Hey - so these are some notes I put together on The Water Knife
Week 6- The Water Knife - Paolo Bacigalupi
Background: ”The Water Knife" grew out of a short story, "The Tamarisk Hunters," that first appeared in the environmental journal High Country News. In that story, Bacigalupi imagined a drought-plagued Southwest where "water ticks" eked out a dessicated existence next to an aqueduct that hurtled water to the wealthy, sealed-off city of Los Angeles. The penalty for stealing water: forced labor and death.” (Hamilton, 2015). Paolo Bacigalupi is generally a YA writer, writing alternative lifeworld fiction.
Genre-bending: The text is quite difficult to categorise or describe in a particular genre or movement. There are elements of neo-noir, Sci-fi, Speculative fiction, Distopian Fiction and Biopunk.
The Water Knife presents caricatured late-capitalism. The idolatry of ‘the Skinny Woman’ and the aspirational goals of an LA residency permit. The book also works into the idea of depletion and overconsumption leading to centralisation.
There are clear parallels between the opium wars, the oil wars and these — the water wars. From gang style turf warfare to corporate espionage and police bribing, for every ‘water knife’ there is an arms dealer or spy in previous commodity wars.
Differences - largely female character set, which is interesting given the masculinity associated with late capital. I don’t really understand this creative decision. Given the regimes in the text are fascistic is this female leadership realistic? (c.f. Adorno - Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda) Interesting too is the gender inversion of natural disasters, natural disasters such as storms are often described ‘she’, but in the text the drought is called "Big Daddy Drought,” perhaps laying the blame at the feet of capitalist patriarchy.
I was interested in Lucy Monroe as a character, her profession reminded me of the ruin-porn in Detroit (One example is Moore’s Detroit project) and what it looks like being post-industrial.
Problematic elements of the text: The Geisha style AI sex-robots — The idea of AI and its limitations is discussed across Bacigalupi’s work — particularly in Future Tense, a slate project in which he discussed whether an AI sex robot is capable of murder both manifestly and legally. However, within the context of the novel, what is this trying to say? Sex the next natural thing to be commodified? The next war after water? Interesting that the street girls’ services could be bought with a shower. Is the text guilty of ‘sexing up politics’ and titillation — do the gender issues in the text serve any purpose?
Interesting Reading
Hamilton, Denise. Amid a real drought, thriller 'Water Knife' cuts to the quick. LA Times. Web. 2015. <http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-paolo-bacigalupi-20150524-story.html>
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense.html
http://www.andrewlmoore.com/photography/detroit/
Adorno on masculinity in fascism - http://0-www.pep-web.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk