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Apr 25, 2016otterno11 rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Bleak, brutal, and believable, Paolo Bacigalupi’s latest eco-thriller, The Water Knife, turned out to be quite the page turner, and I burned through it in a matter of (busy) days. In spite of Bacigalupi’s hard boiled sci-fi prose, this is a book with teeth, and with a message. A master of crafting fast paced, entertaining genre fiction infused with real world ideas and intriguing insights, Bacigalupi's writing rarely feels heavy-handed. Twenty minutes into the future, the Southwest is in trouble, crumbling quickly and heading down the road to chaos that already took down Mexico and Texas. The dwindling supplies of Colorado River water are the literal life blood for the cities of California, Nevada, and Arizona and there's not enough for everyone. Under the noses of the impotent federal government, open warfare between the states is inevitable and Texan refugees are strung up as warnings along the border. It is this world that Angel Velazquez, a “Water Knife” for Catherine Chase, Queen of Las Vegas, inhabits. Angel makes sure that Vegas, with its gleaming Chinese built arcologies keeping the ultra rich cool and luxurious in the desert, gets the lion's share of water by any means necessary. Meanwhile, down in Phoenix, now a third world hellhole, the city struggles to keep up the vestiges of civilization while refugees die of thirst or violence, dumped in empty pools to become yet another “swimmer.” Lucy, a muckraking “collapse porn” journalist and a young Texan refugee, Maria, inadvertently find themselves crossing paths with Angel and a plot that could change the dynamic of power between the three players for the last water in the West. While I haven’t read The Windup Girl yet, it is easy to see this as set in the same timeline of the stories in the YA novels Shipbreaker and Drowned Cities. The Water Knife is set just a few thousand miles away, a few years earlier during the last gasps of the Accelerated Age (what the inhabitants of the previous two stories refer to this time) and, with the exception of a few futuristic tech touches, seems very contemporary. Imagining what grim situations might await in our future if trends are ignored can bring the selfish bent of current politics to a deeper, more emotional resonance, I feel. The Water Knife is certainly a gut-wrenching, gripping taste of what our future may be like.