eJournals REAL 33/1

REAL
0723-0338
2941-0894
Narr Verlag Tübingen
2017
331

Sensing the Heat: Weather, Water, and Vulnerabilities in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife

2017
Alexa Weik von Mossner
A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER Sensing the Heat: Weather, Water, and Vulnerabilities in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife The future is hot and dusty in Paolo Bacigalupi’s dystopian eco-thriller The Water Knife (2015). Set in the drought-ridden American Southwest at some point in the twenty-first century, Bacigalupi’s speculative novel gives readers a glimpse into what it will mean to live in a climate-changed world that has run out of water. It is a world in which the sun shines indifferently on people’s desperate struggles for survival while the southwestern states are entrenched in a brutal fight over the remaining shares of the Colorado River. Always a contested waterway in the region, the Colorado has now become the all-important source of life—without access to the river’s steady flows, no farm, no village, and no metropolis in the region can survive. When that access is shut off, the only option left is abandonment: those who can afford it move north or east to places with more favorable climates. Those who are less privileged try to hold out as long as they can, and once they have exhausted their strength and their health, they become migrants, fugitives, outcasts in communities that long ago have lost any sense of solidarity or sociality. Most of the refugees are from the now devastated Texas, but Arizona is not much better off. Phoenix—where most of the action is set—is a dying city that eventually will fall apart just like “Austin, but bigger and badder and more total” (Bacigalupi 24). Bacigalupi hurls his protagonists into this fierce and disintegrating world: one of them a Texas refugee, one of them a journalist doing “collapse pornography” in Phoenix, and one of them a water knife and thus a man who will stop at nothing to ensure that the water is flowing in the right direction. The Water Knife is not Bacigalupi’s first contribution to the emergent genre of climate change fiction—nicknamed cli-fi by the journalist Dan Bloom—but it may be the one that is most successful in conjuring future climatic conditions in a way that allows readers to imaginatively experience them. 1 As ecocritic Adeline Johns-Putra has noted, “overwhelmingly, climate change appears in novels as part of a futuristic dystopian and/ or post-apocalyptic 1 Bacigalupi’s earlier climate change novels include The Windup Girl (2009) and the young adult dystopias Ship Breaker (2011) and The Drowned Cities (2012). For an ecocritical discussion of Ship Breaker, see Weik von Mossner (forthcoming). A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 174 setting. In such novels climate change is depicted not just as an internal or psychological problem but for its external effects, often as part of an overall collapse, including technological over-reliance, economic instability, and increased social division” (270). 2 The Water Knife is a typical example of this trend. As María Isabel Pérez Ramos has observed, the novel “uses a future post-apocalyptic scenario to discuss aspects already explored by [environmental historian] Donald Worster in books like Rivers of Empire (1985), and foretold by Marc Reisner in his iconic book Cadillac Desert (1986),” which suggest that “the current water management in the Southwest is unsustainable and doomed to fail” (Perez Ramos 48). The difference between these nonfiction studies and Baccigalupi’s novel is that the latter text channels its dramatic evocation of climate change’s external effects through the minds and bodies of its protagonists, thus allowing readers to imaginatively experience what it is like to live in a climate-changed world. 3 In this essay, I will use the methodological tools of cognitive eco-narratology to explore the ways in which Bacigalupi provides readers with what the literary theorist Marco Caracciolo has called “an instruction manual” for mental simulation (83). As Erin James has pointed out, an econarratological engagement with storyworlds “embraces the key concerns of each of its parent discourses [ecocriticism and narratology]—it maintains an interest in studying the relationship between literature and the physical environment, but does so with sensitivity to the literary structures and devices that we use to communicate representations of the physical environment to each other via narratives” (23). James suggests that postclassical narratological approaches, in particular cognitive and contextual narratology, are best suited for an investigation of the complex storyworlds that are evoked in environmental literature. 4 My analysis of The Water Knife will draw on this theoretical archive in order to demonstrate that Bacigalupi's dystopian novel uses the 2 Arguably, the earliest science fiction novels that focus on climate change date all the way back to the 1960s. Although the scenarios they evoke are not anthropogenic in nature, books such as Brian Aldiss’ The Hot House (1962) and J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) envision a radically different planet Earth that is the result of an increase in surface temperature. The drastically changed ecological worlds they depict, however, are driven by an altered radiation of the sun and thus by factors that lie beyond the agential reach of humans. It is only since the late 1990s that anthropogenic climate change becomes a topic in dystopian American fiction, from Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer (1999) and T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000) to Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) and Robinson’s Science in the Capital series (2004-2007). More recent publications include Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay (2010), as well as Bacigalupi’s climate change novels. 