The Water Knife: A novel

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Test, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

PS3602.A3447

Description

Fiction. Literature. Science Fiction. Thriller. HTML:WATER IS POWER   In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez �??cuts�?� water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to… (more)

Collection

Rating

½ (490 ratings; 3.8)

Publication

Knopf (2015), Edition: 1St Edition, Hardcover, 384 pages

Pages

384

Physical description

384 p.; 6.7 inches

Awards

Locus Award (Finalist — Science Fiction Novel — 2016)
RUSA CODES Reading List (Shortlist — Science Fiction — 2016)
Seiun Award (Nominee — 2016)

Media reviews

To some critics and commentators, climate change is also having a deep effect on literature, as more authors focus more closely on the actual and possible consequences of the subject in their fiction. The genre, if it can be called that yet, represents a loose affiliation that stretches back at
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least to J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and includes such authors as Ian McEwan, Ursula LeGuin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood. The Water Knife is perhaps the best, most-recent example of "climate fiction," and it expertly taps a wellspring of fascination and fear that runs beneath a culture ever digging a deeper hole for itself and the environment.
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4 more
In The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi's best-selling, Hugo- and Nebula-winning debut, the author imagines a 23rd century in which the forces of commerce have run amok over the basic, biological building blocks of life. In his equally powerful sophomore novel, The Water Knife, he takes a similar
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approach to an inorganic substance without which human life wouldn't exist: H2O. But where The Windup Girl takes place hundreds of years from now in Southeast Asia, The Water Knife hits closer to home for U.S. readers. Its setting is the American Southwest, at a time in the near future when Britney Spears is toothless and old, the country is plagued by climactic calamities and the Southwest's dwindling water supply is controlled by robber barons. .... Bacigalupi plays on a grand scale, but he does so with a keen eye for detail... His big triumph, though, is never forgetting that The Water Knife is a thriller at its pounding heart. Even amid reams of deeply researched information about the economy, geology, history and politics of water rights and usage in the U.S., he keeps the plot taut and the dialogue slashing.
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"But this is no pastiche; Bacigalupi weaves an engrossing tale all his own, crackling with edgy style."
"With elements of Philip K. Dick and Charles Bowden, this epic, visionary novel should appeal to a wide audience."
"An absorbing, if sometimes ideologically overbearing, thriller full of violent action and depressing visions of a bleakly imagined future."

LCC

PS3602.A3447

Language

ISBN

0385352875 / 9780385352871
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