The Water Knife takes place primarily in Phoenix, Arizona, a dry climate city that relies on downstream water from the Central Arizona Project and the Colorado River. Imagined in the year 2030, many southern cities lost access to their water supply, the most prevalent and scarce supply in the book. The lack of water led to a mass migration of Texans to the North. The inter-state political dynamics mirror those of countries, with residents expressing pride in their home state similar to nationalistic sentiments, and encountering obstacles when attempting to enter other states. Two main characters, Maria and Sarah, migrated from Texas to Phoenix. The discriminatory treatment of them and other Texans by Phoenix residents created constant fighting between Texans and the Merry Perrys, a violent group of Phoenix residents. 

California is the supreme state in Water Knife, holding the rights to many essential water supplies. In this imagined future, Las Vegas also holds a tight grip on its water supply, hiring water knives such as Angel to destroy the water supply of cities. 

The most sacred documents in this reality are water rights. The timeline forms around the pursuit of ancient indigenous water rights, which changes possession multiple times. Lucy’s acquaintance, Jamie, told her a story about his knowledge of such ancient rights, who was later found dead and tortured by rights seekers. Individual seekers of the water rights captured and tortured Lucy to seek information on the location of the rights, because of her connection to Jamie. Unknowingly, instead of the water rights existing in digital form on Mike Ratan’s computer—an employee of California’s regime—the rights existed in paper form within a book given to Maria. Angel’s realization about the right’s paper characteristic leads to the chase after the rights and the concluding events.

Politics of The Water Knife

The Water Knife is shrouded in political breakdown, violence, and disarray as a result of the drying up of the Colorado River and the political commodification of water as a limited resource. However, this political breakdown is perhaps slightly different than many other portrayals in climate fiction. Though not much air time is given to the character Catherine Case, she is central to the story at large and her presence in the political realm as well as her influence on the real turbulence and violence that poor citizens experience is certainly felt. Case is an extremely powerful figure due to her managing the water supply for Las Vegas and is instrumental on the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA). She is fantastic as a political influence because of her overarching political maneuvering as well as orchestrating plots to secure water rights through any means necessary, buying politicians, but most notably by employing so called “water knives” to kill political rivals, destroy projects which threaten the water supply, and use any violent means necessary to secure water rights, acting as an armed agents (sort of like 007) solely for the use of Catherine Case and Las Vegas. This political maneuvering is central due to the commodification of water and the essential running of each city as a city-state as an individual political entity and each state as its own country with closed borders unless you have proper documentation (or a lot of money to hire coyotes to sneak you across the border, not too dissimilar to modern day cartel rings getting people across the US-Mexico border).

The novel highlights these political changes from modern society as a function of the fighting over water rights. It is unlike many other climate fiction novels in that there is a federal government still, it just functions more as a shell of what it is at present, only stepping if there is all out war between states or cities. Additionally, when Carson City begins taking water from Las Vegas, the city with the senior water rights, the federal government does not get involved when Case has her water knives blow up the dam and participate in a violent assault. The federal government additionally is stretched thin budget wise and doesn’t have the means to provide water or save many of the doomed and abandoned towns in Texas and Arizona due to the lack of water. This lack of federal interference and enforcement of law, as well as the tremendous refugee crisis spurred tremendous amounts of gang takeover and the rise of many different paramilitary groups which inflict violence upon the common people. Within cities there is almost no policing or extremely corrupt, with nearly every major player somehow connected to “the Vet”, a gang leader, which keeps people indebted to him, running prostitution rings, and keeping many people in extreme poverty so he keeps power. Paramilitary organizations are also rampant, with groups like the Merry Perrys, a right wing religious group which participate in multiple gun fights in the novel, as well as water knives from California known as ‘Calies’, Angel, and the local gang scene. There is so much murder, death, and destruction in the novel that it can be a little overwhelming, especially when confronted with fact that there are the extremely wealthy mostly Chinese businessmen living in the luxury arcologies who use water to no end and are not exposed to the level of violence and atrocities committed in the town of Phoenix daily. Bodies pile up, particularly among immigrants and people who know too much. Undoubtedly, the level of violence depicted is a product of the political breakdown as a result of fighting over water resources.

