Revisited: The Water Knife

By Paolo Bacigalupi, narrated by Almarie Guerra – Recent news about the drought in the American Southwest reminds me to revisit this excellent 2015 thriller that pits governments against each other and new technology (interesting in itself) benefits some people more than others (go figure). Set in the not-too-distant future, Bacigalupi’s story uses real-life issues as a springboard, adds in toxic intergovernmental rivalries and a healthy dose of greed. It’s an exciting and thought-provoking tale.

In Bacigalupi’s Southwest, Nevada (specifically Las Vegas), Arizona, and California are battling over a dwindling water supply caused by climate change, population pressure, and brazen political brokering. The situation has escalated, with states declaring their sovereignty, closing their borders, and enforcing interstate transit rules with armed militias that shoot to kill. Zoners (Arizonans) have few ways to make a living, and those with weapons prey on the desperate poor. To have water is to be rich or, as the saying goes, “water flows toward money.” The wealthy have bought their way into “arcologies”—high-rise buildings with complex plant and aquatic ecosystems for recycling and recirculating virtually every drop.

In Las Vegas, the Cypress arcologies were built by Catherine Case, nicknamed the Queen of the Colorado River, and head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Las Vegas is to some extent thriving, because of her cunning and cutthroat tactics. But Phoenix is dying.

Angel Velasquez, one of the book’s three protagonists, is an ex-prison inmate—smart, ruthless, a “water knife” who works for Case, cutting other people’s water supplies. Lucy Monroe is a Phoenix-based Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and social media star (#PhoenixDowntheTubes) who just might have a lead on some serious water rights, and Maria Villarosa is a highly disposable Texas refugee barely surviving in Phoenix and at the constant mercy of a brutal gang headed by “the Vet,” who throws enemies to his pack of hyenas.

Angel must visit Phoenix to investigate the mutilation death of one of Catherine Case’s undercover operatives, and the plot really starts to flow. He finds Phoenix swimming with Calis—Californians also working undercover to assure that state’s gluttonous water requirements are met, regardless what happens to everyone upriver. Before long, all the players are after the same thing—original water rights documents that would supersede everything on the books—and no one is sure who has them.

While the story is a critique of a policy environment in which local interests are allowed to supersede regional and federal goals, it never reads like a political tract. And, while quite a bit is imparted about the issue of water rights and reclamation strategies, it isn’t a legal or scientific tome, either. It’s a thriller about a compelling trio of people with different motivations, different places in the water aristocracy, and different strategies for coping. The drought, dust, and poverty that envelop Angel, Lucy, and Maria and their cities affect everyone who lives there. “Somehow they hadn’t been able to see something that was plain as day, coming straight at them.”

A lot of powerful straight journalism has been written recently about water rights, droughts, agricultural demand, and intergovernmental bickering about rights. This important novel makes the stakes eminently—and memorably—clear.

Almarie Guerra does a solid narration, putting just the right Latino topspin on the Mexican voices.

Order here from Amazon, or from your local indie bookstore.

As of July 2021, Lake Mead, the nation’s largest water reservoir by volume, is at 37% of capacity.

***Net Force: Dark Web

photo: openDemocracy, creative commons license

Jerome Priesler’s new techno-thriller, Net Force: Dark Web carries on a series created by the late Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, but lacks the immersive, gotta-turn-the-page qualities of Clancy’s work. It’s certainly true that cybersecurity becomes more consequential by the day, but this book doesn’t make the case.

True to current thriller-writing style, it comprises short chapters of a few pages that skip around to cover the actions of a large number of players, among them: black hat hackers versus white hat hackers, corrupt African leaders, the President of the United States and her new cyber-initiative team, CIA and FBI operatives, parking garage attendants, and moms with kids. In other words, a lot. Too much, in fact. If an author expects to maintain your interest for around 700 pages, the length of the paperback version, at least some of those characters should be written in enough depth to make you care about them.

The story starts strong, with a prologue set in 2023 in Malta (why this was a “prologue” and not just Chapter 1, I don’t know, as it’s contemporaneous with the rest of the story and integral to it). A young woman who has something to do with software development flees through city streets, trailed not just by men in vehicles, but also by a drone following her every twist and turn.

Just as you’re rooting for her escape, in a nice reversal, she’s captured, and you learn her pursuers are CIA and she may not be one of the good guys after all. Then the action moves to Romania where black hat operators plan to use the woman’s clever software to take control of a wide array of computers. They probably can’t anticipate the full ramifications of their project, given the near-future pervasiveness of the Internet of Things. The CIA wants the woman’s help, but she’s resisting.

