Paolo Bacigalupi's THE WATER KNIFE

This is maybe going to sound funny, but it was with a queer sense of relief that I learned the existence of, and then quickly read, The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi's dystopian look at the future of the American West when the water crisis its been denying for centuries finally can't be ignored anymore. I was relieved because this is a book I've long thought I was going to have to write (for reasons I'll get into in a bit) but wasn't sure I was ever going to be emotionally ready to write, or publish, or become known for having written it, etc. So I'm very glad Bacigalupi did. And hey, he probably did a better job than I would, anyway.

But so, I'm a fifth generation Wyomingite and a former elected official, yo. I've spent half my life dealing with the Western United States' deeply weird relationship with its most scarce and precious resource in one way or another. I've grown up canoeing and failing to water ski on gigantic reservoirs formed by dams meant to divert mighty rivers to feed thirsty cities states away. I've struggled to meet the needs of a small town whose water rights on the North Platte River are a cobbled-together mess, some senior to, some junior to those of surrounding ranches, and some of the "town's" rights were actually borrowed from an impossibly swanky nearby country club that currently owns more water than it needs but has the right to yank back that water at any time. Sometime after my tenure in office, the town decided to, as we say, take its hose out of the North Platte River (which joins up with the South Platte River to form the Platte, which flows into the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, meaning that actually I'm not on the watershed affected by the strife of this story, but we've got our own problems, I assure you. Read up on Nebraska vs Wyoming sometime. Hoo dogie.). I read Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water at least once a year, if not twice, just to keep the knowledge and history it imparts ever-fresh in my mind. Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting. Etc.

What I'm saying is, this story is pretty much a telling of half of the recurring nightmares that have plagued my life since the first time I asked the wrong guy why he hated Jimmy Carter so much in the 1970s (hint: nothing at all to do with the Iran hostage crisis). You don't want to know about the other half. But anyway.

The book's title refers to one of its main characters, as well as to a general way of life that has come to prevail in the American West of the not too distant future, a West that is destroying itself not because of any sudden cataclysm that abruptly undermined its grip on civilization, but because nobody ever took warnings like Cadillac Desert (a book referenced more than a few times in this novel) seriously. Meanwhile, every problem it detailed or predicted has come to pass. Aquifers that were being mined at the rate of five feet a year but nature could only recharge at the rate of maybe a half-inch a year have run dry. Dams are silting up. Cyclical drought and climate change have stricken the land HARD. And water has started to follow money, as it ever has, but now at an aggressive and highly accelerated rate, and usually at gunpoint.

Las Vegas is holding on no matter what, largely thanks to the efforts of an omnicompetent ice queen, one Catherine Case, the Queen of the Colorado, a warlord disguised as a water commissioner, who directs armies of engineers, lawyers, politicians, various flavors of military and paramilitary groups, and any other resource she needs, really, all in service of keeping the Belagio fountains foaming. Water that can't be bought or stolen by bureaucratic methods is taken by force even unto, as our story opens, a full-scale apache helicopter-and-missile attack on a municipal water treatment plant in Arizona.

The guy in charge of that operation, Angel, is her number one Water Knife, a guy who goes wherever she bids cutting off other people's water supplies with ruthless efficiency, by any means necessary. Coming off the success of the water plant destruction, he's sent to, where else, Phoenix, in this book a scene of disaster porn that exceeds even our own decade's weird fixation on the urban decay of Detroit. Phoenix should never have been there in the first place. This was known before it was established and allowed to grow. And grow. And grow. And now, aside from California, which is in a water war league of its very own, it is the last rival to Las Vegas, but it has no Catherine Case to run its show. It is thus doomed even if Case and Angel do not succeed in hastening its destruction.

Enter the novel's second protagonist, muckracking journalist Lucy, who has "gone native" in Phoenix despite being a daughter of the water-rich East Coast. A source of hers indicated to her that he was onto something that was going to change everything for Phoenix. An original and impossibly senior water right that couldn't be denied? An untapped aquifer? Who knows? Certainly not Lucy, because of course somebody tortures her contact to death.

A third strand in the novel's braid is a young girl, Maria, living a desperate life in a madman's walled fiefdom in what's left of suburban Phoenix. She, too, has had an encounter with someone suggesting that things are about to change in a big, big way. But what can she do about it? She's just a little water seller who is under constant pressure to give everything up for a career as a "bangbang girl" and earn her living on her back like all the other desperate refugees from Texas do. At least while they're young and pretty. I don't even want to think about the options left to middle aged or elderly women in this world. Especially since, of course, that is left to my imagination.

Maria, despite her status as cliche plucky survivor-victim, actually winds up being the most interesting character in the book, because she is the only one who is truly looking forward (well, except maybe Case, but she's not a character so much as a figurant or force, the power looming in the background). She has vivid memories of her father and his delusions that somehow, somewhere, matters can be returned to "normal", meaning to how they were (or how he believed they were, but of course Maria's present gives lie to a lot of her father's -- and our -- delusions about his past), has seen such fixations as detrimental to her survival, and so is focused every moment on adapting to what is. Angel is the title character, but he's the tool of people trying to preserve the old world for a new 1% at the expense of the new 99% (geographical rather than economic). Lucy is documenting what she can only see as collapse, and trying to make the rest of the world care enough to try to stop it. But Maria, Maria sees that change has already done changed stuff, is still changing stuff, and we'd best just get used to that since it's always been that way.

And thank goodness for that, because otherwise the message of this book is even more hopeless than that of Reisner's, for all of its having cloaked that message in big showy ACKSHUN scenes and large scale disaster porn. Conspiracy theorists and fighters of The Power have it all wrong. The people on top of the pyramid cracking the whips have no more idea of what they're doing than the rest of us. They can't be relied on to fix what's broken anymore than they could have been relief on to maintain it when it wasn't. Hierarchy is not the answer.

Random little people running around having ideas and sharing them probably is. The good ideas get copied and spread. Sometimes the bad ones do, too, but eventually we stop spreading magic salve on the blade that cut us and start spreading bread mold on the wound instead.

Maybe eventually we won't need Queens either.

Meanwhile, this novel. it's exciting enough not to feel like just a thinly disguised think piece. It's not too preachy. It's full of surprises. And it's got great characters. So I think even if you couldn't care less about its premise, you're going to enjoy the book. Warren Ellis is right to compare it to John Brunner. I'd throw in more than a few nods to J.G. Ballard, too. It'll make a great movie in a few years, if it stays out of certain hands.

Meanwhile, well, I'm thirsty. Time for a nice cold glass of slightly radioactive groundwater as filtered through my brand name pitcher. My dog could use some, too. Slurp.

T.J. Bass' THE GODWHALE

An absolute kitchen-sink classic* of more-or-less-mid-century science fiction, T.J. Bass' The Godwhale is one of the most enjoyable reads I've had this year, even while it was also, broadly, pretty bleak.

The story starts firmly in  overpopulated, dystopian Stand on Zanzibar territory, with our sort-of-protagonist, Larry Dever, quickly and stupidly maneuvering himself into becoming a medical time traveler by getting himself cut in half. The medical science of his near-future time still isn't up to making him whole again, or at least not whole enough to suit him, so he elects to go into suspended animation until it can, gambling on Progress to give him back his legs, internal organs, and fully functioning tallywhacker. As one does.

Oddly enough, his gamble pays off in a way -- he becomes the ancestor to pretty much everyone else that matters in the rest of the story. But only in a way.

Seemingly irrelevant at the time but, as it turns out, crucial to the novel's denouement, Larry is first revived by a world in which his many-times-great-grand-nieces and nephews are getting ready to "seed" other planets, sending out genetic arks into outer space, and while they still can't bring him back to cherry-poppin' full functionality, they can still make him a star-daddy, after a fashion -- he's got wonderfully "primitive" genes compared to what's around in his new time -- humanity is starting to degenerate as only people who can handle overcrowding are able to/allowed to breed, resulting in a loss of hybrid vigor and good old fashioned paleolithic-ish awesomeness of which our man Larry is a last surviving example, even though he's now just a "hemi-human." They'd love to graft him onto a clone-grown lower half and send him into the stars, but when he finds out just how they'd accomplish this, he elects to go back to sleep. They can use his clone-grown material as well as his own sweet self to seed the stars.

