Almost twenty years ago, I read a science fiction story that blew my mind. It depicted a dystopian near-future, in which severe drought had depopulated the southwestern United States, states were practically at war with each other over water, and California was enclosing the Colorado River in castle-like fortifications to prevent leakage, evaporation, and theft. The protagonist eked out a meager living collecting government bounties on water-thirsty tamarisk plants. The authorities didn’t know that he was secretly replanting them to safeguard his livelihood.
This was my favorite kind of SF story, with brilliant prose, sharp characters, exquisite worldbuilding, and a tight plot. But I liked it for two other reasons. First, like the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, it showed deep engagement with this world—which I gradually learned was my favorite kind of SF. Second, it put water competition on my radar as a critical topic worthy of study.
After reading the story, I lost track of it. I couldn’t remember the title or author. Still, those vague dreamlike impressions of U.S. states warring over the Colorado River stayed with me.
The timing was fortuitous. As best I can gather, I encountered a reprint of the story in the May 2007 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. One year later, my family and I moved to Amman, Jordan, where I began a two-year Olmsted Scholarship to earn a Master’s of Conflict Resolution at the University of Jordan.
During my time in the Middle East, inspired by the short story, I wrote a lengthy research paper on the history of competition over the Jordan River, which among other things included interviewing a former Jordanian Minister of Water who had negotiated water sharing agreements with Israel. I uncovered a fascinating history as bleak and violent as the short story, with Israel, Jordan and other actors shrewdly outmaneuvering each other for control of the Jordan: diverting rivers, digging canals, bombing waterworks, draining aquifers, and undermining water agreements as soon as they were signed. The competition was slowly murdering the Dead Sea, which is on track to vanish by 2050.
That paper helped get me accepted at Stanford for my PhD in Political Science. It also left me with an enduring fascination with water scarcity. I later read Cadillac Desert, which chronicles the hubris, audacity, and corruption of American efforts to make the southwest desert bloom. Water continually reappears in my own short stories, especially The Weight of Oceans and “Abundance”, a story about efforts to save the Dead Sea.
Rediscovering Paolo
Last year I stumbled across Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, a science fiction novel about violent interstate competition over the dwindling Colorado River. I bought the book immediately and devoured it in a few days. It was dark, gritty, and bleak—Blade Runner meets Sicario meets Cormac McCarthy. Bacigalupi’s apocalyptic nightmare extrapolates a real-world trendline and would make anyone think twice before moving to the southwest.
The novel felt an awful lot like that forgotten short story. To my delight, I discovered that the author was one and the same. Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story The Tamarisk Hunter (still excellent) had set him on a long journey that culminated in this brilliant novel.
When I finished The Water Knife, I immediately began reading Bacigalupi’s earlier novel The Windup Girl, which won the Hugo and Nebula and several other awards. The worldbuilding is among the most unique I’ve ever encountered, which makes the novel both breathtaking and difficult to penetrate. It is set in Thailand in a barely recognizable future, where biotechnology has supplanted information technology in organizing and shaping human civilization. The novel is just as dark and gritty as The Water Knife, and its themes about climate change, genetically modified food, and corporate malfeasance apparently struck a chord with readers, catapulting Bacigalupi from obscurity to fame.
Although I enjoy science fiction and write it myself, it’s rare that I find SF novels I truly love, so discovering Paolo Bacigalupi was a special treat. When I learned recently that he was releasing another novel, I preordered it immediately.
Navola
Bacigalupi’s third adult novel is fantasy, not science fiction, which makes it a courageous departure for an author who has built up certain expectations with his readers. It is doubly courageous because, as a few disgruntled reviewers have observed, it barely qualifies as fantasy; it is set in a fantasy recreation of Renaissance Italy, with only a faint magical luminosity pulsing through its mythology and through a dragon’s eye introduced in the novel’s first chapter. The worldbuilding reminds me of Guy Gavriel Kay, who writes novels reimagining various historical times and places as fantasy worlds. Fortunately, this is exactly the kind of novel I love. I devoured most of this 550-page tome on a single flight from Atlanta to Honolulu.
Everything I love about Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing is here: incredible worldbuilding, rich characters, gorgeous prose, and a skillfully woven plot. The novel also features the gritty brutality that characterizes Bacigalupi’s SF novels. The political intrigue is first-rate and reminded me of both Dune and Game of Thrones; like those works, the novel centers on a young man coming of age in a family that must fight for its survival among enemies who circle like wolves. Young Davico’s relationship with his father is extremely well done, as is his complicated relationship with his sister Celia, forcefully adopted into the family as a means of revenge against an enemy family.
I won’t provide a full review (I liked Gary Wolfe’s), but wanted to mention two themes struck me with unexpected force.
First, the sophisticated mythology and philosophy of Navola differentiates between two dimensions of the world: Cambios and Firmos. Cambios is the world of things built and touched by men, while Firmos refers to the natural world that precedes and transcends mankind. Bacigalupi develops this dichotomy with tremendous skill. Most inhabitants of Navola view Cambios as the proper domain of power and action, but Davico never feels at home there; he prefers to inhabit Firmos, with all its natural power and wild unpredictability. Many characters consequently view Davico as strange and aloof, but we continually see him tapping into a source of power greater than any they can access.
It’s a beautiful artistic representation of a tension I feel constantly in our own real world: between the material and the spiritual, civilization and nature, the visible and transcendent. I have spent my military career immersed in Cambios, studying the laws of power, practicing the arts of war and politics. Yet my constant yearning has been to leave Cambios behind entirely and revel in pure Firmos. The result has been a sense of homelessness in the halls of power. This novel expresses that tension better than anything I have read, and it came during a season when I have specifically sought time in Firmos after long years of immersion in Cambios.
Second, and related, a key theme in the novel is Davico’s struggle with whether or not he has the strength to rule over his father’s commercial empire. Davico was born into a world of ruthless Cambios, but he was also born decent and good. At every step, scheming allies and enemies—and Davico himself—wonder if that disqualifies him from leadership. The novel explores the primal fear—common to all people, but especially men—that one lacks the strength and fortitude the world demands. In the novel this becomes a tangible and practical question, propelling the plot to a brutal reckoning. Along the way, Davico must grapple with his weaknesses and also discover his own unique forms of strength.
I opened the novel expecting to be entertained and mesmerized. I did not anticipate the degree of reflection the book triggered. I remain a huge Paolo Bacigalupi fan, and look forward to seeing where he goes next.