If you enjoyed the stark, violent catastrophism of The Windup Girl, you’ll likely find much to enjoy about The Water Knife, though its apocalypse-in-progress (the ever-escalating drought in the southern US) is considerably closer to home in temporal terms. A stickler for taxonomy might highlight its paucity of technological novums, and argue that it’s really a technothriller. One might also compare it to Sterling’s Heavy Weather, which deals with a similar issue in a similar territory: Sterling is interested in showing us the sociotechnical systemicity of the problem, while Bacigalupi is interested in who survives the bottleneck, and how.

The world of The Water Knife is not one whose collapse might be prevented, or even managed. It might be escaped—but only by those who can buy their way into the sealed ecosystems of the arcologies, expensive life-rafts in a bone-dry sea. For everyone else, it’s a Hobbesian life in the refugee favelas clustered around metered water pumps. A maguffin is hunted; dastardly deeds abound; threads are drawn together, or mercilessly snipped off; the pages turn swiftly. It’s an engaging and topical near-future novel, albeit one haunted by the same problematics regarding the depiction of sex and violence that animated The Windup Girl.

But the most chewy bit is the ending—so, spoiler-haters, get thee gone.

Still here? Good.

Bacigalupi seemingly has two projects in this novel; the first is to depict the escalation of drought conditions in the southern US, and present it as a function of history rather than an out-of-the-blue apocalypse. What impact this will have is uncertain; people have been narrating the rapacious thirst of California for as long as that state has existed. As with other manifestations of climate change, it’s not that we don’t know it’s happening; it’s that we all fail to make the connection between the despoilment of distant environments and the effortless fulfilment of our desires. While The Water Knife does a great job of dramatising resource conflict, the violence done by people to the world is overshadowed by the violence done by people to each other; the individualist dynamics of the technothriller cannot sustain what Tim Carmody calls “the systemic sublime”, the epiphanic hit of conceptual breakthrough wherein the world is revealed as more complex than before. (The same is true of The Windup Girl, despite its being ostensibly “more sf”; Bacigalupi is more interested in how people break than in how systems break.)

Which brings us to his second project, namely to interrogate the morality of a dustbowl continent crawling with refugees. In a final-scene reversal reminiscent of a Sergio Leone movie, the maguffin—old water deeds issued to a Native American tribe two centuries before, the ultimate in what water law calls “senior rights”—is in the hands of the idealistic journalist who’s just been through hell trying to find it. With these ancient bits of paper, she can put up a legal bulwark against the desertification of Arizona; she can hold back the tide, if only for a little while, by playing the legislators and deal-makers at their own game.

But instead, Bacigalupi has her shot in the back by the refugee who’d unwittingly been carrying the thing. To her, the collapse of Arizona and beyond is a given; she knows that the inevitable can only ever be deferred, not prevented. Seeing a choice between deferring ecological collapse for many, or simply buying her own way out of its path, she chooses the latter—the same choice that the water knives made, but in miniature.

This feels less like an endorsement of market fetishism than an observation that market fetishism is a self-fulfilling prophecy: that the only thing that “trickles down” in such a system is an atrophy of collective values. Bacigalupi has done sufficient research to understand both the technological and the social dimensions of this particular arena of the climate wars, and the novel seems to me to argue that the window of opportunity on the social side is closing fast, if it isn’t closed already—and that once it’s closed, selfishness becomes the only rational survival strategy. Scarcity trumps morality, forever.

I very much believe that Bacigalupi shows us the worst of apocalypse and dystopia in hope of nudging us toward something better, no matter how slightly, but The Water Knife also admits of a more cynical reading: that a slow-motion civilisational car-crash is inevitable, and we’d be wise to jettison our bleeding hearts and activate our inner Gordon Gekko if we want to see out Babylon’s last hurrah in comfort. That’s an ugly reading, for sure—both of the book, and of the world—but these are ugly times, and the history of water in the southern US is uglier still. So enjoy this self-confessed “collapse porn” technothriller, but don’t come to Bacigalupi in search of hope for a brighter future. That well’s long dry already.