All of this is just prologue, though... and then he wakes up again, more or less by accident, into the world of The Hive, in which Bass' other novel Half-Past Human, is set (apparently The Godwhale is a sequel thereto. Oops). A world in which humanity now averages about four feet tall (if that) lives by the multi-billions in one giant, continent-spanning, computer-controlled underground city in unbearably close quarters, below vast Gardens of the kind only Monsanto could love (as in the food plants cannot pollinate themselves or in any way breed, and have to be synthesized from the amino acids up) that exist solely to provide calories for the teeming masses crammed in below, in which no animal life apart from the Hive's stunted little denizens exists, and in which the oceans are completely, lifelessly sterile.

Except for the titular Godwhale, a Harvester, a cybernetic whale remnant of some civilization that existed about halfway between Larry's first awakening and his second, in which giant artificially intelligent cyborgs gathered all the fish and plankton and sea greens and protein from the sea and existed to serve man. This one last cyborg, who lends the novel its title, seems from its having that honor like it's going to be more of a personality within said novel, but alas, the Rokal Maru serves more as a setting-cum-excuse than a partner in protagonism to Larry. I would have loved to have her as more of a character and less of a plot device. Alas. Anyway, she's spent hundreds of years beached on a reef somewhere until suddenly her little robot friend Trilobite discovers not only that there are still people on this here planet, but also maybe some other things are starting to show up, too. Almost as if a cache of biological samples somehow broke open or something. Hmm!

This all probably seems super spoilery, but really, I assure you, it isn't. This is all milieu I'm explaining here, a setting in which a complex and varied plot told in a series of vignettes over decades takes place and which I'm not going to divulge except to say that, well, yes, Larry's genes got around really good for a guy who didn't even have gonads by the end of the first chapter.

Author T.J. Bass, who sadly died in 2011, thus preventing me from fangirling him on social media because I'd not yet heard of him, was a medical doctor by profession, meaning there is enough hard sci-fi content here to satisfy the most grognard among us (provided he considers medicine and biology to be science-y enough), but it almost never overwhelms the story, or the action, of which there is plenty.

I've never so enjoyed being so disappointed in humanity, you guys. Ever.

*Seriously. From its titular cybernetic whale/ship to its medical time travel to its status as another finger-wagging parable to its post-apocalyptic (and post-post apocalyptic, and post-post-post apocalyptic)(remember, it's sort of a time travel tale, though all the travel is in one direction) settings to its The Man Who Folded Himself identity-collapsing (half the novel's characters are pretty much clones of its sort-of-point-of-view character) to its reverse Planet of the Apes ending, this novel is going to remind you of everything while still being its own unique thing. Quite a feat, that!

John Brunner's STAND ON ZANZIBAR

Simultaneously reading like a deadly earnest Illuminatus! Trilogy scrubbed of all the conspiracy nuttiness*, a fictionalized parable of Toffler's classic Future Shock, a finger-wagging sermon about the evils of overpopulation, and a whacked-out Jeff Noon media scramble, Stand on Zanzibar is one of the coolest bits of New Wave science fiction a reader could pick up.

A lot of people who pick up a John Brunner novel -- or indeed any older science fiction novel --  in the 21st century get hung up on either the eerie prescience the author seems to have had about our contemporary world (the book was written in 1968 but set in 2010) or on what the author got wrong about it, but to do either is to miss the point here. Good fiction is good fiction, whether or not someone guessed there would be smart phones; ditto good social criticism. Stand on Zanzibar is both.

The title comes from an observation made by a wag/sage of the novel's world that the world's current population of 7 billion (yes, one of things he got right; we hit that number pretty close to the same time he projected) if stood together in one place shoulder-to-shoulder, would take up the area of the island of Zanzibar (when the book was written, the world's population could fit on the Isle of Man, a much smaller bit of land). The world he depicts will remind fans a bit of that in Soylent Green**; its be-domed New York might also make one think of the be-domed city-as-spaceship New York in Cities in Flight. And as I suggested above, I kept thinking of Jeff Noon's fiction, particularly Channel Sk1n.

