Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Science Fiction & Ecological Imagining
Chapter 2: The Politics of Water in Dune & The Water Knife
Chapter 3: The Politics of Energy in The Windup Girl
Chapter 4: Ecofeminist Politics in Dune, The Windup Girl & The Water Knife
Chapter 5: Science Fiction & the Politics of Science & Technology
Chapter 6: The Role of Language in Ecological Imagining
Conclusion
Works Cited, Footnotes, & Author's Notes
Chapter 1: Science Fiction & Ecological Imagining
Chapter 2: The Politics of Water in Dune & The Water Knife
Chapter 3: The Politics of Energy in The Windup Girl
Chapter 4: Ecofeminist Politics in Dune, The Windup Girl & The Water Knife
Chapter 5: Science Fiction & the Politics of Science & Technology
Chapter 6: The Role of Language in Ecological Imagining
Conclusion
Works Cited, Footnotes, & Author's Notes
Introduction
Science Fiction (SF) imagines dystopian worlds in order to create an epistemological experience and awareness about issues such as climate change, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Given the pressing problems concerning climate change and the interrelated issue of resource management, SF has become increasingly concerned with the epistemological imagining of ecological utopias and dystopias, which is the key focus of the budding ecocritical SF [or, cli-fi] subgenre. Many people today are clearly concerned with the state of their environment, and any socio-political discussion on the environment is likely to encompass the management of humanity’s shared resources, renewable or otherwise. The primary recurring question asked seems to be how societies can be configured to allow better resource management for a better environment, which would in turn create a better social, political and economic paradigm. According to Milkoreit (2), authors of ecocritical SF have suggested that the visions presented in their imaginative works can play a role in societal transformation by presenting a coherent and convincing narrative about the science of climate change and its relationship to the management of humanity’s resources. Using what cognitive scientists term “possibility thinking” to consider imperceivable states such as the future (Milkoreit 2), they provide bleak, distressing, dystopian visions of the potential social, political and economic consequences of poor present actions and decisions, and how they can be avoided.
Frank Herbert’s 1965 Dune is a foundational text of ecocritical SF, one of the first to deeply explore the social, political and economic interplay between climate science and resources, and influential in establishing ecocritical SF as a subgenre. Set on an almost waterless planet, and borrowing heavily from real-world resource conflicts such as the ‘Scramble for Africa’, water and the spice melange become literary symbols for petroleum and mineral resources, and their hyper-commodification presents a plethora of social, political and economic manifestations that lead to ruin in nearly every aspect of human life. For the Fremen natives of Arrakis, Dune’s setting, every aspect of life is shaped by water, and their entire existence is premised not only on its preservation, but also on the gradual and careful transformation of their planet so that water will eventually be abundant, against neoliberal and capitalist forces. Dune comments extensively on neoliberalism [or late capitalism], which Herbert ostensibly sees as the culprit of ecological destruction due its incessant focus on wealth creation by resource extraction at the expense of ecology. Dune was seminal in presenting a distressing vision of Earth’s neoliberal resource conflicts followed through to their natural, unchecked conclusions: ecological ruin, which then leads to social, political and economic ruin. Paolo Bacigalupi’s more recent ecocritical SF works build on Dune’s foundations and visions, but making them much more imaginatively ‘possible’ by setting them on Earth. His 2015 novel The Water Knife brings many of Dune’s ecological crises to near-future Earth, where North America is rendered almost waterless due to climate change. Water is now the new oil, with neoliberal petro-capitalist extractors replaced by water extractors, and nearly every facet of social, political and economic life determined by water hyper-commodification, resulting in a distressing Dune-esque vision of social, political and economic ruin. 2009’s The Windup Girl delves into more subgenres of ecocritical SF, using biotechnological concerns common to the ‘biopunk’ [see footnote 1] subgenre by featuring a race of organic, genetically modified ‘new people’. The biopunk subgenre allows Bacigalupi to extend resource commodification to ‘new people’ themselves, and also to the only remaining forms of energy in a post-oil world: the calories produced by food; animal and human labour from those calories; and genetic code that can produce the most food. Despite each text differing significantly in class and gender tropes, each contains a hierarchical social structure that allows poor treatment of the ‘other’, in many cases women. Viewing these texts through an ecofeminist lens, humanity’s failure to treat their ecology well stems from its detachment from ‘nature’ and subsequent failure to treat each other well. Humanity’s detachment from nature could be traced to its love affair with various concepts such as the ‘new-fangledness’ of capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, science and technology.
Put simply, the selected texts, despite being products of their respective contexts and therefore differing in treatment of various tropes such as gender and class, present a compelling and shared narrative that climate science and resource management are inextricably intertwined, that poor resource management leads inevitably to social, political and economic catastrophe, and that good resource management requires significant societal and political change. Using a range of complex literary devices such as imagery, metaphor, symbolism and allusion, these selected texts harness the power of imagination and language to each deliver a remarkably simple, common message: humans need to look after each other and look after their environment, and failure to do so may lead to ecological, social, political and economic ruin.
Frank Herbert’s 1965 Dune is a foundational text of ecocritical SF, one of the first to deeply explore the social, political and economic interplay between climate science and resources, and influential in establishing ecocritical SF as a subgenre. Set on an almost waterless planet, and borrowing heavily from real-world resource conflicts such as the ‘Scramble for Africa’, water and the spice melange become literary symbols for petroleum and mineral resources, and their hyper-commodification presents a plethora of social, political and economic manifestations that lead to ruin in nearly every aspect of human life. For the Fremen natives of Arrakis, Dune’s setting, every aspect of life is shaped by water, and their entire existence is premised not only on its preservation, but also on the gradual and careful transformation of their planet so that water will eventually be abundant, against neoliberal and capitalist forces. Dune comments extensively on neoliberalism [or late capitalism], which Herbert ostensibly sees as the culprit of ecological destruction due its incessant focus on wealth creation by resource extraction at the expense of ecology. Dune was seminal in presenting a distressing vision of Earth’s neoliberal resource conflicts followed through to their natural, unchecked conclusions: ecological ruin, which then leads to social, political and economic ruin. Paolo Bacigalupi’s more recent ecocritical SF works build on Dune’s foundations and visions, but making them much more imaginatively ‘possible’ by setting them on Earth. His 2015 novel The Water Knife brings many of Dune’s ecological crises to near-future Earth, where North America is rendered almost waterless due to climate change. Water is now the new oil, with neoliberal petro-capitalist extractors replaced by water extractors, and nearly every facet of social, political and economic life determined by water hyper-commodification, resulting in a distressing Dune-esque vision of social, political and economic ruin. 2009’s The Windup Girl delves into more subgenres of ecocritical SF, using biotechnological concerns common to the ‘biopunk’ [see footnote 1] subgenre by featuring a race of organic, genetically modified ‘new people’. The biopunk subgenre allows Bacigalupi to extend resource commodification to ‘new people’ themselves, and also to the only remaining forms of energy in a post-oil world: the calories produced by food; animal and human labour from those calories; and genetic code that can produce the most food. Despite each text differing significantly in class and gender tropes, each contains a hierarchical social structure that allows poor treatment of the ‘other’, in many cases women. Viewing these texts through an ecofeminist lens, humanity’s failure to treat their ecology well stems from its detachment from ‘nature’ and subsequent failure to treat each other well. Humanity’s detachment from nature could be traced to its love affair with various concepts such as the ‘new-fangledness’ of capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, science and technology.
Put simply, the selected texts, despite being products of their respective contexts and therefore differing in treatment of various tropes such as gender and class, present a compelling and shared narrative that climate science and resource management are inextricably intertwined, that poor resource management leads inevitably to social, political and economic catastrophe, and that good resource management requires significant societal and political change. Using a range of complex literary devices such as imagery, metaphor, symbolism and allusion, these selected texts harness the power of imagination and language to each deliver a remarkably simple, common message: humans need to look after each other and look after their environment, and failure to do so may lead to ecological, social, political and economic ruin.
Chapter 1: Science Fiction & Ecological Imagining
As well as a creative art form, SF functions as an epistemological tool that allows readers and writers to engage imaginatively in “possibility thinking” about the future. Cognitive scientists describe “possibility thinking” (Greene, qtd. in Milkoreit 4) as “a necessary part of thought, decision-making and action” (4) which allows individuals to “generate in [their] mind[s]… ideas and images of states of the world, which are not perceivable with the senses“ (4), for example, the distant future. SF authors are able to “place readers in [future] worlds where the negative consequences of present ways of thinking and being are distressingly palpable and second to use these possible worlds to influence readers to take action” (Otto 182) on various present issues, including climate change. Frank Herbert, author of the 1965 ecological SF novel Dune, was certainly interested in ecology, having authored several previous works on “ecological matters” (Herbert, qtd. in Parkerson 404). Herbert ostensibly saw what was then the nascent economic theory of late capitalism [now neoliberalism - see footnote 2], as a key culprit in a “global problem” (405), and allegorises criticism of it in Dune through Arrakis’s “regime of unequal, undemocratic extraction and distribution of resources” (Anderson 228). On the one hand, Arrakis is analogised as Earth’s oil-rich and exploited Mexico and Middle East regions (228), containing Middle Eastern and Mexican flora “saguaro, burro bush, date palm, sand verbena” (Herbert 1342), and whose inhabitants are “vulnerable people… beings whose lives and living conditions are made not to count politically and socially except as ‘bare life,’ subject to capture and trade” (Anderson 229). On the other hand, the Harkonnens, Imperials and other resource extractors symbolise the neoliberal, American petro-corporations who “kill, cheat, steal, and destroy to accumulate capital” (Anderson 229). Dune’s imagined allegorisation of economic neoliberalism as an “uneven political order opens a utopian space in which one can see capital’s ghastly shadow and imagine bioregionally responsible alternatives” (229) which focus less on resource extraction, and more on responsible resource and environmental management.
Through characterisation, Herbert allegorises opposition to neoliberal hyper-commodification and extraction of a planet’s finite resources in favour of ecological literacy. Arrakis’s ecologist, Pardot Kynes, who shares nearly identical interests with Herbert and is ostensibly his Boothian ‘second’ or ‘implied’ self (Booth 70), proclaims the importance of “cultivat[ing] ecological literacy among the people” and that “the highest function of ecology is understanding consequences” (305-7). “Purely an ecological novel” (Stratton 307), Dune is concerned primarily with imagining ecological literacy and bioregionally responsible alternatives to destructive neoliberalism, or ‘ecological wisdom… human practice that tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community” (309-12). In terms of imagining potential consequences, “the gap between the actual world and the narrative world [in this case Arrakis] encourages readers to think about alternatives that would bring about a future better than the present” (Otto 179). In order to widen this gap for the reader, Herbert alludes to present day Earth when describing the Atreides' homeworld, Caladan, in the opening chapters: “windows on each side of her overlooked the curving southern bend of the river and the green farmlands of the Atreides family holding” (Herbert 4). This natural, earthly, Eden-esque description is juxtaposed a short time later against the dystopian Arrakis when Paul Atreides is given a report of his antithetic, soon-to-be homeworld: “the funeral plains… the wilderness that is empty, the wasteland where nothing lives except the spice and the sandworms” (31). According to ecologists Pardot and Liet Kynes, with better ecological management, “Arrakis could be an Eden” (125) if it weren’t for humans “and their works who have been a disease on the surface of their planets” (309). Using “man as a constructive ecological force,” they hope to bring about their Eden through total human control of ecology through such means as an “orderly cycle of water to sustain human life under more favourable conditions” (154), and then “inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place - to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape!” (308). Pardot’s utopian vision stands in stark contrast to the extreme capitalist [or neoliberal], extraction-focused paradigm prevailing on Arrakis and which humanity was hurtling towards in the mid-1960s. Pardot seems convinced that if humans understand their complex ecology enough to control it, then ecological catastrophe is avertable through imagined improvements, and is the key to humanity prospering.
Another key feature of Dune is its imagery of complex planetary ecosystems through allegorisation of the changeable Arrakeen ecosystem using sand dunes as symbols and metaphors. Understanding complexity, and imagining potential consequences within that complexity, are inextricably intertwined, as increased complexity in any system means, inductively, more potential consequences to consider. In today’s climate discussions, these are known as ‘feedback loops’. Pardot Kynes understood this deeply:
"The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem… is that it’s a system!... [it] can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences" (Herbert 565).
With a full understanding of complexity and consequences, both Kynes believe the Fremen represent an “ecological and geological force of unlimited potential” that would allow them to reshape the ecology of any planet to fit their needs (557). Both Kynes wish to change Arrakis by harnessing feedback loops and “maintain[ing] and produc[ing] coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity...relationships and relationships within relationships (557). They had developed a detailed plan of how life would be added to the complex Arrakeen ecosystem to foment the complex relationship-within-relationship chain reaction: “adaptive zones were laid out in the deep south” where “mutated poverty grasses were planted first along the downwind of the chosen dunes” (564). When these grassed dunes reached the necessary height, they were reinforced with tougher grasses, which had the effect of anchoring each dune (265). With anchored dunes, the fremen set about planting carefully selected deeper vegetation such as “ephemerals… scotch broom, low lupine, vine eucalyptus…, [and] dwarf tamarisk” (564-5). With the requisite plant life now in place and each dune now a seed for a more complex ecosystem, the fremen carefully added the requisite fauna: “burrowing creatures to open the soil and aerate it… , predators to keep them in check…, insects to fill the niches these couldn’t reach… and the desert bat to keep watch on these” (565). As would be the case on Earth with any attempt to change, create or maintain a complex ecosystem, this painstakingly complex work would yield no visible results in any Fremen’s lifetime and were unimaginable to them, taking “from three hundred to five hundred years” (562) to complete. The Kynes dune is a metaphor for a seed, a symbolic microcosm for the slow process of planetary transformation: as part of the whole planet, it is a non-living thing, but can be used with living things to seed more life, and eventually, spawn an entire ecosystem. Through the symbolic allegorisation of slow, but sure and careful maintenance of the Arrakeen ecosystem over several centuries, readers can apply that thinking to Earth to “[live] the present in a different way, not with an unimaginable utopian blueprint as our guide, but instead with a commitment to ecological sustainability and environmental and social justice” (Otto 184). SF stories help to bring such complex ideas and theories into popular imagination.
