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. 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. Caputo, Davide (2012). Polanski and Perception: The Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski. Bristol, England: Intellect Books. ISBN 978-1-841-50552-7. http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/The-Water-Knife-Audiobook/B00UAWDZ32?source_code=AUDORWS0309159CVZ

Paolo Bacigalupi opens the novel with this sentence: “There were stories in sweat” (3). What does he mean by this? Why do you think he chose to begin with this declaration particularly? Esoteric stuff. Articles that are drier than desert, when you’re digging through travel schedules and cash transfers…Nobody reads stories about paperwork the way they look at pictures in the blood rags, right? (p. 168) In chapter 13, Angel thinks about his first meeting with Lucy: “He’d known her. And she’d known him, too” (141). realizes. Why does Angel think that he and Lucy know each other even though they had never met previously? What does he believe they share in common? Would you say that he is correct? Why or why not? Much of the story takes place in a dying version of Phoenix. The Water Knife of the title is an operative of the Southern Nevada Water Authority (i.e. Las Vegas) named Angel. His job is both to serve legal papers denying water rights to Las Vegas' competitors and to bring violence down on those refusing to comply. In Angel's world, water is life and each state understands that legal actions are the least of the tools at their disposal. The book opens with Las Vegas protecting its own water supply via a thin legal disguise and the destruction of a neighboring city's water treatment plant.

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! Brady, A. (2020, August 6). An Interview with Author and Scholar Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. Retrieved from artistsandclimatechange.com: https://artistsandclimatechange.com/2020/08/06/an-interview-with-author-and-scholar-matthew-schneider-mayerson/ These days are coming, and as always fiction explains them better than fact. This is a spectacular thriller, wonderfully imagined and written, and racing through it will make you think—and make you thirsty.”—Lee Child, author of Personal

Palmer, A., & Walton, J. (2021). The Protagonist Problem. Retrieved from www.uncannymagazine.com: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-protagonist-problem/ It’s possible that narratives like The Water Knife might not motivate progressive environmental politics, as authors and critics often hope, but support for climate barbarism – callously allowing the less fortunate to suffer – or even ecofascism” (Brady, 2020) 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? This ability to engender empathy is often cited as a key attribute of fiction, but the emotional response to stories is not always as the author intended. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson has conducted several surveys looking at the impact of climate fiction on reader attitudes. The Water Knife and its precursor short story The Tamarisk Hunter have featured in a number of Schneider-Mayerson’s studies.

READERS GUIDE

In the 2015 poll conducted by Polish Museum of Cinematography in Łódź, Knife in the Water was ranked as the fourth greatest Polish film of all time. [21] Home media [ edit ] 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. As a fiction writer, you actually have an opportunity to go at the same ideas, but you can make them engaging… the reader gets to live viscerally in that world… in the skin of a climate refugee.” (Urry, 2015)

Sarah was schooling away her Dallas drawl, scraping away Texas talk and Texas dirt scrubbing and scraping as hard as her pale white skin could take the burn.” (p. 39) Angel and Lucy make it to another Las Vegas safe house. Angel places a call to Las Vegas pretending to be helpless and in need of extraction. Angel and Lucy relocate to another building and watch as a helicopter blows up the safe house with two missile strikes. After the smoke clears, Angel and Lucy ambush the men searching for Angel’s body in the rubble. Angel discovers that Case is working with California to secure the water rights from Angel, whom she believes is withholding them from her. Angel attempts to convince Case that he never double-crossed her and that he will bring her the water rights. The film was nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and is Polanski's only Polish-language feature to date. Knife in the Water has garnered acclaim from film critics since its release, and is one of Polanski's best-reviewed works. American filmmaker Martin Scorsese recognized the film as one of the masterpieces of Polish cinema and in 2013 he selected it for screening alongside films such as Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds and Innocent Sorcerers in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom as part of the Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema festival of Polish films. [9] Plot [ edit ]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 Water Knife is an noir-tinged, apocalyptic vision of the near-future: What will the world be like, and how will we live in it? Bacigalupi already seems to live there. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble Angel enjoys the television show Undaunted. Why does he seem to like this particular show? Does his view of the show change after he discusses it with Lucy? Why or why not? What might this suggest about the influence of arts and media, and the way that we approach these forms of entertainment? Would you say that the television show is propaganda? Why or why not? Are any other forms of propaganda evident in the story? How can something be recognized as propaganda? 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.