The plot Brunner chooses from among the billions of possible stories on that/this overcrowded world concerns a mega-corporation that is getting ready to buy a country, the men chosen to spearhead the project (which takes a long view of a Third World nation's economic development into a new kind of global economic powerhouse as just another opportunity to increase shareholder value -- eerily, kind of the way our modern private prison industry works!), and some of their friends. Because the nation in question is in Africa, the company's single African-American (abbreviated "Afram") vice president, Norman Niblock House, gets the nod, along with the U.S.'s equally Afram ambassador to that little nation, Elihu Masters, who's been best friends with the country's president-for-life for some twenty years. Said president*** being a tired old man now, who has been pretty much single-handedly holding his little nation together since the British abandoned the whole colonialism thing and more or less forced him into the role of someone to whom they could hand off all their problems. But there is no  good prospect for a successor, so why not bring in a corporation? The project is not viewed as the president selling out so much as a father with hundreds of thousands of helpless dependents trying to secure a future for them. Believe me, it sort of works.

This is largely because there is so much else going on in this novel, which is apparently modeled on John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy ****, at least structurally, for the narrative, plot forwarding chapters are interspersed with all sorts of non-narrative interludes of pure, hypermediated texture, including extended excerpts from the works of one Chad Mulligan, sociologist, who is this novel's Austin Train figure (see The Sheep Look Up), a wise man who has gone ignored but may now be called somewhat resurgent, but only because drinking himself to death in disgust is taking too long and is actually kind of boring.

But wait, there's more!

Because Norman has a white roommate, Don, a guy with a freak gift for pattern recognition who has spent the last ten years in deep cover as a member of the U.S. Army's "Dilettante Corps" in which his job is basically being a sort of Cayce Pollard for the government. In the course of the story, Don gets called up and has to go overseas to help out with an international problem involving a fictional Pacific Rim nation with whom the U.S. is in a seemingly endless and bitter Vietnamesque war. Said country having made an announcement regarding a Great Leap Forward in eugenics and genetic engineering that holds incredible possibility and also, of course, incredible threat to the rest of the world.

For the reaction of the First World to the planet's overwhelming population problem is to plunge into eugenics with all enthusiasm. Laws governing who may have children and how many children they may have get stricter and stricter all the time -- and in the United States, differ from state to state, so, for example, Nevada is close to a free-for-all whereas Louisiana is flirting with the idea of not allowing anyone to breed who can prove three generations of residency in that state in addition to the standard prohibitions on anyone with genetic defects of any kind reproducing. As the novel opens, the latest trait under fire is color-blindness. But what everyone is really afraid of is that someday producing too much melanin is going to be a prohibiting factor.

Which is to say that racism -- and sexism, which I'll get to later -- are prevalent elements throughout the text. As the U.S. is at war with an Asian power, plenty of anti-Asian sentiment and offensive slang gets slung about (which, about the slang, get ready for that. The slang in Stand on Zanzibar could be the subject of a whole big and fascinating paper, to be pored over like that in A Clockwork Orange, but unlike Burgess' novel, all of Brunner's slang is derived from English), and blacks don't get any better treatment. It's all presented very matter-of-factly, even casually, which can be shocking but which is part and parcel of the societies we're examining. Kinship and tribalism and associated inter-group violence, sociologists tell us, tend to come very much to the fore in cases of crowding.

As is, apparently, a very casual, even cavalier, attitude towards women, the young and attractive variety of which are referred to in this world as "shiggies" and are passed around like party favors, traded like Magic the Gathering cards, apparently happy with this state of affairs and the nomadic, uncertain life they lead on the "shiggy circuit." Older women are only ever noticed if they happen by some freak of affairs to have somehow achieved serious corporate power, with a depressing few exceptions, and even the one younger-than-the-alpha female executive type who crosses our path is at first dismissed as on the scene just because her boss got tired of sleeping with her. To the slight credit of the man making this internalized observation about her, he does eventually include that she might be there on her own actual merits as well, perhaps. Partly. Ugh.

The only other reason a woman might matter, of course, is as breeding stock. But only if she's genetically OK. But hey, at least the potential father has to pass genetic muster as well. So I guess there's parity somewhere. Ugh.

But hey, all of literature has taught me how it sure do suck to be female, so I can hardly single out this book for special castigation. Especially in a year in which I have taken on Robert Silverberg. I do not cry out for a fan-edit of Stand on Zanzibar from which my gender has been removed, but, you know, yuck.

