In the near-future American Southwest, water is more precious than gold.
Angel Velasquez is a “water knife”—an enforcer who cuts off water supplies to competing cities to ensure the survival of Las Vegas. When rumors of a legendary "water right" surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent to investigate, finding himself in a landscape of corrupt developers, desperate migrants, and hardened journalists.
From the National Book Award-finalist author of The Windup Girl, this is a gritty, high-stakes thriller about a world where the drought never ends and everyone is thirsty for power.
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Speculative fiction exploring ecological breakdown, resource scarcity, and climate collapse has redefined contemporary science fiction through deeply grounded worldbuilding. Paolo Bacigalupi established a prominent presence in environmental science fiction with acclaimed works that confront the consequences of environmental degradation and unchecked corporate power. His award-winning novel The Windup Girl brought widespread recognition to biopunk and climate fiction, illustrating a post-calorie-crisis future shaped by bioengineering and corporate monopolies.
Born on August 6, 1972, in Paonia, Colorado, Bacigalupi majored in East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, graduating in 1994, and subsequently worked as a consultant in China. He began publishing short genre fiction in 1999 with 'Pocketful of Dharma' in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His early short fiction was gathered in the 2008 collection Pump Six and Other Stories, which received a Locus Award. Bacigalupi's debut novel The Windup Girl (2009) won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, John W. Campbell Memorial, Locus, and Compton Crook Awards, and was named one of the top ten books of 2009 by Time magazine. He expanded into young adult literature with Ship Breaker, which won the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and became a finalist for the National Book Award. His other major novels include the drought thriller The Water Knife (2015), as well as The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, The Doubt Factory, Plump Six and Other Stories, and The Tangled Lands (co-authored with Tobias S. Buckell). In 2024, Bacigalupi published NAVOLA, an epic fantasy novel inspired by the history and politics of the Italian Renaissance.
Bacigalupi's fiction centers on sustainability, environmental ethics, and the socio-economic impacts of climate change. His narratives frequently detail futures marred by severe drought, bioengineered plagues, rising sea levels, and fierce competition for basic resources like water and calories. Stylistically, his work combines rigorous worldbuilding with noir and biopunk tropes, examining how human greed, corporate dominance, and political corruption interact with ecological decline. In addition to his adult and young adult novels, Bacigalupi's short fiction and articles have appeared in publications such as WIRED, High Country News, Salon, OnEarth Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