Through characterisation, Herbert allegorises opposition to neoliberal hyper-commodification and extraction of a planet’s finite resources in favour of ecological literacy. Arrakis’s ecologist, Pardot Kynes, who shares nearly identical interests with Herbert and is ostensibly his Boothian ‘second’ or ‘implied’ self (Booth 70), proclaims the importance of “cultivat[ing] ecological literacy among the people” and that “the highest function of ecology is understanding consequences” (305-7). “Purely an ecological novel” (Stratton 307), Dune is concerned primarily with imagining ecological literacy and bioregionally responsible alternatives to destructive neoliberalism, or ‘ecological wisdom… human practice that tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community” (309-12). In terms of imagining potential consequences, “the gap between the actual world and the narrative world [in this case Arrakis] encourages readers to think about alternatives that would bring about a future better than the present” (Otto 179). In order to widen this gap for the reader, Herbert alludes to present day Earth when describing the Atreides' homeworld, Caladan, in the opening chapters: “windows on each side of her overlooked the curving southern bend of the river and the green farmlands of the Atreides family holding” (Herbert 4). This natural, earthly, Eden-esque description is juxtaposed a short time later against the dystopian Arrakis when Paul Atreides is given a report of his antithetic, soon-to-be homeworld: “the funeral plains… the wilderness that is empty, the wasteland where nothing lives except the spice and the sandworms” (31). According to ecologists Pardot and Liet Kynes, with better ecological management, “Arrakis could be an Eden” (125) if it weren’t for humans “and their works who have been a disease on the surface of their planets” (309). Using “man as a constructive ecological force,” they hope to bring about their Eden through total human control of ecology through such means as an “orderly cycle of water to sustain human life under more favourable conditions” (154), and then “inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place - to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape!” (308). Pardot’s utopian vision stands in stark contrast to the extreme capitalist [or neoliberal], extraction-focused paradigm prevailing on Arrakis and which humanity was hurtling towards in the mid-1960s. Pardot seems convinced that if humans understand their complex ecology enough to control it, then ecological catastrophe is avertable through imagined improvements, and is the key to humanity prospering.
Another key feature of Dune is its imagery of complex planetary ecosystems through allegorisation of the changeable Arrakeen ecosystem using sand dunes as symbols and metaphors. Understanding complexity, and imagining potential consequences within that complexity, are inextricably intertwined, as increased complexity in any system means, inductively, more potential consequences to consider. In today’s climate discussions, these are known as ‘feedback loops’. Pardot Kynes understood this deeply:
"The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem… is that it’s a system!... [it] can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences" (Herbert 565).
With a full understanding of complexity and consequences, both Kynes believe the Fremen represent an “ecological and geological force of unlimited potential” that would allow them to reshape the ecology of any planet to fit their needs (557). Both Kynes wish to change Arrakis by harnessing feedback loops and “maintain[ing] and produc[ing] coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity...relationships and relationships within relationships (557). They had developed a detailed plan of how life would be added to the complex Arrakeen ecosystem to foment the complex relationship-within-relationship chain reaction: “adaptive zones were laid out in the deep south” where “mutated poverty grasses were planted first along the downwind of the chosen dunes” (564). When these grassed dunes reached the necessary height, they were reinforced with tougher grasses, which had the effect of anchoring each dune (265). With anchored dunes, the fremen set about planting carefully selected deeper vegetation such as “ephemerals… scotch broom, low lupine, vine eucalyptus…, [and] dwarf tamarisk” (564-5). With the requisite plant life now in place and each dune now a seed for a more complex ecosystem, the fremen carefully added the requisite fauna: “burrowing creatures to open the soil and aerate it… , predators to keep them in check…, insects to fill the niches these couldn’t reach… and the desert bat to keep watch on these” (565). As would be the case on Earth with any attempt to change, create or maintain a complex ecosystem, this painstakingly complex work would yield no visible results in any Fremen’s lifetime and were unimaginable to them, taking “from three hundred to five hundred years” (562) to complete. The Kynes dune is a metaphor for a seed, a symbolic microcosm for the slow process of planetary transformation: as part of the whole planet, it is a non-living thing, but can be used with living things to seed more life, and eventually, spawn an entire ecosystem. Through the symbolic allegorisation of slow, but sure and careful maintenance of the Arrakeen ecosystem over several centuries, readers can apply that thinking to Earth to “[live] the present in a different way, not with an unimaginable utopian blueprint as our guide, but instead with a commitment to ecological sustainability and environmental and social justice” (Otto 184). SF stories help to bring such complex ideas and theories into popular imagination.