Major Critiques

I think one of the foremost critiques and takeaways that Bacigalupi has of modern society is of the overconsumption and unequal consumption of resources, such as water, which many people have taken entirely for granted. Particularly in the West and the United States we waste so many resources because of the lack of this conservation mindset, while also making the conservation movement very exclusive. This exclusivity and disparity of resource use with water in the novel with the differences between the life of luxury in the arcologies with fountains and bountiful amounts of water all the while people are dying on the streets and selling their bodies just to get a thimble of water or have snow ball’s chance in hell to get into California because of the (seemingly false) promise of a water rich paradise.

Bacigalupi shows the violence of immigration in “The Water Knife”, heavily critiquing the closed border policy of the modern day United States which leads people to take drastic measures just for the promise of a better tomorrow, often leading to discrimination, violence, and sometimes even death. In the novel, immigrants become indebted to cartel-like gang institutions which run the coyote program which illegally sends people across the border, often to their demise. Angel and Lucy often see bodies of not only politicians and those who hold water rights, but endless amounts of immigrants dead in piles which the people have become immune to. There is no doubt that this complex between so called ‘zoners’ and immigrants, the discrimination that Texan immigrants feel (somewhat ironically, as Texas seems to be one of the biggest anti-immigration states in the modern U.S.) is a critique of the current political system demonizing immigrants and blaming them for the problems that they have essentially caused.

There is a consistent theme of politicians preaching theories of ‘conservation’, all the while buying and litigating for protections to their water supply while simultaneously using more than they were legally entitled to as well as causing disaster and death downstream of them by cutting off their water supply. The character Catherine Case is based on Patricia Mulroy, the real life manager of the Las Vegas water supply and later succeeded by Marilyn Kirkpatrick and Bacigalupi is very clearly critiquing their policies of water ‘conservation’, not all that dissimilar to the strategies of Case, other than the use of violence through this fictional concept of water knives. There are multiple examples of the SNWA and these two heads of the Las Vegas Water Supply funding different billion dollar projects that siphon water from the Colorado River (not in their jurisdiction, I might add) and bring it to either Lake Mead or other water holding sites for the use of Nevada and Las Vegas. There are also projects which plan to implement drilling and fracking to free water from deep aquifers underneath rural Nevada in protected plant and animal habitat, potentially lowering the water table to critical levels and cause huge threats to human health. Other federal studies also show that species protected under the Endangered Species Act could be threatened by projects like this. Though “The Water Knife” is a work of climate fiction, it is not entirely a far leap to say that one could imagine a future where this kind of thing is happening because to some degree it is happening at present. Bacigalupi is evidently critiquing these policies, especially on the precipice of the drying up of Lake Mead and the constant near catastrophe in the modern world, which threaten water resources across the desert landscape of the Southwest US.

Role Of Rivers And Dams

Playing a key role in both the water Knife as well as the lives of many Americans living in the western united states is the colorado river. Running from the rocky mountains 1500 miles to the gulf of california the colorado river provides significant portions of water to Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nevada. Originally divided up among the states by the Colorado river compact which drastically over estimated the amounts of water that would be flowing in the river annually creating almost an immediate shortage which only compounded as the Basin states were plunged into drought. There are several important dams along Colorado for both water storage and the generation of hydroelectric power. As more and more states run out of alternate sources of water and water rights come to play a significant role in who gets premium access to the water several of the dams are blown up leading to incredible amounts of down river destruction and pressing the states higher up river to work on alternate water sources. 

The Second important water source in the Water Knife is the Central Arizona Project which was originally designed to provide a stable flow of water from Colorado to the state of Arizona. However, as water begins to run out it proves to be just the opposite as it becomes the city of Phoenixes lifeline to Colorado and proves to be very vulnerable to an attack which in turn cripples the city and results in the US government putting a significant amount of resources into protecting the canal.

Works Cited

Heller, Jason. (2015, May 28). “The water knife” cuts deep. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2015/05/28/408295800/the-water-knife-cuts-deepr-knife-cuts-deep 

I-Team: SNWA head back to court to keep multi-billion dollar water siphoning project alive. (2018, September 14). KLAS. https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/i-team-snwa-head-back-to-court-to-keep-multi-billion-dollar-water-siphoning-project-alive/

Lustgarten, A. (n.d.). The ‘water witch’: Pat mulroy preached conservation while backing growth in las vegas. ProPublica. Retrieved May 10, 2024, from https://www.propublica.org/article/killing-colorado-pat-mulroy-las-vegas-water-witch