3 The notion of what it is like to experience something individually and subjectively is what psychologists and philosophers call qualia. In his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat? ” the philosopher Thomas Nagel defines qualia as the sense or feeling of “what it is like” for someone to undergo conscious experience (435). 4 On postclassical narratology, see Alber and Fludernik (2010). Sensing the Heat 175 human body and its sensual and affective capacities in order to allow readers to imaginatively experience a decidedly unpleasant future world. Rather than simply evoking “bad weather,” Bacigalupi uses anthropogenic climate change as a catalyst for drastic developments in the ecological, economic and social realm and invites readers to understand on a visceral level that changed climatic conditions will inevitably lead to such conflicts and vulnerabilities. Dystopian Climate Change Fiction and the Evocation of Estranged Storyworlds Dystopian climate change fiction belongs to the larger genre of environmental science fiction which, as Eric Otto has pointed out, “often employ[s] a rhetoric of estrangement and extrapolation that compels readers toward critical reflection on seemingly invisible attitudes and habits” (7). This rhetoric is at the heart of what science fiction scholar Tom Moylan has called an “enlightening triangulation between an individual reader’s limited perspective, the estranged re-vision of the alternative world on the pages of a given text, and the actually existing society” (xvi-xvii). Both Moylan and Otto thus locate the transformative potential of speculative fiction in its capacity to make things strange and thus different from readers’ lived reality in ways that are enlightening. It bears mentioning that Moylan refers to “the alternative world on the pages” of a science fiction text and thus to the imaginary environment within which the characters’ actions take place. We call such environments imaginary or virtual because they only exist in the writer’s mind and in those of individual readers, their only material dimension being that of black dots on a white page or pixels on an electronic reading device. And yet they can be so vivid and engaging that readers feel strongly moved by them und even unwilling to (mentally) leave them by refocusing their attention on their actual environment. While all narrative texts, as James has observed, “offer up virtual environments for their readers to model mentally and inhabit emotionally” (54), such worldbuilding is of particular importance to science fiction because of its speculative and futuristic nature. As Moylan has shown, the transportation into an alternative world is one of the main pleasures provided by science fiction texts. Readers familiar with the genre may be less interested in character development or even plot than they are in the detailed description of a place they have never imagined before (5). How exactly such “transportation” into an imaginary environment comes to pass has been explained differently by different scholars. The psychologist Richard Gerrig suggests that it is in part an unconscious mental performance that involves what he calls readers’ “memory traces” (42), but he does not spell out how exactly such a performative act plays out in reader’s minds. A more empirically substantial explanation is offered by embodied simulation A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 176 theory as it has been proposed and developed by the Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese. Embodied simulation theory is built on mirror neuron research and—on the most basic level—it describes “a form of active bodily relational experience” (Gallese 3). Neuroimaging research has shown that when we see another person act—be it a directly perceived person or an actor in a film—we map those actions onto our premotor cortex, the part of the brain that is also active when we engage in actual movement. Remarkably, something related also happens when our brains process literary texts. As Gallese sums up the empirical results of several functional neuroimaging (fMRI) studies: Silent reading of words referring to face, arm, or leg actions, or listening to sentences expressing actions performed with the mouth, the hand, and the foot, both produce activation of different sectors of the premotor cortex. … These activated premotor sectors coarsely correspond to those active during the execution/ observation of hand, mouth, and foot actions. Thus, it appears that the MNS [mirror neuron system] is involved not only in understanding visually presented actions, but also in mapping acoustically or visually presented action-related linguistic expressions. (443) Whereas in the case of direct perception (or film viewing) the premotor cortex “mirrors” the movements we see in others, in reading (or listening), the perception of movement thus plays out on the imaginary level, with our brains reacting much in the same way they would respond to personally performed movement while our bodies remain still. This is what cognitive scientists call neuronal reuse, since the same neurons that are activated by performed movement also fire in response to perceived movement and imagined movement. Importantly, the mirror neuron system does not only help us recognize the actions of others, real and imagined, but also aids us in the attribution of mental states such as sensations, attitudes, and