Chapter 2: The Politics of Water in Dune & The Water Knife
In both Dune and Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2015 The Water Knife, water is hyper-commodified, its possession confers social status and wealth in complex ways, and its very existence shapes social, political and economic structures. In The Water Knife, social groups are often successful depending on how well they are able to control water. Set in desert cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, which were probably originally impossible due to water scarcity in the first place, characters lament their inability to control it: “we thought we could make deserts bloom, and the water would always be there for us. When we thought we could move rivers and control water instead of it controlling us” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 181). Groups with no ability to control water and their environment, such as “People up from the Gulf” are continually fighting nature, “driven off by hurricanes… fleeing drought” (236). In the large, wealthy arcologies, however, much of their success is due to their ability to control water: “It all gets recycled. It goes down to methane digesters, then passes through carp ponds and snail beds. Some of it gets reverse-osmosis-filtered and comes back up through the pipes, and some of it goes into the vertical farm on the south face” (187). The futuristic water-cleansing and recycling technology works by harnessing various elements of perfect nature, instead of imperfect human machinery:
"...balance all the plants and animals... clean up the waste and turn it into fertilizer they can use in their greenhouses, how to clean the water, too. You run black water down through filters and mushrooms and reeds and let it into lily ponds and carp farms and snail beds, and by the time it comes out the other end, that water, it’s cleaner than what they pump up from underground. Nature does all the work, all the different little animals working together, like gears fitted inside an engine. Its own kind of machine. A whole big living machine." (91)
Social groups that are able to control their environmental resources and thrive are subsequently then able to exert control and dominance over other, less-fortunate groups through the restriction of resources to them: “These days Mexico never saw a drop of water hit its border, no matter how much it complained about the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River. Children down in the cartel states grew up and died thinking that the Colorado River was… a myth” (12). When members of subordinate social groups gain admission to the residences of the overclass, the juxtaposition is pronounced. Maria, who previously had to recycle and reuse every drop of her body’s filthy waste water with clearsacs, now engages in profligate waste of pristine, fresh water:
"she filled it to the top... drank it all. She filled another… held the cool glass to her cheek. Drank it, too... water crashed into the glass as she filled it a third time. She couldn’t get enough. She was too bloated to drink it now, but she couldn’t let it go. She carried the glass back into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Gallons and gallons and gallons of water poured over her… gushed down her body and disappeared down the drain." (176)
Ultimately, the overclass are even able to control and use their water resources to destroy subordinate social groups, like the Harkonnens do to the Fremen, and like petro-capitalists on Earth do to Middle Eastern and South American populations. When water-rich California grows “tired of negotiating for its share of the river” (187), instead of sharing its accumulated wealth with poorer groups, it destroys a large dam, causing water to ironically “rush down through canyons, cross state lines, inundate towns, sweep away all traces of human activity along its margins” (187). In The Water Knife, humans do possess the ability to control and harness natural resources to shape their environment but, unfortunately, it is done irresponsibly by the privileged few who then use their control to destroy their subordinates to maintain the status quo.