That aside, this is a pretty fantastic read, a worthy companion to Brunner's other blisteringly awful masterpiece, The Sheep Look Up. But where we could sort of, kind of, desperately cling to the idea that The Sheep Look Up was a self-denying prophecy, Stand on Zanzibar still feels like it could happen, is happening.

But we already knew that, didn't we?

Sing it, Pete.


*Which, I hasten to assure you, is still a very entertaining, if somewhat depressing, thing.

**Itself based on a novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! that came out two years before Stand on Zanzibar.

***Whose name is Zadkiel Obomi, and I'll refer you to the rest of the internet for points of view on that amazing coincidence/prediction. Yawn.

****Which I haven't read but now really want to.

John Brunner's THE SQUARES OF THE CITY #OneBookAtATime

The Sheep Look Up utterly devastated me when I read it for the first (and definitely not the last) time earlier this year, and I realized that John Brunner was a guy whose books I would definitely need to track down one by one until I had read them all.

Then my pal Paul Weimer and  a relatively new Twitter friend, Fred Kiesche, applauding my resolution, told me that if The Sheep Look Up was "death by pollution", The Squares of the City was "death by chess". As in the structure is modeled after a World Championship game in 1982 between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin. I thus knew that this one would have to be my next Brunner, because if there is one thing I love, utterly hopelessly*, it's chess. And people who are obsessed with chess.

And I also like a good jaw about urban planning and cities. So, um, as they say nowadays, hell yes.

The city in question here, Vados, is a relatively newly founded capital city in a ficticious South American Republic, Aguazul, to which our hero, the delightfully named Boyd Hakluyt,** has been summoned to help improve its traffic flows. Vados might be the most modern and well-planned city in the world, but the problem of moving people and goods around is never really solved, is it?

But of course, it's not really a traffic problem our hero has been brought in to solve. See, the circumstances behind the founding, just 20 years ago, of the city of Vados, are troublesome. Aguazul's president, Vados (yes), did not trust his people and their meager resources to create the perfect city he dreamed of, so he threw it open to the global elite as what amounted to an investment opportunity with big returns -- the biggest return being a place to live with a guaranteed high standard of living, elegance, order, and freedom from riff-raff. Yeah, he sort of built Galt's Gulch.

But wait! In order to assure the city had adequate water, most of the nation's water supply was diverted. Water that peasants and villagers and small farmers depended on. Water that said peasants etc. wound up having to follow to Vados, even though Vados had no place for the likes of them, resulting in unsightly slums and shanty towns and the general presence of riff-raff in this perfect city. Oh noes!

So what Hakluyt is really there to do is come up with a "traffic improvement plan" that requires the city to eliminate said slums and shanty towns, thus forcing the riff-raff back "onto to the land" where they belong. Any plan he might come up with that does not require this will be rejected; he is there to provide an excuse and act as a scapegoat.

It takes him a while to discover this, of course. And once he does...

Here is the source of the novel's real interest and tension (the chess plot is really just window dressing, though it's kind of fun to track plot developments -- deaths, arrests, kidnappings -- and see how they map onto the moves of the famous 1892 game): Hakluyt spends a lot of this novel trying to rationalize his presence in Vados, to justify to himself and a few key others his dogged determination to do some appoximation, at least, of what he's being paid for. Among those key others is one Maria Posador, leader of a small faction of native-born privilege who have taken up the cause of the slum-dwellers. If there is an opposite term for "femme fatale" that term would apply to Maria, who is constantly trying to get our hero to do the right thing and tell his employers to pound sand.

Lots of others would like him to do so as well, and many of them are less subtle than Maria, which means there are some decent action scenes, conspiracy elements, even a bit of a mystery plot woven in with this meditation on haves and have nots and what the former might be seen to owe to the latter. Which is to say that once again, Brunner showed a great deal of prescience -- but this time his work has not achieved anything like the status of self-denying prophecy that The Sheep Look Up has.

And of course it's a bit of a dig at the history of the New World in general, isn't it?

Well worth a read.


*As in I adore the game and never miss a chance to play but pretty much suck at it to a hilarious degree.

