he’ll be highly paranoid, the next he’ll be in la la land. I found Lucy to be very bland and while I liked Maria, she’s involved in this whole gang subplot that ends up going nowhere.I think that while Bacigalupi is a master at imagining and describing a milieu, he struggles to populate it with worthwhile characters.If you’re just interested in the book, you can stop reading now, as this is about the reality of some of Bacigalupi’s ideas.At first, I was tempted to talk about Climate Change and how perplexing I find it. Coz I mean, we’ve been having this debate about whether it’s “man-made.” But does that even matter? Not really. Fact: climate is changing. Fact: this changing climate is effing us up currently (see: death toll from heat waves in India) and is gonna continue to eff us up even more. We’ve designed our civilization to work within certain climate parameters, so it’s really not good if they change too quickly or drastically. So if humankind wasn’t already having an effect on the climate, then we better start having one. I mean it’s an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. We could possibly GO EXTINCT. Maybe just maybe that’s not something we should mess around with?But honestly, what’d be the point? If you don’t take it seriously yet, some rando guy talking about it in a book review isn’t going to have an effect.Instead, let’s return to the idea of a Dis-United States because I want to ponder whether that’s a thing that’s possible. I’d say, Yes, it’s about as possible as Britain exiting the EU, and to explain why I want to talk about The Beatles! Yep, The Beatles.When they played in 1965 at Shea Stadium, NY Times described it thusly, “…immature lungs [of their fans] produced a sound so staggering, so massive, so shrill and sustained that it crossed the line from enthusiasm into hysteria and soon it was in the area of the classic Greek meaning of the word pandemonium—the region of the demons.” Love that description.I wasn’t alive back then, but my mother tells me that EVERYONE listened to The Beatles. Maybe not everyone went as wild as the above fans, but they were a cultural phenomenon. But it’s one that’s never going to be repeated because the way we find and access music has fragmented the musical landscape. There are so many sources to find your music – and so many ways for a band to monetize their sound – that now everyone can find a hundred different bands fitting their exact desired musical aesthetic. You (by which I particularly mean Americans) can get exactly what you want in music, and that’s true of everything else now. TV, movies, video games, news, type of food, social contacts, etc. We all get to be very picky. For example, there are between 600k to 1 million books published a year in the US. Meanwhile, in 1865, there were only something like 10k books published in France, leading to the cultural phenomenon of The Count of Monte Cristo, which was read by EVERYONE (in Paris, at least), much like The Beatles was listened to by EVERYONE.So we’ve become accustomed to being able to have things our way, without needing to compromise. Well, why not government? Already anti-establishment politicians are growing in popularity throughout the western world. How long until we say, why bother with a federal government? They don’t fit me. I’ll stick with just my state and if I don’t like my state, I can move to a different one.Before you scoff, consider some realities: there is a HUGE disparity between the amount of revenue that individual states provide to the Federal gov’t versus the amount of aid they receive from the federal gov’t. For example, in FY2012, Mississippi provided the second LOWEST revenue per capita at $3503 to the federal gov’t, yet relied the most on federal aid, with 45.3% of their state revenue coming from aid. Whereas in that same year, Connecticut provided the third HIGHEST revenue per capita at $13163, while ranking #46 for reliance on federal aid, with only 23.6% of their state revenue coming from aid.Whatcha think is gonna happen when, say, Trump stops providing federal aid to California, and they go: OKAY LOL we’ll stop paying federal taxes then and federally dependent states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Missouri, South Dakota, etc can go screw themselves. Combine this with the fact that the American Electoral System ‘punishes’ states that vote overwhelmingly one party or another: since Clinton won huge margins in many of her states (e.g. 61.5% of California vs. Trump’s 33.2%), America ended up in the awkward situation of its president actually losing the popular vote. All of this wrapped up with the neat little fact that partisanship is at an all time high. In 1960, just 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats said they would be unhappy if their children married someone of the opposing party. Today it is HALF – 50%!!! – of Republicans and a third of Democrats. In 2016, 45% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats said that the other side’s policies were a THREAT to the nation. Not just misguided. A THREAT.So not only would I say it’s *possible* that the United States will fracture (dramatically or otherwise), but I consider it *probable*, especially as environmental and population pressures continue to increase.###In summary, The Water Knife is an easy book to recommend. It’s highly flawed, but it’s such a smooth read – and with such a thought-provoking setting – that even despite the flaws, the reading experience is a good one.