Like in The Water Knife, in Dune, water shapes nearly every aspect of life. Arrakis is so devoid of water that human life is only made possible through the wearing of unnatural technology such as ‘stillsuits’, garments that recycle the body’s urine, faeces and sweat into potable water (Herbert 31). Due to a complicated and unnatural “tripod” political structure consisting of “the Imperial Household balanced against the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad, and between them, the Guild with its damnable monopoly on interstellar transport” (24), the waterless Arrakis sits economically and politically at the centre of the galaxy due to it being the only planet known to produce the valuable spice, melange. An analogy to the petroleum oil of planet Earth, melange is essential to facilitating intergalactic trade, and “squeeze[d]” (266) out of Arrakis by foreign occupiers like the Harkonnens and Imperials while driving the occupied Fremen “into utter submission” (4898), reflecting real events such as the Suez Canal Crisis, Abadan Crisis, and the ‘Scramble for Africa’ [see footnotes 3,4,5]. The centring of plot on a spice-exploited, waterless planet, and with the only recognised social protection system, the Imperial ‘faufreluches’, which provided “a place for every man and every man in his place” (592) being “not rigidly guarded on Arrakis” (3), water is “indeed, power” (144), and its possession determines both wealth and social status. When House Atreides first occupies Arrakis, the local populace riots due to the strain the increased immigration would put on existing water resources, knowing that the privileged ruling class, with their “cistern… holding[ing] fifty thousand liters… always kept full” would survive easily while “the very poor die” (68). The privileged and “Noble Born” (57) Lady Jessica experiences this disparity first-hand when she discovers the special arcology-esque climate room in the Arrakeen castle using the cistern’s precious water supply at the expense of the dying poor: “Water everywhere in this room - on a planet where water was the most precious juice of life. Water being wasted so conspicuously that it shocked her to inner stillness… it was a deliberate statement of power and wealth” (78). Arrakis is, put simply, “a one-crop planet… it supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings” (309). In the dry climate of economically exploited Arrakis, water simply equates to wealth, and its unfair distribution and allocation mean that the underclass Fremen simply have no chance of advancing up any rung of the social ladder.
The hyper-commodification of water and the resultant social stratification due to its unequal distribution mean that in Dune, social customs and practices are inextricably linked to it, albeit differently depending upon which end of the class spectrum the social group belongs to. Liet Kynes posits that the Arrakeen “climate demands a special attitude toward water… you waste nothing that contains water” (Herbert 126), and this maxim shapes nearly every aspect of Fremen social custom. In Fremen culture, the act of spitting in the direction of a new acquaintance, or giving “the gift of [the] body’s moisture”, is considered one of the highest tokens of respect that can be given, while the simple and usually involuntary act of shedding tears is known as giving “moisture to the dead” (354), a sacred Fremen ritual. Extreme water scarcity, coupled with its natural abundance in the human body, means that Fremen practices regarding death almost exclusively revolve around extraction and reallocation of water from corpses in the event of deaths: “all of a man’s water, ultimately, belongs to his people - to his tribe… it’s a necessity… a dead man surely no longer requires that water” (153). The water of all dead Fremen is recycled back into the tribe’s reservoirs, and if a tribe member is killed in combat by another tribe member, then “combat water belongs to the winner” (350). Collaboration between Fremen tribes and outside groups is also dependent upon making a “water decision” (235), which generally means the zero-sum sacrifice of at least one tribe’s member’s life for their water in exchange for help from the other group. While the social customs of the Fremen underclass revolve around the careful reallocation and preservation of the scarce resource, the opposite is true for the overclass, where the customs are centred on flaunting of wealth, waste and “every degradation of the spirit that can be conceived” to maintain the status quo and drive the underclass into submission:
"Flanking the doorway… were broad laving basins of ornate yellow and green tile. Each basin had its rack of towels. It was the custom... for guests as they entered to dip their hands ceremoniously into a basin, slop several cups of water onto the floor, dry their hands on a towel and fling the towel into the growing puddle at the door. After the dinner, beggars gathered outside to get the water squeezings from the towels." (141)
On present day Earth, where water scarcity is a nascent issue disproportionately affecting those with reduced ability to make meaningful changes, the capacity to imagine the consequences of water scarcity and its potential to negatively impact social and cultural customs, and make changes that could prevent them, is a powerful epistemological tool. Imagining possible social structures in the future in order to retroactively influence them through present action is analagous to Jean-Pierre Duquy’s strategy for social change (qtd. in Zizek in Otto 182), which states:
"We should perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past [the past of the future] counterfactual possibilities [“if we had done this and that, the calamity that we are now experiencing would not have occurred!”] upon which we then act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny - and then, against the backdrop of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past."
Put simply, without the capacity to imagine the potential future negative social dynamics arising from present courses of action or inaction, it is impossible to make meaningful and effective decisions that may improve them, and ecocritical SF serves as an epistemological tool for this.
