Oreskes, M., & Conway, E. M. (2014). The Collapse of Western Civilisation: A View from the Future. New York: Columbia University Press. Along their journey, they encounter Lucy Monroe, an award-winning journalist, who is being tortured by rivals seeking to locate the senior water rights. However, betrayal; soon follows, as each individual has their own uses for the document, and it becomes a question of who they can trust. Update this section!

In 2014, Martin Scorsese selected Knife in the Water to be screened as part of the festival of Polish films in the United States and Canada entitled "Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema". [20] Tobar, Héctor (28 May 2015). "Imagining a thirsty future in Paolo Bacigalupi's 'The Water Knife' ". The Washington Post . Retrieved 19 July 2015.Polański himself had an offer to make an English-language, colour remake, with a Hollywood cast (including Henry Fonda), but he refused, saying he did not want to do a remake of a movie that was already good. Meanwhile, the Vet is torturing Maria for failing to pay rent on time. He feeds her hand to his hyenas, and she remains caged inside of his compound. The Vet and his men notice the smoke rising from the fire started at the gas station and leave the compound in a hurry to join the fray. Toomie, Maria’s friend who tried to protect her from the Vet, discovers her at the compound and frees her. Maria decides to attempt to cross the Colorado River on her own. What is the Stanford prison experiment? According to Angel, what determines how people act? Lucy asks if people are “anything on their own, inherently” (283) and if they can be better than what they grew up with. How does Angel answer this question? Do you agree with him? What does the novel ultimately seem to suggest?

The book is based on Bacigalupi's short story, The Tamarisk Hunters, and revolves around the effects of climate change in the near future. The water supply has been drastically reduced and control of the supply has been taken over by corrupt business magnates. Angel Velasquez is the main protagonist and is a spy/assassin, known as a “water knife" – his job is to sabotage the water supply of his employer’s competitors. He encounters many conflicts on his journey and meets the mysterious journalist Lucy Monroe and refugee Maria Villarosa along the way. Residents in the southwestern United States enduring that water crisis will appreciate the precision with which Bacigalupi imagines our thirsty future…. Bacigalupi is a grim, efficient and polished narrator…. Our waterless future looks hot—and filled with conflict.”—Hector Tobar, The Washington Post An intense thriller and a deeply insightful vision of the coming century, laid out in all its pain and glory. It’s a water knife indeed, right to the heart.”—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Aurora As some of you may know I am currently undertaking a creative writing PhD with the catchy title Navigating the mystery of future geographies in climate change fiction. Bacigalupi is raising bigger questions, too, about what happens when a shrinking federal government leaves a vacuum in its wake, and what kinds of things rush in to fill that void. "This was the true apocalypse. The world after all the rules had stopped existing," Lucy realizes as she reaches a point of no return. That realization could also serve as The Water Knife's alarming, mobilizing bottom line.

As George Marshall noted in Don’t Even Think About It: Why are Brains are Hardwired to Ignore Climate Change (2014), there is a distinction between our rational and emotional minds. Those fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists and paid politicians, all with vested interests in downplaying the climate crisis and insisting that we can – indeed should – continue pretty much as usual, are past masters at appealing to emotions over rationality. For example in threatening people that their actions and policies have already kept in poverty, with the idea that pursuing net zero will make them “ poorer and colder” (Wood & Chapman, 2021) and “ destroy their way of life”. (Heath, 2023) Examine the treatment of the theme of allegiance within the story. How does allegiance seem to be defined within this novel? To what do the characters show allegiance? Do the characters remain steadfast in their allegiance or do their allegiances shift throughout? If they shift, what seems to motivate these changes? She is a corrupt business magnate who controls the Nevada water supplies and the luxury arcology structures that shelter the rich. She is part of the syndicate that sabotages the water boards of rival states to keep Southern Nevada Water Authority flourishing. Lucy Monroe On the other hand, we found that the Hobbesian violence of The Water Knife is potentially counterproductive. Authors and critics might hope that portraying a dystopic cautionary future will scare readers into engaging in progressive politics today, but it might not work out that way. Paolo Bacigalupi, New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award finalist, dives once again onto our uncertain future with his first thriller for adults since his multi-award-winning debut phenomenon The Windup Girl.

She is a young orphan now a refugee from the collapsed state of Texas. She embodies the poor who have to scavenge and survive the harsh conditions and scarcity of water. She finds herself wrapped up in the same power struggle that is about to take place following new revelations and truths. Update this section! In chapter 28, we learn that Angel blends in with the group of people he is among. What is it that allows him to blend in? What does he have in common with all of the others in the group? What major theme or themes does this seem to reveal or support? The Water Knife is a 2015 science fiction novel by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is Bacigalupi's sixth novel, and is based on his short story, The Tamarisk Hunter, first published in the news magazine High Country News. It takes place in the near future, where drought brought on by climate change has devastated the Southwestern United States. [3] Central characters [ edit ] The climate crisis has thrown up a challenge for fiction which exposes some inadequacies in these portrayals of individual moral journeys, indeed one of Admussen’s proposals for fiction in an era of climate change is that it should “ abandon the individual moral journey” (Admussen, 2016). It is a strange habit – maybe even a failing of humanity – that we struggle to see in collectives. As Stalin notoriously put it “ one death is a tragedy a million is a statistic.” UK News stories have forever qualified some distant foreign disaster with a note of how many “Britons were involved.” We crave the focus given by an image of one poor drowned child positioned as if sleeping on a beach, but camps filled with thousands of the desperate do not move us so. Nonetheless, whatever Bacigalupi’s intent, Schneider-Mayerson has identified some surely unintended consequences amongst the reader reactions. The pacey thriller style narrative following vulnerable individuals through life changing events does make for an engaging story with a reach beyond the climate change converted readership. However, the book offers little hope or guidance about how to avoid this future or how to respond in ways other than a focus on individual survival.The way fiction, as exemplified in The Water Knife, aims to instil empathy for less than a handful of key characters can mean the form neglects other emotions and wider foci. Ada Palmer and Jo Walton described it as The Protagonist Problem (Palmer & Walton, 2021) the way the narrative success or failure rests on the shoulders of a few key individuals. This is a feature also of the great men approach to the teaching of history, and indeed educational policy in the UK where the notion of hero school leaders who can be parachuted into any school ignores the massive contribution made by layers of staff and specific contexts within their successful schools. As Palmer and Walton note, A]water-wars thriller set in the Southwest only a few decades from now…. While Bacigalupi’s environmental message could not be more powerful, it’s neatly embedded in a nonstop action plot, full of murders and betrayals, that should satisfy thriller readers who didn’t even think they cared about these issues.”—Gary K. Wolfe, The Chicago Tribune Lucy as the representative (and indeed Pulitzer winning) journalist gets to wrestle with that dilemma between detailed rational explanations and appeals to emotive reporting. Does the novel seem to support the notion of binary good and evil, or does it offer a more nuanced version of morality? What ethical decisions are the characters faced with, and what informs and ultimately seems to determine their decisions? Does there seem to be a clear sense of what is right and what is wrong? What does the book seem to say about morality, choice, and human nature?