"Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that."

The Water Knife continues Bacigalupi's ecological collapse stories, this time in an American Southwest running chronically short on water. California, Nevada, and Arizona are at each others throats for what remains of the Colorado River. Texas is already gone, 'Merry Perry' refugees trying to filter north and west while they pray for rain to bring their lives back. The Feds don't care, as long as the violence stays below a plausible level of deniability, but that level of deniability is pretty high. Legal action can deny a whole city water, well over a hundred people are murdered in an average week in Phoenix, and the book opens with the Nevada National Guard carrying out a helicopter assault on an Arizona pumping station (cue ride of the Valkeries).

The plot follows the interlocking stories of three people caught up a fatal game over some very very valuable water rights. Angel is the top water knife for Nevada's Catherine Case; a cold-blooded Mexican ex-gangster willing to cut anybody out so Las Vegas can keep drinking. Luck Monroe is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist riding #PhoenixDowntheTubes, knowing that Phoenix will kill her but unable to let go of the story. Maria is a teenage Texan refugee just trying to survive.

The setting is top-notch. The rich live in Chinese arcologies with perfect recycling and guarded and sealed entrances; the poor cluster around Red Cross wells in decaying suburbs. Apocalyptic dust storms roll across the sky, burying solar farms in drifts of Inland Empire topsoil. Bacigalupi nails the carnival-of-death atmosphere of a longterm refugee camp, the idea that the apocalypse might happen so slowly that we won't notice, until it all happens to fast to stop. There's a tension between Old Eyes and New Eyes, between seeing the world as it used to be (the United States of America, green lawns, law and order) and how it has become (drone strikes in cities, dust storms, plata o plomo for whole cities.)

This is some of the best, and most compelling near future ecological fiction being written. My main problem is that the character beats track too closely Bacigalupi's own The Windup Girl: Here's the corporate hatchet man with his last scruple of humanity; here's the idealist who should run but can't; here's the innocent whore; this is when they fall in love despite themselves; this is when Murphy's Law proves supreme and social tension breaks; and fin. And unlike his last novel, in this one Bacigalupi goes with the Old Eyes. Who cares which side of a line in the desert you're from, or what Arizona promised some Indians 150 years ago. This is the now, and what matters is where your next sip of water is coming from, and who has to get cut so you can get it.