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On the bleak future The Water Knife depicts, including state border patrols and climate refugees

People don't actually stay still, you know — when their area is a disaster, they go somewhere else, right? And that's just a natural human impulse. And it's also a natural human impulse for people to sort of hunker down and say "no, no, this is ours — we've got the good stuff, and we don't want to share."

And so yeah, in this future, there's a point where there's so many refugees on the road, there's so many — some of them because of hurricanes, some of them because of high seawater levels, some of them because of drought — that you're starting to see all of the states sort of, like ... you know, sort of really getting much more muscular about their state's rights.

They're like: "No, no, no, this is our territory. We don't want to share it with the state next to us." And you see a really weak federal government at the same time that isn't able to really coordinate or get people to sort of cooperate with one another.

I think that, when I think about the future that The Water Knife represents, it's one where there's a lack of oversight, planning and organization. That's really the disaster. There's the drought and there's climate change, and those things are horrible — and then there's how people react to it. And this is, this world is built on the assumption that people don't plan, don't think and don't cooperate — which makes for a pretty bad future!

On how to categorize his fiction

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Paolo Bacigalupi is also the author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities. J.T. Thomas Photography hide caption

itoggle caption J.T. Thomas Photography

Paolo Bacigalupi is also the author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities.

J.T. Thomas Photography

The questions about how we label a story really seem to set a lot of preconceptions in people's minds. So if I say this book is science fiction, or if I say I'm a science fiction writer, automatically one of the things you'll hear from people is "oh, I don't read that."

[But if you say,] "No, no, no — well, so I actually write about this crazy drought in the Southwest where Phoenix and Las Vegas are having a water war, and there's very little water in the Colorado River," and suddenly the person's like "oh yeah, well, we're having a terrible drought here" or wherever they're living. And suddenly they're very engaged...

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future — those are science fictional questions.

And so, you know, in terms of labeling it, I'll label my books anything that will get somebody to read it. ... [You] want them to like or hate your book based on the book is itself, not based on the idea that maybe it's, I don't know, Barbarella.

Read an excerpt of The Water Knife

lake mead

colorado river

science fiction

Paolo Bacigalupi

drought

Las Vegas

Phoenix