The Water Knife: Paolo Bacigalupi’s Eco-Thriller about the Colorado River’s Distributaries
Book Cover of Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel, The Water Knife
Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2015 novel The Water Knife is an eco-thriller set in a near future in which the Colorado River’s water levels have become dangerously low, and competition for its dwindling supply has become deadly business for Las Vegas, Phoenix, and the state of California, all of which siphon the river’s water through natural and artificial distributaries. In this water-scarce future, social inequality and ecological degradation have intensified; the wealthy have taken refuge in arcologies while the poor live in shanty towns and crumbling suburbs, surviving on water rations, breathing through makeshift air filters, and laboring under precarious conditions. A work of speculative fiction, The Water Knife builds its imaginary scenario of “what if things in the 21st century continue to get worse” on very real historical competition over water rights and contemporary shifts in climate and economics. The novel’s characters embody the tensions between nostalgia and the present, faith and data, and individualism and social responsibility.
The tension between nostalgia and the present is best embodied by the character of Maria Villarosa and her philosophical conflicts with the figure of her father and her guardian Toomie. Maria is young, about 14 years old, and therefore has no knowledge of life prior to the water shortage and intense social inequality of life in Phoenix. Both her deceased father (a construction worker on a local arcology) and her guardian Toomie (a former construction worker turned food cart operator) talk about the old days, telling Maria “It wasn’t always like this” (247). But Maria knows nothing but the present moment of scarcity and depravity, and she sees neither the possibility of things returning to how they used to be nor the possibility of things changing into something better: “It’s like you can’t see what’s happening. You talk about how it was before, but I don’t know what that is” (247). Maria sees clearly the reality of the present moment (“what’s happening”), unclouded by memories of the past (“how it was before”). To her, if someone “only sees how it used to be. Before. When things were old” then they have “old eyes,” which she labels a “problem” (371). Having “old eyes” means being trapped in a nostalgia for the way you think things are supposed to be, which blinds you to seeing that the world has changed, that history has moved on, which prevents you from acting accordingly.
Portrait of Paolo Bacigalupi
The tension between a wishful nostalgia and a clear-eyed realism is also related to another of the novel’s tensions: that of data versus belief. The character Lucy Monroe, an investigative reporter, suggests that even if you know that things are falling apart, you might resist believing it (p. 31). Lucy’s friend Jamie Sanderson, a lawyer for the water department, rejects belief as having anything to do with Las Vegas’s attacks on Culver City and other downstream distributaries of the Colorado River: “This was never about believing. […] This was about looking and seeing. Pure data. You don’t believe data—you test data” (pp. 31). Like wishful nostalgia, belief ignores the observable data of what’s happening around you in favor of some idealization. The novel juxtaposes Lucy and Jamie’s conversation with references to John Wesley Powell’s historic expedition down the Colorado River in 1869 and his subsequent prediction of water shortages in the area were the government to encourage widescale settlement and development of the West (p. 30). If Powell could foresee the future in the 1800s, argues Jamie in the novel (and on behalf of its readers), then surely we could have prevented today’s problems with water scarcity in the American southwest.
The novel’s interest in Powell’s foresight and the government’s willing disregard of his science-based warnings is echoed in the novel’s interest in whether humanity is fundamentally good or evil, and its more pragmatic and Machiavellian characters’ insistence on assuming the latter. One example is the character Angel Velasquez, a water knife working for the Nevada Water Authority, who makes Lucy feel sick listening to his “view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered” (p. 283). Angel believes that the job defines the person, as in the Stanford Prison Experiment (p. 282)—that people let their jobs shape their morality, and that even if they have choices, “mostly they just do what they’re pushed to do” (pp. 283 and 325). Angel’s conversation with Lucy is not really about people being fundamentally good or evil, but rather is about whether people have free will (p. 283) and the strength to make their own choices or whether they are content to be little gears in a machine (p. 366).
Ultimately The Water Knife is a novel of values rather than a novel of ideas. Cooperation—as opposed to self-interest—is the most privileged value at the end of the novel. Angel cynically believes that people will “work together for a while, but not when it gets really bad” (p. 283) because, as Lucy observes, fear drives people apart (p. 311). However, the tendency to look out for only yourself is countered by Toomie, the character who most embodies an ethic of care; Toomie suggests that the answer is to think of others: “We’re all each other’s people. Just like we’re all our brothers’ keepers. We forget it sometimes. When everything’s going to pieces, people can forget. But in the end? We’re all in it together” (p. 250). The question arises as to the type of values that make people stand up against oppression and big money (p. 311). The response is delivered by Toomie: “work together and build together and support each other” (pp. 250–251). Bringing this back to the novel’s core historical preference point, the Colorado River Compact and The Law of the River, we can see that greed and competition have guided humanity’s stewardship of the Colorado River, resulting in insufficient waterflow for not only the downstream cities in the United States but also for Mexico, where the Colorado River used to pass through all the way to the ocean but now trickles pitifully to an end 100 miles north of the Pacific Ocean in a sunbaked mudflat.
Sharing is caring, as they say. That the Colorado River can be so mismanaged as to ignore the needs of the people living in Mexico suggests the extent to which US policy decisions evince little care about those around us on a regional or international scale. The Water Knife looks into a future where a similar ethic of care for “those less fortunate than ourselves” is abandoned at the local level, too, as the wealthy abandon the poor to dust storms and drought while retreating to luxurious closed ecosystems in high tech arcologies (p. 91) instead of working toward collective solutions that could benefit everyone. The novel challenges us to find solutions to our ecological problems through collaboration rather than zero-sum competition.
Additional Resources
“Readers Guide.” Penguin Random House. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/237233/the-water-knife-by-paolo-bacigalupi/9780804171533/readers-guide/#.
“Episode Six: Where the River Ends.” Thirst Gap: Learning to live with less on the Colorado River, KUNC: NPR for Northern Colorado, 22 May 2023, https://www.kunc.org/thirstgap/2023-05-22/episode-six-where-the-river-ends.
James, Ian. “The river’s end: Amid Colorado water cuts, Mexico seeks to restore its lost oasis.” Los Angeles Times, 31 January 2023, https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-01-31/colorado-river-in-crisis-the-rivers-end.
Glennon, Robert. “John Wesley Powell, Great Explorer of the American West.” The Smithsonian, 26 June 2019, https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/john-wesley-powell-great-explorer-of-the-american-west/.
Mohanraj, Mary Anne and Paolo Bacigalupi. “Paolo Bacigalupi on writing solutions in values fiction.” Interview. Portolan Project Deep Dives, Speculative Literature Foundation, n.d. https://speculativeliterature.org/portolan-project/deep-dives/paolo-bacigalupi/.
Pitt, Jennifer. “The Colorado River Compact at 100.” Audubon, 22 November 2022, https://www.audubon.org/news/the-colorado-river-compact-100.
Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, revised and updated. Penguin Books, 1993.
Robison, Jason, et al., editors. Vision and Place: John Wesley Powell and Reimagining the Colorado River Basin. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2020. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv182js17.
Soleri, Paolo. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. 1969. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/arcology.
Woodbury, Mary. “Wild Authors: Paolo Bacigalupi.” Artists and Climate Change: Building Earth Connections, 30 April 2019. https://artistsandclimatechange.com/2019/04/30/wild-authors-paolo-bacigalupi/.