emotions. “The perception of pain or grief, or of disgust experienced by others,” explain neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, “activates the same areas of the cerebral cortex that are involved when we experience these emotions ourselves” (xii). Such “feeling with” another person is what we call empathy, and the embodied simulation thesis therefore also offers a plausible neurophysiological explanation for the notion that narrative texts are “instruction manuals” that allow readers to simulate the sensory and emotional experiences of characters. Studies have shown that visual imagery activates the visual cortex whereas textual imagery that relates to sound, smell, taste or touch activates other relevant brain regions through neuronal reuse (Keysers and Gazzola 2009). Taken together, these studies provide evidence for the claim, forwarded by Gallese and the literary scholar Hannah Wojciehowski, that our experience of literary characters relies to a large degree on liberated Sensing the Heat 177 embodied simulation (2011). 5 For econarratological readings, it is important to note that liberated embodied simulation is crucial not only for our understanding of characters, but also for our experience of the storyworlds that surround these characters and that stand in complex relationships to them. Interestingly, this is also true for the storyworlds of specular fiction, that is, for our imaginary experience of fictional environments that have no direct correspondence to our everyday experience of the actual world. The metaphor of the instruction manual is an interesting one because it stresses the active role of the reader as someone who performs the narrative and surrounding storyworld in their minds, as Gerrig would put it (17). Just like actors on a stage, he suggests, readers engage in acts of simulation during which “they must use their own experiences of the world to bridge the gaps in texts” (17). And yet—as the history of science fiction and other speculative modes of storytelling demonstrates—readers can also simulate the look and feel of a strange and foreign world they have no personal experience with. Like instruction manuals, literary narratives “invite readers to entertain certain imaginings” (Caracciolo 83), and those imaginings are not limited to previously lived experience in the actual world or even to the laws of physics that govern it. In the case of near-future science fiction such as Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, the terrestrial laws of physics tend to still apply; in fact, this mode of speculative fiction draws part of its fascination precisely from the fact that it is familiar and strange at the same time, thus offering an experience that science fiction scholar Darko Suvin has famously termed “cognitive estrangement” (49). As Otto explains “[p]ure estrangement severs us entirely from our experienced reality and we are left in fantasy. Pure cognition, if not directed toward contemplating the novum in the narrative, severs us entirely from the imagined possibility and we are left in a reality indistinguishable from our own. When estrangement and cognition interact, however, we are encouraged to access the novum and consider its origins or conditions of existence” (8). While I take issue with Otto’s use of the term “cognition” here, which seems unduly limiting and unaware of the fact that our cognitive apparatus is also what allows us to perceive and process things that are “strange” (though we might not be able to explain them), I agree that it is the combination of the familiar and the strange that is central for both our enjoyment of (near future) science fiction and for the possible insights we might draw from it. In the case of dystopian climate change fiction, such cognitive estrangement may help us to get a better understanding of the potential future repercussions of our current actions. 5 Such processes liberated because they are “freed from the burden of modeling our actual presence in daily life” (Wojciehowski and Gallese, n. pag.). A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 178 Cognitive Estrangement and the Virtual Experience of Bad Weather in The Water Knife The Water Knife invites readers to imaginatively experience a world that, on one level, feels deceptively familiar. As Hector Tobar notes dryly in his review of the novel for the Washington Post, “[t]he great book publicist in the sky has been working his magic on behalf of Paolo Bacigalupi. His new book, a novel about a bone-dry dystopia, arrives just weeks after Gov. Jerry Brown declared that California was facing the worst drought emergency in memory” (2015). Tobar goes on to speculate that “[r]esidents in the southwestern United States enduring that water crisis will appreciate the precision with which Bacigalupi imagines our thirsty future,” and yet, this eerily familiar world is also considerably different from the contemporary American Southwest. Bacigalupi opens his tale with an extended reflection on the nature and history of human sweat, but the man who believes that this salty body fluid tells “you everything about” whether someone will “survive another day” is not located outside in the dusty hot landscape of Nevada (1). Instead, the water knife Angel Velasquez is “perched high above Cypress 1’s central bore and watching Charles Braxton as he lumbered up the Cascade Trail, the sweat on the lawyer’s brow” telling him that “some people weren’t near as important as they liked to think” (1). The mentioning of the Cascade Trail might evoke an image of the rugged American wilderness in the minds of readers who have hiked along winding mountain trails. But they will also understand that the picturesque wilderness of Cypress 1 is a human creation. The enormous arcology is one of the prestige projects of Angel’s employer Catherine Case, the “Queen of the Colorado” (4). 