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From: Titus G <noone@nowhere.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: The Water Knife. Was: Nebula finalists 2010
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2024 18:03:51 +1300
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On 20/11/24 08:18, William Hyde wrote:
> Titus G wrote:
>> On 19/11/24 03:42, James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>>> Which 2010 Nebula Finalist Novels Have You Read?
>>>
>>> The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
>>> Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
>>> Finch by Jeff VanderMeer
>>> Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman
>>> The City & The City by China Mieville
>>> The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak
>>>
>>> I read the Bacigalupi (which I hated and which kept its publisher
>>> afloat for years), the Priest and the Mieville
>>>
>>
>> Both the Bacigalupi and the Mieville novels were a solid four stars
>> for me.
>> Bacigalupi's "Ship Breaker" was less than mediocre and I just discovered
>> that I have "The Water Knife" so began reading it today. So far it is a
>> dark but a brilliant corrupt dystopia of a future of dust storms and
>> water shortage where Nevada controls the water from the Colorado and
>> Arizona is turning into a deserted desert like Texas already is.
> 
> 
> I'm not likely to read the book any time soon so, how does Texas turn
> into a desert?
> 

At the commencement of the book far in the future, Texas is already a
desert with its refugees in Arizona where the Nevada 'Water Knife' is
operating to 'cut' Arizona's meagre water supplies to divert them to
Nevada which already basically controls the Colorado River with drones,
private militia, black helicopters and lawyers, subject to Federal
oversight, The rich live in arcologies or have fled to California or
Canada prior to borders being more tightly controlled than the current
US/Mexico border. The summary provided in the reply by "bliss" is not
specifically stated but I think it is accurate though I don't recall the
restrictive medical policies claim. There is no scientific
explanation, nor proselytising about Climate Change. The places are
real. I used the atlas to see the path of the Colorado and find features
like Lake Mead which the book stated was seriously low back in the 1920's.

The following is perhaps the only relevant quotation to your question.
"Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma,
and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century,
pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from
ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They’d played dress-up-in-green and
pretended it could last forever. They’d pumped up the Ice Age and spread
it across the land, and for a while they’d turned their dry lands lush.
Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans—vast green acreages, all because someone
could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from
what they were. They’d had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and
they fell back,  realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed,
and there would be no more coming."

It may be because of the contrast to my recent reading, but this was one
of the most realistically violent stories I have read. Mainly action
adventure and there were some silly instances where mutilated people
performed impossible physical movement, e.g. being shot in the kneecap
but walking with a limp the next day with no treatment. The Science
Fiction aspect was also fascinating in an age of arcologies where
architectural firms are biotectural firms.
I enjoyed "The Water Knife" so much that I now plan to reread "the
Windup Girl" which I have mainly forgotten.