Summary Of The Water Knife By Bacigalupi

In the contemporary novel The Water Knife, Bacigalupi highlights the consequences, the savagery, and the measures people will resort to when they are dancing on the edge of life and death - all the result of an abrupt deprivation of a necessity to life: water. As the story progresses, Bacigalupi develops the novel to feature two distinct genres: a dystopian genre which is more focused on serious political issues, and then the detective-thriller genre where Bacigalupi adds a more suspenseful component to the novel for entertainment value. Post-apocalyptic literature is as described by Louise Fabiani “a thought experiment with a plot”, and that its “little secret is to wake us up while there’s still time”. While The Water Knife is known more as a climate-fiction novel, I argue that it can also be described as a post-apocalit through how the interaction of the two genres that The Water Knife falls under demonstrates that emotion can shroud logic, leading to ignorance of the problems at hand and the potential dilemmas that can occur in the future,
Sparks fly between the Bonnie and Clyde-esque couple in chapter 32 with their highly vivid sex scene. The unnecessary amount of detail documenting this particular section with lines such as: “Mesmerized, drunk on the pleasure… feeling wildy alive” (p.272) that are capable of immersing the audience into the moment. Prior to Angel and Lucy’s relationship developing to the level that it is in chapter 32, the couple shared another suspenseful scene in which Angel rescues Lucy from her captor and Angel’s former colleague, Julio. While there are no specifics that can be included, the aforementioned chapters are examples of how Bacigalupi weaves in entertainment into his novel - through highly descriptive and emotional