6 It is a remarkable piece of design and engineering, an artful imitation of nature with a closed watercycle and climate-controlled air below an overarching glass dome that allows sunlight to filter “down from above, dappling bamboo and rain trees, illuminating tropical birds and casting pocket-mirror flashes on mossy koi ponds” (2). Surrounding this artificial domed landscape is the city of Las Vegas, or what is left of it, engaged in a constant struggle against the encroaching desert, the unbearable heat, the dust storms, and the near-permanent drought conditions. 6 The term arcology is a linguistic blend of the words architecture and ecology. It denotes a utopian structure that provides space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities and often is self-sufficient and ecologically sustainable. Arcologies have frequently been features in science fiction literature and film, but equally ambitious projects in the actual world have proven difficult. Famous and notorious examples include Paolo Soleri’s experimental prototype Arcosanti in central Arizona and the Dongtan project near Shangai, which both have yet to be completed. Urban projects reflecting arcology principles have been somewhat more successful, but no current project would come anywhere near the Cypress arcologies in Bacigalupi’s novel. Sensing the Heat 179 Angel cannot help but “enjoy […] the view” from the “aerie” he occupies high up in the arcology as he waits for the sweating lawyer to make his way up the trail. From his elevated position, the people below seem “smaller than ants. Not really people at all” (2). Readers might suspect that there is a metaphorical dimension to Angel’s ruminations, and once they read on they will see confirmed that he is used to observing the world from a position of power, a position he holds thanks to Case, who controls a large part of the Colorado River and thus decides who lives and who dies in the region. But regardless of whether they notice the metaphorical dimension or not, the text invites readers to see both the arcology and the humans who populate it through Angel’s eyes. Bacigalupi’s third-person narrator uses the ruthless water knife as a focalizer throughout the first chapter, thus limiting readers’ imaginary experience of the storyworld to his perspective. 7 They can only simulate what Angel sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels at any given moment, and they also share his affective and cognitive processing of this sensory information, which is inevitably colored by the fact that he used to be one of the poor creatures who fought for survival in the heat and dust outside and who only recently has come into a position of privilege. Angel is an exconvict who now lives the high life because Case has released him from prison and given him a housing permit in the lush paradise of Cypress 1. In exchange, she “own[s] his ass” (1). There is nothing that Angel would not do for his boss, and the first chapter of the novel demonstrates just how far he will go. Cutting off a whole town from the much-needed water supply leaves him as indifferent as the threatening, torturing, or killing of those who dare to challenge Case’s reign. The time is gone, he knows, when people played by the rules, “believing there was a way for everyone to get by, pretending they could cooperate and share their way out of the situation” (12). By now “Big Daddy Drought” has worsened the environmental conditions to a degree that it has become a dog-eats-dog situation in which the southwestern states will fight each other to the death for the last drop of water. The fact that readers are bound to Angel’s perspective in this first chapter has important consequences for their initial understanding of the novel’s storyworld. The narratologist David Herman has argued that we constantly attempt to reconstruct not only the events in a narrative, but also the environment that surrounds the characters and their actions (13-4). Seeing the arid Southwest through Angel’s eyes allows readers to share his privileged position also in terms of knowledge. His words and thoughts tend to be sarcastic and they convey well how much the possession of water has become a merciless business operation in a time of enduring drought. Angel pictures Case in her office: 7 The notion of focalization goes back to the French narrative theorist Gerard Genette and refers to the perspective or point of view through which a narrative is presented. A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 180 With maps of the state of Nevada and the Colorado River Basin floor to ceiling on the walls around her, her domain laid out in real-time data feeds—the veins of every tributary blinking red, amber, or green indicating stream flow in cubic feet per second. Numbers flickering over the various catchment basins of the Rocky Mountains—red, amber, green—monitoring how much snow cover remained and variation off the norm as it melted. Other numbers, displaying the depths of the reservoirs and dams … Over it all, emergency purchase prices on streamflows and futures offers scrolled via NASDAQ, available open-market purchase options if she needed to recharge the depth in Lake Mead, the unforgiving numbers that ruled her world as relentlessly as she ruled Angel’s. (Bacigalupi 5) What Bacigalupi evokes here is a futuristic, speculative scenario that has no direct correspondence in readers’ actual worlds. And yet, the description makes it easy to picture Case’s workplace since it