In The Water Knife, extreme water scarcity and hyper-commodification has relegated the United States of America to a form of Dune-esque pre-democratic feudalism, evidencing both how fragile human political systems are, and how crucial resources like water are to social, political and economic stability. Compared with Dune, the so-called “gap between the actual world and the narrative world” (Otto 179) is drastically reduced, as it is set along the 100th meridian, encompassing the south-western US states of Arizona, California, Texas and Nevada. These areas have been severely water deficient for centuries (Boronkay & Abbott 137), and climate change is set to exacerbate the already serious problem by “alter[ing] the runoff of many rivers due to changes in precipitation patterns… increas[ing] the demand for river water, due to more frequent droughts and greater stress being placed on other sources of water,” thus increasing the risk of armed conflict (Tir & Stinnett 211). In The Water Knife, the conflict is centred on access to the Colorado River, one with a long history of actual ‘water wars’ dating back centuries, including the 1960 State Water Project and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where Northern California and Southern California engaged in heated legal debate over the construction of the State Water Project dam to redistribute water from the North to the South (Boronkay & Abbott 137-8); the opposition to hydraulic mining during the height of the California Gold Rush (138); the Owens Valley/Mono Lake-Los Angeles Aqueduct, revolving around violent public opposition to a Los Angeles aqueduct to divert water away from Mono Lake during the 1930s (138); the 1922 Colorado River Compact, a contentious agreement by various states on supposedly equitable division and redistribution of the river’s water (Dineen 212); and; various other conflicts that exist to this day. Using many of these real-life conflicts, particularly The Colorado River Compact, as the backdrop for its narrative, The Water Knife “takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions” (Otto 180). Bacigalupi’s “potentially devastating conclusion” is the consequence of a ‘Big Daddy Drought’ in North America drastically reducing the water volume of the Colorado River. Consequently, as in any ecosystem, complex Dune-esque interrelationships between component parts, coupled with feedback loops, mean that a range of unforeseen problems begin to manifest: “Snowpack up in the rockies… No one planned for that… dust storms and forest fires are playing hell with our solar grid. No one planned for that… all that dust is speeding snowmelt, so even when we get a good year, it melts too fast or else evaporates. No one planned for that… Hydropower… she laughed… that’s a shot except in the spring because you can’t get a decent head in the reservoirs” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 60). The use of real life ‘water wars’ and the depiction of the worst case, dystopian scenario as their resolution “raise[s] in readers the question ‘Does that seem like something we want to be going toward?’” (Otto 182) and strengthens the desire to change current practices, moving away from a cutthroat, neoliberal, extraction-oriented paradigm to a more ecologically sustainable one.
In The Water Knife, as in Dune, water often exists as a major form of currency to be traded, but with the underclasses, as usual, having less access to and control over it compared with the ruling classes. Inside the ruling Cypress Arcology where the water distribution of the Colorado River is controlled, it is traded as if on a present-day stock exchange: “Maps of the state of Nevada and the Colorado basin floor to ceiling on the walls… emergency purchase prices on streamflows and futures offers scrolled via NASDAQ, available open-market purchase options….” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 7). In addition to being broadly traded as a major commodity on international stock and resource markets, it is traded in cut-throat and hyper-capitalist fashion according to the laws of supply and demand among residents of the Fremen-esque slums of South-Western USA. Within each slum community, extreme demand and almost no supply means citizens must “do whatever they needed to get a little money, to buy a little water, to keep going for another day” (102). To perpetuate this hyper-capitalist, neoliberal structure, the overclass have installed a pump where residents can purchase volumes of water for market price according to “how much water is down underground… when it gets low, the price goes up so people will slow down and not take so much. When the aquifer gets full, the price goes down” (46). Water’s price in the free market is almost as fluid as water itself: “The pump’s glow flickered and dropped to $6.66. Went back up to $6.95. It flickered again. $6.20. And then back up to $6.95… $6.90… $6.50… $5.95. $6.05. The price was definitely falling… Market price, falling like an angel coming down from Heaven… Free fall… $5.85. $4.70. $3.60… it was almost like buying futures” (46-7). Something as simple as fluctuating value on water has immense impact on social activity in the slums as the suffering masses move to take advantage of the drop in water price: “people started running, seeing finally what was happening. Word spread into the Merry Perry tents and pulled people away from lighting candles… Others were swarming over to gawp at the price, then running to tell others about the miraculous plunge. People began crowding the other spigots” (48). The water price is, however, only ever lowered temporarily, causing the desired social turmoil before the upper classes bring its value back out of reach of the slums: “the big boys would sit up… automated systems would catch the fall and start pumping… rich people’s automated household systems caught the price break and started pumping gallons into cisterns” (49). Even when members of the underclass do accumulate water resources, their position is made precarious and they must “turn [it] into money… can’t just sit on it” (74). Any attempt by the underclass to leverage water as the overclass do is crushed, as Maria’s operation is thwarted by local, government-backed water-mafia: “Looks to me like you’re starting up some kind of water bank here. Got your own liquid empire… buying, selling, trading. Looks pretty icy, girl” (95). The underclass suffer the ultimate humiliation to the ruling class and, like Maria, are forced to hand back their water gains: “she reached into her bra and pulled out the wad of sweaty bills. Started to peel off singles in green and yuan in red. Cato held out his hand... reached over and took the whole cash wad” (95). In The Water Knife, water is just one of the keys to power, and even when the underclass begin to make small water gains, they are quashed by the overclass.
