Pick Up The Water Knife Designed By Paolo Bacigalupi Available In Paperbound

with sitelinkBrave New World, I think I'm inviting insults to my intelligence by saying this, but sometimes Mr Bacigalupi is just a little too heavy for me.


I really like and appreciate what the author tries to do, both the strength of his writing and his focus on the dystopian but not unrealistic futures that could occur due to climate change.
I enjoyed sitelinkThe Windup Girl and I especially loved sitelinkThe Drowned Cities, The latter was such a powerful and horrifying book about the effects of war, particularly on kids,

There were things about sitelinkThe Water Knife that I can and will praise highly, Things that made me want to thrust it into the hands of anyone who bothers to listen to my recommendations.


And then there are passages like this:

"Numbers flickering over the various catchment basins of the Rocky Mountains red, amber, green monitoring how much snow cover remained and variation off the norm as it melted.
Other numbers, displaying the depths of reservoirs and dams, from the Blue Mesa Dam on the Gunnison, to the Navajo Dam on the San Juan, to the Flaming Gorge Dam on the Green.
Over it all, emergency purchase prices on streamflows and futures offers scrolled via NASDAQ, available openmarket purchase options if she needed to recharge the depth in Lake Mead.
. . "

that made me think, . .



You see, whatever kind of pretty label we try to dress Bacigalupi's books up in like "dystopian", "postapocalyptic" or "steampunk" the truth is that he writes oldfashioned, hard, sciencey sciencefiction.
It seems wrong to criticize the guy just for being so much smarter than me, but his frequent descriptions of the climate, water scarcity, and its economic impact had me completely lost and made the book so slow at times.
I had flashbacks to when I was in college and had to write an essay on the water wars between India and Pakistan.


The reason I probably don't fall in love with a lot of traditional scifi is because I like peoplebased stories.
Even the most inventive of plot ideas can leave me feeling cold if I don't give a damn who it's happening to.
Which is actually why I still really enjoyed a lot of this book, When we're not learning about the environment, we get to meet some damn interesting characters,

This is a world where water shortages have given rise to the water equivalent of drug lords and the spies/terrorists who work for them water knifes.
Angel Velasquez is one of the best and baddest water knifes and he's been sent to Phoenix to investigate the rumours of a new water source.
But he's going to have to get past Lucy Monroe, a strong and badass character who I liked immediately.


In fact, the author has created some fascinating characters here, His action scenes are perfectlyconstructed, his dialogue is realistic and a pleasure to read, He adds just the right amount of grit and creep factor to a few chapters that had me on the edge of my seat.
It's just a shame that roughly half of this book was a struggle to get through, The fact that

I kept pushing through the mindnumbing bits to get to the good stuff should tell you how much I thought it was worth it.


sitelinkBlog sitelinkFacebook sitelinkTwitter sitelinkInstagram sitelinkTumblr A great story about potentially what our world could be like after our water starts to run out.
Of course the one percenters aren't affected but the rests of us are pushed to the limits, Politics and money prevail as humanity is pushed to the brink,

A rousing adventure with lots of action, WARNING graphic violence throughout

Recommended book and author,stars

Ripped from the headlines of today, The Water Knife breaks the mold of typical dystopian fiction in a masterful telling of an extremely bleak nearfuture, fragmented America.
The setup is very long overof the book but it was well worth the effort to get through it.


The reality portrayed in The Water Knife reveals the consequences of socalled climate change and the resulting water scarcity on the American Southwest.
The author, with his limitless imagination, creates a sad, violenceridden world abounding in colorful detail, in sharp contrast to the bleak desert landscape that dominates the story.
And this is what makes this book so impressive: the world building, There is enough of the familiar to make it real, Weve all read or heard the current news about the yearslong drought that California and other states are suffering through, the dust storms plaguing Phoenix, and the legal battles gearing up over water rights between the states of the American southwest, the states in the southern plains, and various other entities such as American Indian tribes.
There is a near constant stream of television commercials about the water rights of the tribes here in Oklahoma the rhetoric from both sides is simply amazing to hear.