draws heavily on visual imagery that we know, if not from personal experience, from stock exchange newscasts, financial market reporting, and from Hollywood films such as Wall Street (1987) and The Big Short (2015). Although the description is lacking in detail, most readers will immediately be able to simulate the situation in their minds and understand that in this future world water has become even more of a precious commodity than it is today, a commodity that sustains a form of gambling that may be even more precarious than contemporary stock trading since it is wholly dependent on the prevailing weather conditions. If the climate was to shift towards somewhat wetter conditions again, Case and her opponents in California and Arizona would be quickly out of business. There is no sign, however, that the weather will change. Throughout the novel, Bacigalupi presents the severe drought conditions as a fact of life and as something that will only get worse over time. Whereas the first chapter considers those conditions in the abstract and from a safe distance, the second chapter of The Water Knife plunges readers in the middle of things, allowing them to experience the material side of the drought in more immediate ways through the novel’s second protagonist, the journalist Lucy Monroe. In a way, Lucy’s trajectory has been the opposite of Angel’s: unlike him, she started from a position of privilege and chose to move to the dying city of Phoenix, Arizona, in order to become “a collapse pornographer … hunting for salacious imagery, like the vultures who descended on Houston after a Cat 6, or the sensationalized imagery of a fallen Detroit being swallowed by nature” (24). On her bad days, Lucy agrees with her critics that this is what her work amounts to. On others, she feels “that she wasn’t so much eroticizing a city’s death as excavating a future as it yawned below them. As if she were saying This is us. This is how we all end” (24). Most importantly, however, Lucy realizes that she is no longer a distant observer of environmental collapse. Instead, she has become “one of the actors” (25) and therefore someone who is as much exposed to the horrific ma- Sensing the Heat 181 terial conditions around her as the poor Zoners who still manage to hold out in the city. When we first meet Lucy, she wakes up in the middle of the night because her house is shaking under the onslaught of yet another dust storm. At first she believes that she hears rain, but once she is fully awake she realizes “it wasn’t rain caressing the windows of her home, but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again” (19). Bacigalupi uses a physical metaphor here to give readers a sense of the weight that the Arizona weather is putting on Lucy’s existence. 8 In this early passage in the chapter that introduces Lucy, readers do not yet know in what conditions she lives, but they can simulate in their mind the sense of a weight crushing down on one’s body. This allows them to understand on a visceral level that Lucy’s life is hard, and that its hardship is directly connected to the meteorological conditions around her. To this, the narrative quickly adds a vague sense of fear, as Lucy observes her dog Sunny cowering anxiously underneath her bed. “No matter how much Lucy tried to tell herself that the dog was crazy,” the narrator tells us, “her own lizard brain believed in the dog’s warning” (Bacigalupi 21). What happens between Lucy and Sunny when she peers underneath her bed and finds him “crouched and shivering” (20) is a case of what psychologists call trans-species Theory of Mind (ToM) and emotional contagion. Not only does Lucy cognitively read her dog’s body position as an expression of fear, but she also engages on an affective level in a sub-conscious process of embodied simulation. This is what we call affective empathy or emotional contagion, a process that has been well researched on the intra-species level, but that also seems to be working across species lines (in both directions) as many pet owners and animal trainers will attest. 9 As I have discussed in the previous section, processes of embodied simulation also operate during our exposure to literary texts, and so this passage not only represents contagious fear between Sunny and Lucy but also processes of embodied simulation. Readers are cued to feel along with both of them as they simulate in their minds the dog’s physical display of fear as he “huddle[s] underneath the bed, fur and skin twitching, giving off a low, continuous, miserable whine” (20), and Lucy’s reaction to it as she tries to “force herself to relax, but a nervous shiver of her own refuses[s] to stop rippling under her skin” (21). 10 This makes it easy to understand that Lucy feels compelled to get up in order to check the 8 As Lakoff and Johnson have shown, we use metaphors not only in literature but also in our everyday understanding of the world around us because they help us to map the unfamiliar onto the more familiar on the grounds of structural similarity (152). 9 For discussions of cognitive and affective empathy on the intra-species level, see Marco Iacoboni (2009) and Frans de Waal (2009). 10 For the central importance of ToM for fiction reading, see Zunshine (2006). For study that considers the role of empathy in fiction reading, see Keen (2007). A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 182 dead bolts on the doors and the seals of the windows, even though she keeps telling herself that she is being paranoid. The narrative here cues feelings of suspense in readers, which are intensified by Lucy’s belief that “something was outside, something dark and hungry, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that the horrific thing was turning its attention to her—to her and Sunny and this safe little island of hunkered adobe shelter that she called home” (21). 