Note: If that summary suggests any satiric intent, know that nothing in The Water Knife is played with a wink or hint of ironic knowingness. The Water Knife opens with the all-powerful head of the Las Vegas Water Authority - a Pat Mulroy stand-in named Catherine Case - using a corrupt court order as a pretext to unleash her private military force (you read that right) to drop some flaming law of the river on a water plant in rival Arizona. So right, in fact, that his scenario works not only as the setting for the book’s hurtling, beach-ready plot, but as scarily plausible clairvoyance about the shitstorm that’s coming here in real life along a dying river generally acknowledged to be the nation’s most imperiled. They feel right, too, the interlocking ecological, human, social and moral catastrophes he came up with, from dust storms and crooked politics to tides of doomed refugees and baroque criminality. Requiring a drought-shriveled near future for his three protagonists - Angel, a Vegas water thug Lucy, a Phoenix journalist Maria, a Texas refugee - to flee across, scrabble through and lose their illusions in, Bacigalupi has extrapolated, broadly and deeply, what would happen if the American Southwest dried up. It’s not some lame, off-the-shelf, one-apocalypse-fits-all dystopia that sci-fi novelist Paolo Bacigalupi has contrived for his new yarn, The Water Knife (Knopf, $25.95).
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