Prolonged drought, the draining of the aquifers, and violent political winds have combined to return most of the desert southwest back into its natural form, while the states of the Eastern seaboard, the Gulf Coast, and the Midwest are succumbing to the rising sea levels, monster hurricanes, and severe tornadic storms that dwarf anything previously known in American history.
A weakened federal government has caved to demands that the states be permitted to forcibly close their borders, which now use National Guard and local militias to violently prevent entry into their state.


Mr. Bacigalupi has an exceptional talent of creating characters that are complex and believable, The “water knife” a hit man who cuts off water to farms, towns, and cities is a tough, clever Mexican immigrant who works for Catherine Case, the powerful ruler of the Southern Nevada Water District.
Using a small army of thugs, she has channeled most of the water of the Colorado River into Las Vegas, when she has built massive vertical towns that are virtually selfcontained.
In these privileged communities, thousands of wealthy people live in luxury unknown to the rest of the population,

Angels boss sends him to Phoenix to further solidify her hold on the waters of the Colorado River.
In the course of his dirty work, his path intersects with a teenage refugee from Texas, and an investigative reporter who is pursuing the story of Arizonas water politics at great risk to her life.
The intertwined stories of these three characters form the core of this extremely wellwritten novel,

The depth of the characters is what one would expect in such an exampleactually a pretty superior exampleof “afterthecollapseapocalypsefiction” a subgenre becoming increasingly formulaic.
The Water Knife describes people increasingly on edge, people in trouble, and twisted people who take advantage of the chaos to create their own tyrannical kingdoms.
The violence is explicit, and may be disturbing to some readers, Theres explicit sex, too. This is a book for adults, period, This book is about what is in todays headlines, leaving the reader to wonder and worry about its predictive value like readers have done with sitelink, sitelinkBrave New World, and sitelinkAtlas Shrugged, among others.


Paolo Bacigalupi is among the most gifted of current science fiction writers, His bestknown work, sitelinkThe Windup Girl, is a masterpiece of the imagination, painting a picture of a grim, farfuture reality of GMOs that illuminates the world in which we now live.
The Water Knife is as equally compelling, another look at the potential future of our world, and is highly recommended.
It's almost impossible for me to review Bacigalupi, Check my other reviews, you'll see, The Windup Girl, Pump Six and Other Stories the only one I did justice to was Ship Breaker, his YA book.
In a nutshell, it's because once I am out of his world, I really don't want to go back in.
I work rather hard at maintaining both knowledge and optimismwithout thought of 'moral dessert' someone finally just watched The Good Placeand Bacigalupi sends me right into the pit of despair and not the good kind, with an albino with a cold.


Here's why:

Life, all around her, Struggling and surging and trying so very hard to survive in the face of all the horrors the world had to offer.

On this ragged edge, she was alive, . .

She'd come to Phoenix to see a place dying, but she'd stayed for the living, Trying to divine something meaningful from this place's suffering, What does a place that falls apart look like What did it mean

Nothing,
It doesn't mean anything,
It just tells me how badly I want to live,

I persevered reading because out of his adult books, this one had the most hope ha! A relative term.
But there is environmental devastation, purposeful destruction, casual cruelty, deliberate cruelty, poverty, prostitution, torture, mutilation, and even the sex is masochism.
And no one really gets just desserts, and no one is really magically saved, It's like the worse possible version of the world, Which is, indeed, the world, but without the leavening of hope, positivism, or vision, There is a little compassion in here, which most genuinelyoh shit, I just realizedmight be from a magical Negro.
Damn it.

There's a line from somewherenot here, certainlyabout how the mirror someone holds up shows us the version that makes us want to cut our hearts out.
That's what Bacigalupi does here, but the way he does it seems also to hold up the worst version of himself.


Really, read sitelinkJennifer's excellent review, What she said.


Technically, probably a fourstar book in quality fast plotting, worldbuilding, wordsmithing, much less in 'enjoyment, ' I don't think I can rate this one at the moment, I'll probably keep my hard copy for awhile, but I'm definitely ditching The Windup Girl,

Many thanks to Jennifer for motivating me to get this off my TBR list, .