11 The novel has thus set the mood for the part of the narrative that takes place in Phoenix, a place that Lucy imagines as “a sinkhole, sucking everything down—buildings, lives, streets, history—all of it tipping and spilling into the gaping maw of disaster—sand, slumped saguaros, subdivisions—all of it going down” (24). What it means to live in that sinkhole becomes clear just a little later in the chapter, when Lucy sees herself forced to leave her house in the middle of the dust storm to report on a local murder case. At this point, the narrative invites readers to simulate what such a storm feels like to those who are directly exposed to it. After strapping on her REI filter mask and grit goggles Lucy presses open the door and tries to orient herself: Sand blasted her skin raw as she ran toward the memory of her truck. She fumbled with its door handle, squinting in the darkness, and finally got it open. Slammed it closed behind her and sat hunched, feeling her heart pounding as wind shook the cab. Grit hissed against glass and metal. When she powered up the truck, dust motes swirled inside, a red veil before the glow of the instrument panel’s LEDs. She revved the engine, trying to remember the last time she had changed the filters on its intakes, hoping it wouldn’t clog and die. She switched on storm lights and pulled out, bumping down the potholed street more by memory than by sight. (26) Using Lucy as a focalizer, the passage narrates the urban landscape as it presents itself to her. Packed with visual and other sensory imagery, it cues readers to simulate the feeling of sand blasting against one’s skin, of squinting one’s eyes, of one’s heart pounding out of fear and exertion. They are invited to imagine the sound of grit against glass and metal, the sight of red dust, the confusion of trying to orient oneself without eyesight. There is no information in the passage that would be external to Lucy’s perception and cognition. As readers, we cannot help but share her experience of the storm as well as her affective and cognitive response to it. This does not change, however, that we may be critical of her behavior, thinking that it is crazy to go outside during such a severe storm and wondering whether it is worth the risk. Focalization through the consciousness of a protagonist allows for intense embodied simulation and therefore for a particularly vivid experience of the 11 On suspense in literary reading, see Chapter 2 of Keith Oatley’s The Passionate Muse (2012). Sensing the Heat 183 narrated situation, but it does not keep readers from making analytical judgments about that situation or from being curious about what it will lead to. In fact, as Gregory Currie has argued, character desires—our empathetic suffering with a protagonist and our sympathetic hope that things will turn out well for her—are often in conflict with our narrative desires, i.e. the desire for a suspenseful, exciting story (183). Thriller plots such as the one we find in The Water Knife have a particular strong tendency to create such conflicting desires as they put their characters through hell in the service of an action-packed, page-turning story. As Fritz Breithaupt has noted, “readers do not always feel the same emotions as the characters they are reading about” (440) but may have a more complicated affective response. Breithaupt even detects what he calls “empathetic sadism” in readers as they both suffer with characters and enjoy the reading experience at the same time (440). We could also locate such empathetic sadism in writers, however, since they deliberately exploit readers’ capacity for empathy—also in moments of suffering—in order to create more immersive reading experiences. The Water Knife is a good example of this kind of sadism, since Lucy will undergo torture in the course of the story and Bacigalupi describes the physical and psychological experience of that ordeal in graphic detail, allowing for a high degree of embodied simulation. In this early passage in the novel, however, he uses sensory imagery to give readers an equally visceral and agonizing sense of the extreme Phoenix weather conditions. The third protagonist and focalizer of the novel, the refugee Maria Villarosa, allows readers to get an even more immediate sense of that environment for the simple fact that she is not in a position to protect herself from it. Maria is one of the “Merry Perrys,” as the refugees are contemptuously nicknamed by those who are better off. Like most of the other climate refugees that populate Phoenix, she is originally from Texas and thus one of the many American citizens that are now treated much like the displaced Oklahoma farmers at the height of the 1930’s Dust Bowl. The people who have fled the devastated environment of what used to be Texas, Maria notes self-consciously, “stank of fear and stale sweat that had moistened and dried. They stank of Clearsac plastic and piss. They stank of one another from lying crammed together like sardines in the plywood ghettos that they’d packed in close to wherever the Red Cross had spied relief pumps into the ground” (37). The situation of the refugees is so desperate that they are forced to recycle their own urine back into drinking water by filtering it through the omnipresent Clearsacs—an image that, along with the sensual imagery of foul-smelling bodies, will likely trigger a disgust response in most readers. The only relief provided for the displaced Texans is the water pumps that the Red Cross/ China Friendship has installed