No one, Lucy realized. No one is in charge.
Picture the worst devastation you’ve ever seen on the news: gang violence, war refugees, famine, people dying while trying to escape into another country. Now imagine that what people are fighting and dying over isn’t oil, or land, or even drugs, but water. Imagine it’s happening in the United States. Imagine it’s happening to you.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s latest novel The Water Knife takes the reader deep inside a near-future America where water supplies are failing. A hired assassin – a water knife – is following the rumor of a new water claim on behalf of his Vegas boss. A Phoenix journalist along with a young Texan migrant are caught up in the search, and everyone involved tries to not get tortured, murdered, or eaten by hyenas. Because the world has gotten exactly that dangerous, and more than a little insane.
The phrase “near future” in the book description means exactly that: the book takes place at a non-specified date that’s close enough to the current time to give the story a very gritty, realistic feel that’s only a little sci-fi. In between the familiar things like Twitter hashtags (#PhoenixDownTheTubes) and conversations peppered with Spanish phrases, you also have new party drugs, 3-D printers that mass-produce buildings, and skyscraper arcologys where the wealthy can live and work and shop in a huge enclosed structure with an endless supply of water, while everyone outside tears apart abandoned developments for salvage and drinks out of Clearsacs ™ that filter urine into “clean” water.
The situation that America finds itself in is very close to our current time as well. Check the news and you’ll see that Los Angeles and Phoenix are already fighting over who gets the greater share of water from the Colorado River. At the start of this book the fight is just short of a war, and there are a lot of casualties. Arizona is a dust bowl, Nevada and California have sealed their borders, and the entire state of Texas has collapsed, providing an endless supply of desperate migrants. Governments are a joke (just like now. Thank you! I’ll be here all night…), and corporations have free rein to do whatever it takes to keep the water flowing to their high-rises, up to and including sabotage and murder.
“If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.”
One thing you have to understand about Bacigalupi is that he’s not going to dumb anything down for the readers. A lot of his stories focus on the effect that corporate greed and humanity’s shortsightedness are having on the world, and the author makes sure to discus that in detail so you can see how we’ve gotten to this point.
The plot itself revolves around the hunt for a document about a water claim, something that could solve the problems for any state that gets ahold of it and will make the person who sells it rich beyond their wildest dreams (or get them killed. It’s a lot more likely that it will get them killed.) So since this is a legal document we’re talking about, there’s also a lot of in-depth discussion about legal claims, corporate law, whether or not a government agency has any right to step in to a situation, who’s in charge, what each corporations motivations are, and who’s loyal to whom. Be prepared to completely lose track at times; you’ll pretty much be in the same boat with the three main characters themselves.
Having the story told from three viewpoints actually makes things easier to understand, since we can see the whole impossible situation from three different levels of society. Angel Velasquez is at the top, a paid assassin/detective/spy/thug who’s job is to “cut” water for Vegas, ie: threatening homeowners and occasionally leading military operations to blow up rival water treatment plants. Wandering around the middle income level is Lucy Monroe, a journalist who came to Phoenix to document its slow death from thirst (#CollapsePorn) and stayed to shed light on the people responsible for turning off the taps. And clinging to the bottom rung of society is Maria Villarosa, a Texan migrant trying to earn a living by selling her water rations by the cupful to construction workers, and trying to not end up as just another girl with her throat cut by the local drug gang and tossed into the bottom of a dry swimming pool (“Phoenix swimmers”, a popular picture category in the local blood rags.)
I ended up liking all three characters. They’re all varying levels of tough and angry, and they all have enough of their souls left that they can still act on behalf of someone other than themselves. Bacigalupi writes snappy, back-and-forth banter for them (especially Angel, who’s seen enough hell for a lifetime but still has a sense of humor about it) and feeds the reader their histories bit-by-bit, so we discover what brought them to this point in their lives at the same pace that we learn more about the mystery they’re trying to solve.
The viewpoints we don’t see are from the two extreme ends of society: the fabulously wealthy, and the drug lords and coyotes (the people smugglers, not the animals). That’s a calculated move on Bacigalupi’s part; the people in this world who have the most power and money become almost sub-human. They certainly have less humanity than the people they prey on. And other than a certain sense of style there’s very little difference between the folks who murder and torture a prostitute for not handing over a cut of her earnings, and the ones who’ll cut off water to a million people if it means their companies’ stock prices will go a little higher.
If you think that makes this is a story about nobility in suffering, with the little people joining forces and saving the world through self sacrifice…well, no. Push anyone hard enough and it’s just a question of which loyalty will crumble first. Water is a primal force, and it brings out primal responses in everyone. If Bacigalupi has any suggestion at all about how to fix a water crisis like this, it’s that we’re going to need to do something to fix it now before it gets anywhere close to this bad. Because once you take everything away from enough people, there’s very little chance that anyone’s going to be able to think about saving the world, or saving anyone other than themselves.