Tuesday, February 13, 2018

More on Paolo Bacigalupi THE WATER KNIFE

Paolo Bacigalupi’s cli-fi novels tell stories about man-made impacts on the environment – and, in turn, the results of these impacts back on men and women. His cli-fi novels include The Windup Girl and The Water Knife. The definitions given for cli-fi novels and movies overall take into account stories that  Bacigalupi accomplishes so well.
One must consider Bacigalupi one of the more prolific cli-fi storytellers dealing with climate change. 

Paolo Bacigalupi is a writer who has global warming on his mind, for sure. On Facebook, he wrote:
I wrote THE WATER KNIFE because I was concerned about America’s willingness to pretend that climate change wasn’t real, and wasn’t a pressing problem for us. I wrote it as a thought experiment: What happens when we try to pretend that facts don’t exist and science data isn’t real? Where does it lead? In that story, the result is that those who have been clear-eyed and planned for the future are struggling, but still hanging on, and those who pretended it wasn’t coming have lost everything. There are drought refugees, border controls between states, and an increasingly dysfunctional and fragmented United States. I added in Merry Perrys, a group of religious fundamentalists who pray for rain, because Rick Perry did just that during the Texas drought of 2011. Now he’s the Energy Secretary. And now, a climate denier is our President, and our government agencies are being asked to remove data about climate change, to not to speak about climate change, and to not acknowledge climate change. The House of Representatives is looking to cut funding to the IPCC, and Trump is looking to pull out of the Paris climate agreement–all while the planet hits record heat levels.

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