all over town, but that water does not come for free. Instead, the price at the pumps is continuously changing A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 184 with the market price, symbolizing the moment when the green, amber, and red numbers that flicker across Catherine Case’s office walls materialize into the amount of water that a poor person can afford. Chinese corporations are omnipresent now not only in Vegas and Phoenix, but all over the American Southwest. “They knew how to make things happen” (34), knows Maria, not least because her father was working a construction job on the Taiyang Arcology, a sister project to the arcology in Vegas, before falling to his death from the nineteenth floor. Now an orphan, Maria struggles to survive with the help of her friend Lisa who coughs up blood because she has been exposed to unfiltered air for too long and sells her body to whoever is interested. Maria starts out as the most disenfranchised protagonist of the novel, but she is also the one who is most determined to survive. She waits patiently by the water pump because she hopes to “see the world as clearly” as the hydrologist who currently pays for Sarah’s body (44). From him she receives the information that there are moments when the price at the pump will dramatically drop for a brief moment because of uneven withdrawal from the large users. Her plan is to take advantage of that moment and to later re-sell her water for a higher price to those who need it. Her business model mirrors those of the large players such as Case, but because she is poor and physically weak, it is doomed to failure. Although she succeeds at the pump, she is later forced to give up her water to the bigger dogs that control her neighborhood. And Sarah’s involvement with the hydrologist eventually leads both of the women into a much larger and increasingly deadly water conflict that also involves Angel and Lucy. Bacigalupi’s characters are disappointingly flat and most of the plot developments in the second half of The Water Knife are highly generic thriller fare written in “relentless bursts of testosterone-driven prose” (Tobar 2015). Looking at the novel from an econarratological perspective, we must concede that the structural weaknesses of the novel and the frequent display of graphic violence may impede some readers’ ability and willingness to empathize with the characters in a way that would allow them to experience the storyworld through their consciousness. And yet, the novel is nevertheless interesting from such a perspective precisely because its generic thriller plot—which will appeal to readers who enjoy that kind of genre fiction—is driven by a conflict that is caused by anthropogenic climate change. It is because the climate is changing that the ancient water rights that are at the center of the conflict have become invaluable in the drought-ridden Southwest. Even Angel has to learn that in a world without enough water, no privilege, no friendship, no loyalty, and not even love has any enduring value. When he drives his elegant Tesla past the “[r]efugees and recycling opera- Sensing the Heat 185 tions dotting the […] dark zone” on the fringes of Phoenix, he gazes from inside the climate-controlled space of the car at what appears to him as “[g]host images: a woman clutching the back of a scooter, whipped by wind, arms around her man’s waist, her eyes and mouth pursed tight against the dust. Another scooter, hauling a five-gallon water cube strapped down by bungee cords, the driver hunched over his handlebars, a bright blue Sparkle Pony filter mask hiding his features” (97). Once again, Angel looks at people from a distance and in a way that denies their humanity. He only leaves the Tesla when he reaches the Hilton 6 hotel where his room is “barricaded from the outside world by humidifiers and HEPA filters and argon-filled insulating glass” (100). To Angel, Phoenix is an alien place, its suffering familiar and yet strange, not part of his current world. His position at this point in the narrative mirrors that of its readers. They, too, are to some degree familiar with dust storms and soaring temperatures. And they, too, have seen humans on scooters wearing filter masks and the many other signs of environmental degradation and injustice. What makes these phenomena strange is their presence in the middle of a major American city in the twenty-first century. Yet, together with Angel, readers soon learn that it is impossible to keep one’s distance when one is physically present in a place like this. Once Angel leaves the insulated spaces of his car and hotel behind in order to find out whether someone is betraying Catherine Case, he comes in close contact not only with Maria and Lucy, but also with the merciless forces that shape both women’s lives. Pérez Ramos notes that “The Water Knife is an admonishment and a cautionary tale, with constant references to what could/ should have been done when there was still time” (55). Tobar widens the perspective, observing that “much of the social and political life of [the novel’s] future America is shaped by the kind of disorder, law-breaking and violence one finds in present-day South Sudan and Syria” (2015). Such comparisons between contemporary reality and the imagined future world of the novel are constantly invited by the text and almost inevitable. Erin James has noted that “comprehending a narrative is an inherently comparative process, in which readers reconstruct sequences of events, states, and actions integratively by considering both the world that is in the narrative and the world that is not. This process involves determining how the actions and events depicted in a narrative