**I suspect his name is a nod to Richard Hakluyt, an Elizabethan era writer who promoted the settlement of North America in his work.

John Brunner's THE SHEEP LOOK UP #OneBookAtATime

What a weird combination of eerie prescience and slapstick satire this is, for all that I'm pretty sure it was just supposed to be the latter.

The Sheep Look Up is very much a product of its time, when the Vietnam War was still raging and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was still relatively new and shocking. As such, its view of the rest of the twentieth century -- the author's imagined future, our immediate past -- should come across as dated. There are no cell phones, no internet; computers are still big expensive things on which time must be reserved. But despite all this, the novel feels fresh as ever. Horribly, terrifyingly fresh.

I've read a lot of dystopian lit in the last few years, watched my world die and devolve in dozens of different ways in the (virtual) pages of all kinds of fiction. And some of those books have upset me, yes. But none have just plain scared me as much as this one did.

I finished reading and I had to rush outside and take in a deep gulp of the cold and still mostly clean night air of Cheyenne in January __ I say mostly because, well, there's an oil refinery on the south side of town, and an inversion layer like we've got going on tonight traps all that lovely sour crude smell, but at least I didn't need a filtration mask to breathe. Down in, say, Denver, though (where, incidentally, a lot of the most gruesome action in The Sheep Look Up takes place), well, they do have those smog warnings on some days, and some days I can look south and kind of see it.

The America of The Sheep Look Up is one in which no books like The Sheep Look Up ever got written, or, if they did, paid attention to. It's a grandly collapsing environmental catastrophe of the old school, where the air, water and soil have all been allowed to become so toxic that filtration masks to breathe are just the beginning; the Great Lakes are completely dead, no city's water supply is reliably safe, trace heavy metals and defoliants and pesticides contaminate even the food that is supposedly safe and organic and sold at a premium, and still the profit motive is king; even providers of global food aid expect to make a buck off it, to say nothing of those who are only too happy to get rich providing filtration masks and allegedly clean food and water purification devices.

The madness is presided over by a recently elected jackwagon of a President of the United States who is half Ronald Reagan and half George W. Bush (with a dash of Ferris F. Fremont thrown in), cavalier and clueless but quick to give the press a tough-talking John Wayne soundbite that puts all those America-hating traitors who think they should still be able to see the sun and the moon in the sky in their places. President Prexy is still hell bent on exporting the American Way of Life, by force if necessary, and seems all but unopposed in his military adventurism and his willingness to maintain the status quo at all costs.

Almost. Enter Austin Train, academic and agitator, a spiritual son of Ralph Nader whose message was even less well-received than Nader's had been at the time of this writing (1972), and who finally had a bit of a nervous breakdown and disappeared. Only wait, some people were listening, and in his name have formed a movement that some readers see as predicting the Occupiers of today. Even more marginalized than our Occupiers, though, they're all in sort of a holding pattern, struggling just to survive on a continent drowning in toxic waste, sewage and effluent, and barely holding on against drug resistant diseases, parasities, birth defects, chronic environmental disease and malnutrition. A lot of them seem barely able to hold a coherent thought in their heads; all of them are hoping that Train will come back and show them what to do.

Brunner conveys all of this in a very post-modern style, presenting us with a series of vignettes of different characters coping with this toilet of a world in different places intercut with snatches of mass media chatter that give the small, sad stories of his characters great depth and context. We get stories from both sides of the barricades, profiteers and agitators for a better world (or at least for an end to the madness, since this America may well be past the point of no return, environmentally). The plot that ties it all together is almost a whodunnit, but of course we know who did it.

Never before in life have I been so grateful to live in a world where the voices crying out against pollution and waste have not been totally marginalized. But lest I get too comfortable -- I read this book on an e-reader, that was manufactured using a pollution-intensive process, on another continent. The United States might not now, thanks to the culture of warning and concern of which novels like The Sheep Look Up have been a vital part, become the toilet this novel depicts, but that doesn't mean other places won't. There's a reason so many of our manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and that reason is the flight by pollution-causing industry to countries who don't have even our still rather lame environmental (and occupational) standards. We're still treating the planet as a toilet. We're just keeping our own bathrooms clean.

For now.