The Water Knife

The Water Knife is a work of fiction depicting a, scarily tangible, world stretched thin by a crippling lack of resources, populated with people driven completely by the need for basic resources, getting just enough to make it to the next day or to horde as much of it for themselves as possible, living in an environment where it is impossible for  the basic needs of every single person to be met. This fact drives the characters in the book to increasingly egregious means to ends, and while the narrative that the characters engage with really is horrifying, what truly made the book unsettling for me was the realistic nature of the world it took place in. It is easy to imagine a situation where limited resources force people to act in extreme, morally reprehensible ways just to secure a means of survival, and that is exactly the world that The Water Knife depicts, organizations that are today seen as powerful and malevolent such as state government are now relicts of a society that relished in it’s excesses, now forced to resort to desperate tactics to hold onto a semblance of what society was like before it had to face the consequences of its own

gluttony. What made this book resonate with me was how accurate this depiction was, Paolo Bacigalupi truly realizes the predicament our society is facing and this book is in essence a warning to us as to what the world might look like if we don’t take action now. He depicts a world where life as we know it has ended, and people find themselves in a savage, unforgiving world that is no longer keeping their coddled comfort a priority. He is warning us what our lives might become if we don’t take action, and honestly, I think we should take his warning to heart.