relate to other possible past events, alternative presents, or potential happenings in the future” (xi). Tobar’s review of The Water Knife demonstrates some of the possible results of such inherently comparative processes on part of the reader, as it includes a quote from the novel that explicitly links the violence of its storyworld to anthropogenic climate change: “We knew it was all going to go to hell, and we just stood by and watched it happen anyway,” says Lucy’s friend Jamie soon before he is mur- A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 186 dered, “There ought to be a prize for that kind of stupidity” (Bacigalupi 29). It sounds like a warning from the future. Conclusion The Water Knife is a good example of how the narrative strategies of dystopian climate change fiction can enable the “enlightened triangulation” that Moylan sees at the heart of science fiction’s awareness-raising potential: Readers are invited to draw connections between their own “limited perspective, the estranged re-vision of the alternative world on the pages of a given text, and the actually existing society” (Moylan xvi-xvii). Critical responses to the novel suggest that such triangulations are particularly easy for readers whose actual environment closely mirrors the imaginary world of the novel. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Denise Hamilton observes that “[r]eading the novel in 93-degree March weather while L.A. newscasts warned of water rationing and extended drought, I felt the hot panting breath of the desert on my nape and I shivered, hoping that Bacigalupi’s vision of the future won’t be ours” (n. pag.). Given that readers’ actual experience plays an important role in their sense of transportation into a storyworld and their ability to imagine that storyworld vividly, as Gerrig and others have argued, such findings are not surprising. 12 But clearly, The Water Knife and other pieces of cli-fi also engage readers whose personal experiences do not match their virtual experience during the reading process quite as closely. After all, our affective response to a literary text is determined not only by the emotional memories we have retained from previous experiences (real and imagined), but also by the vivacity of the things we imagine while reading. As literary scholar Elaine Scarry has argued, such imaginary vivacity “comes about by reproducing the deep structures of perception” (9) through the powerful evocation of the material properties of storyworld itself and a description of characters’ sensual perception of and affective responses to them. The Water Knife excels at providing its readers with material and sensory imagery that allows them to imagine its climate-changed future world vividly through processes of embodied simulation. This may be its modest contribution to the cultural discourse around climate change, its overly violent plotlines and flat characters notwithstanding. The British climatologist Mike Hulme has argued that we must get away from understanding climate only as a physical reality, and begin to see it also as “an imaginative idea—an idea constructed and endowed with meaning and value through cultural practice” (14). Thus understood, anthropogenic climate change is not only a scientific but also a cultural problem. How we 12 On this point see also Green and Chow et al.. Sensing the Heat 187 address it depends in part on cultural values and economic priorities, and in part on our species’ very capacity to sense, process, and understand information. As long as we do not believe that climate change concerns us directly, we are unlikely to engage in or support any action to curb greenhouse gas emissions more effectively. Psychologists Van der Linden et al. suggest that “instead of a future, distant, global, nonpersonal, and analytical risk that is often framed as an overt loss for society,” climate change should be framed “as a present, local, and personal risk” in ways that “facilitate more affective and experiential engagement” (758). Cognitive psychologist Paul Slovic and ecocritic Scott Slovic similarly remind us in Numbers and Nerves (2015) that “we as a species think best when we allow numbers and narratives, abstract information and experiential discourse, to interact, to work together”(4). 13 Mirror neuron-enabled processes of liberated embodied simulation, as we experience during our engagement with narrative fiction, may be considered an important component of the experiential system, regardless of the fact that the experiences in question are virtual. This is precisely the reason why climate change fiction, like other speculative modes of writing, can help us consider the potential future outcomes of our current choices. Instead of speaking abstractly about a changing climate, as scientific discourse must do, such texts as Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife allow us to experience on the imaginary level what it might mean to deal with the resulting weather and what ecological, economic, and social consequences such meteorological shifts may have. Works Cited Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik, eds. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Aziz-Zadeh, Lisa, and Antonio Damasio. “Embodied Semantics for Actions: Findings from Functional Brain Imaging.” Journal of Physiology - Paris 102 (2008): 35-39. Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Water Knife. London: Orbit, 2015. Breithaupt, Fritz. “Empathetic Sadism: How Readers Get Implicated.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 440-461. Caracciolo, Marco. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 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