I won’t go into how all the other plot threads and descriptive elements merge with this set-up, except to say some of them don’t. The entire Africa plotline was extraneous to the story; deleting it would have reduced the page count. Likewise, Priesler describes every new character at length, whether they reappear or not. You may regret struggling to remember all those backstories.

What makes a techno-thriller work is confidence that the author has the technology down pat (good examples are Ghost Fleet or This is Gomorrah). Inevitably, a moment arrives when the author goes out on a limb, when you must suspend disbelief and just hang in, but I never reached that point of trust. As far as I can tell from his past works, Priesler has not written this type of book before, and it shows.

Photo: openDemocracy, creative commons license

Your Next Thriller: Idea Goldmine

The July 2018 issue of Wired is a treasure trove of ideas for thriller writers. Here are the ones that got my creative juices flowing.

satellite 2

photo: Alexas_Fotos, creative commons license

Space Wars and Daily Life
“The Outer Limits of War,” by Garrett M. Graff, which bears the provocative subhead “a new arms race is threatening to explode—500 miles above our heads.” A parenthetical factoid declares that 14 out of the 16 “infrastructure sectors designated as critical by the Department of Homeland Security, like energy and financial services, rely on GPS for their operation.” Things you might not expect, like ATMs, cellular networks, and credit card systems depend on GPS. And the satellite array that makes GPS possible is highly vulnerable to deliberate attack, not to mention the 500,000 pieces of debris, marble-sized and up, currently orbiting earth at up to 17,000 mph.

The All-Seeing Eye
In Steven Levy’s “The Wall,” Palmer Lucky’s portable surveillance towers use radar, cameras, and communications technologies to identify moving objects up to two miles away. The virtual reality component of the system tags objects as people or coyotes. Then it reports in to those who will do something about it. Such systems would have military uses, scanning the battlefield, and are being tested at the U.S.-Mexico border. Lucky’s virtual wall would cost about one-fiftieth of the proposed 30-foot high concrete structure under consideration at the border, with all its security, wildlife disruption, aesthetic, and property infringement downsides.

Bitcoins

photo: Mike Cauldwell, creative commons license

Cryptocurrency
“The Blockchain: A Love Story; The Blockchain: A Horror Story,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. How the Tez went bad. Leaving aside the particulars of this long piece, a good thriller writer can expertly decode the most opaque problem. So I hope you’re working on a novel about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, so I can finally understand it.

Mission Possible?
Oh, and the Mission Impossible movie franchise technologies that have—and have not—achieved reality. Gecko gloves, yes. Covert subdermal implants, no.

That Plastic Gun Isn’t a Toy
Finally, check out this chilling video on the Wired website headlined “Legal Win Opens Pandora’s Box for Weapons.” Forget age requirements. Forget background checks. Forget gun control altogether. Thank you, DoJ.

Better Natures vs. Worst Instincts

Clouds, storm

photo: Alias 0591, creative commons license

Were you, like me, puzzled by the preponderance of dystopian fiction in the young adult category a few years ago? I don’t know whether it started with the post-apocalyptic The Hunger Games trilogy or merely came to a head then, but it seemed adolescents couldn’t escape these bleak takes on their future world. Might they even give up on it?

Disasters, manmade or otherwise seem ever-more likely—an earthquake near the Pacific Coast,  coastal flooding up the Atlantic seaboard, asteroids hurtling toward Earth, Kim Jong-Un, the Rise of the Ultra-Nationalists. So many ways for our world to be royally screwed. In fiction at least, the frequent aftermath of calamity is a society that is, well, dystopian.

Recent analyses suggest that in the current world political climate, the political cataclysms that breed dystopias have put the genre on the rise again. Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 have increased 9500 percent since the inauguration of president Trump—and at least for a time, it topped the Amazon bestseller list.

Cory Doctorow in the April Wired argues that disasters don’t inevitably end in dystopias. “The difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs,” he says. “It’s about what happens when everything fails.” He suggests that here, in the nonfiction, disaster-prone post-election real world, “we’re about to find out which one we live in.” Do we respond by helping each other, or do we see survival as a zero-sum game, in which one person’s gain is another’s loss? He reminds us that, on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats, at least half the seats were empty, as people already saved did too little to help their drowning fellow passengers struggle aboard.

A dystopia can be created when we’re persuaded that our neighbors are our enemies, not our mutual saviors and responsibilities.

The belief that when the lights go out, your neighbors will come over with a shotgun—rather than the contents of their freezer so you can have a barbecue before it all spoils—isn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s a weaponized narrative. (Emphasis in the original)

Unfortunately, there’s all too much of that kind of thinking in today’s political narrative. Doctorow has thought extensively about what makes a better versus a worse future. In his new novel Walkaway (published today, affiliate link below), the questions he tackles underscore the importance of the narratives we tell ourselves. Do they lead us to work toward utopias or succumb to our worst instincts?

For Further Consideration

  • Many classic novels have described dystopias, as cautionary tales and authors’ predicates to a sentence that starts “If this keeps up . . . .” Here are 10.
  • A “spectacular” television version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale begins April 26 on Hulu.

“Hush Now, Don’t Explain”–Part 2

Billie HolidayFiction editor Beth Hill has written excellent advice to authors in her Editor’s Blog essay, “Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain.” I covered four of her points here on Friday.

Here are two more and an example from Cormac McCarthy:

  • It isn’t necessary to stop the story’s action to define what something is or how it works, Hill says. These are digressions and most readers don’t like them. Many authors enjoy doing the research for a book (I do!). They aren’t just making stuff up, they’ve grounded their work in reality. They want to share. And probably shouldn’t. That said, readers of some types of sci-fi and techno-thrillers expect to be given an understanding of the science and mechanics behind the story. Authors who write in those genres get a little slack on the “how stuff works” front. I read a terrific military novel lately (The Empty Quarter), where Amazon reviewers criticized it for not explaining every acronym and term. I wasn’t bothered, thinking I’d figured most of it out, but reader frustration was great. So it may be that a careful balance is needed.
  • Hill says if a character speaks several languages, she doesn’t need to repeat her words or thoughts in more than one of them. Writers should pick phrases or opportunities to use the second language when the meaning will be obvious by word form or context. Cormac McCarthy uses a lot of Spanish in The Crossing, and even though a not-to-be-specified number of decades have elapsed since I had high school Spanish–which certainly never touched the topics McCarthy writes about–I had no trouble following. This exchange between several Mexican men and two young Americans takes place after an old man has drawn them a map of where they want to go and walked away (McCarthy does not use quotation marks):

When he was gone, the men on the bench began to laugh. One of them rose to better see the map.

Es un fantasma, he said.

Fantasma?

Sí, sí, Claro.

Cómo?

Cómo? Porque el viejo está loco es cómo.

Loco?

Completamente.

In this and in many different and subtle ways, McCarthy confirms the reader’s understanding of what is said without a mechanical translation of every phrase (or, by extension, technical term). By the time I finished this book, I was following so well, I thought I could actually speak Spanish!

Again, I encourage you to take a good look at Hill’s full essay. Avoiding overexplaining will help keep you in step with your readers, which is what every writer wants!

The Man in the High Castle: Guest Post

Man in the High Castle, Philip K. DickGuest-reviewer David Sherr gives 5 stars to this 10-part Amazon Studio Series production, which he binge-watched one recent weekend. Says David:

The Man in the High Castle is a complex story of espionage and betrayal based on a 1963 Hugo Award-winning novel by Philip K. Dick. It’s produced by Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner (1982), based on another of Dick’s dystopian tales, and Frank Spotniz (The X-Files). The story provides an alternative history: Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany win World War II, and the United States is under totalitarian rule.

While very few movies are as compelling as the book that inspired them, this one holds true to its source in essential plot and character development. (This Gizmodo review describes some of the differences, for fans of the book.) The series is perfectly paced with tight dialogue and uniformly superior directing and acting. The cinematography is exquisite—lingering shots in muted color settings.

Man in the High Castle

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in Man in the High Castle

Among the production’s leading actors are Alexa Davalos, Rupert Evans, Luke KleinTank. One particularly outstanding and subtle performance is that of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the melancholy but kind US Japanese Trade Minister, Nobusuke Tagomi, in the accompanying photo. (You may remember him as Chang in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Academy Award-winning film, The Last Emperor [1987], or Eddie Sakamura in Rising Sun [1993], based on a book by Michael Crichton.)

The artistic director, costume designer, and set designer all deserve kudos. The film depicts technology, clothing, hair styles, and vehicles that appear to be from at least a decade earlier than 1962, when the story is set, which is consistent with a point in the story-line about how progress is inhibited by the effects of fascism.

The Man in the High Castle became available for Amazon streaming on November 20. It’s billed as “season one,” so there may be more to come.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 95%.

Guest review by David Scherr. Contact him at dmsherr@gmail.com or on Twitter: @davidsherr