Compared with Dune, where water simply means wealth and therefore class, The Water Knife’s class structures are slightly more nuanced, and Bacigalupi constructs an apocalyptic, post-democratic and post-federalist United States of America that has returned to a state of quasi neo-feudalism, replete with complex interminglings of race and place. Feudalism is a pre-capitalist, pre-democratic, hierarchical social, political and economic system that centres on the relationship between property, land, resources and power (Brown 1). Put simply, more property and resources, or land, means more power, and formal systems of social, political and economic equality, in other words a social democracy, do not exist. In The Water Knife, this neo-feudalism manifests in land being strictly owned and physically walled off by social groups to preserve and control access to the flowing river, and never changing hands. This is contrasted with the bioregional, neoliberal political system prevalent in Dune, where the focus is less on land but more on resources, and where physical territory frequently and forcibly changes hands to facilitate their forced extraction. Like the medieval castles of old feudal times, the utopian, climate-controlled ‘arcologies’ in the The Water Knife represent ultimate wealth and decadence, with their resource-rich inhabitants oblivious to the suffering outside at their expense. In Nevada’s Cypress Arcology utopia, an almost carnivalesque atmosphere is created:
"mothers pushing double strollers; hourly girlfriends clinging to the arms of weekend boyfriends, tourists from all over the world, snapping pics and messaging home that they had seen the Hanging Gardens of Las Vegas. Ferns and waterfalls and coffee shops. Down on entertainment floors, the dealers would be changing shifts. In the hotels the twenty-four-hour party people would be waking up and taking their first shots of vodka, spraying glitter on their skin. Maids and waiters and busboys and cooks and maintenance staff would all be hard at work, striving to keep their jobs... " (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 7)
Even in the nearly-destroyed city of Phoenix, inhabitants of the Taiyang Arcology live as a sheltered overclass, juxtaposed against the dystopia outside: “Relief agency workers, drilling speculators, borderland contractors with gold teeth, smiling, the men and women who prospered in the heart of disaster... nice splashing waterfall to drink espresso next to; lots of Chinese office girls walking around in their short skirts,” while “out in the dark zone… that place is a fucking mess” (102-4). The dystopian ‘dark zone’ surrounding the arcologies is a complex intermingling of race and place, comprising the “gaunt refugees of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico” (84). The listing of the country of Mexico with two present-day USA states is an ironic allusion to present-day race relations in North America: in parts of the USA including those two states, Mexicans are feared as the ‘other’, labelled as ‘illegals’ and ‘border-jumpers’, but in Bacigalupi’s imagined world, those lines have blurred, with Texans and Arizonans ‘othered’ by states further North and with more access to water. Women from Texas are generally forced into prostitution and objectified as “Texas bangbangs” (31) and generally cling to the bottom rung of the social ladder: “desperate Texas girls… Jamie would never have stooped so low” (142). Instead of USA border guards protecting the entire country’s richer resources from international immigration from places such as Mexico, states with rich water resources now protect against immigration from the other, poorer states with “militias assigned to hunting down Zoners and Texans who cross [the] border” (59). The underclass now consists of a multi-ethnic, multinational and multilingual group of individuals of “people babbling in Spanish, English and Dallas Drawl, and all sounding pretty much the same in mourning” (123). The status of social groups in The Water Knife is less due to identity markers such as nationality, language or ethnicity. Water means power, and powerful social groups form where water is abundant regardless of the race or nationality, with formerly fluid and superficial state borders between rich and poor states now strongly enforced to preserve the status quo, while the formerly relevant and strongly guarded national border that divided race is now non-existent.
"...balance all the plants and animals... clean up the waste and turn it into fertilizer they can use in their greenhouses, how to clean the water, too. You run black water down through filters and mushrooms and reeds and let it into lily ponds and carp farms and snail beds, and by the time it comes out the other end, that water, it’s cleaner than what they pump up from underground. Nature does all the work, all the different little animals working together, like gears fitted inside an engine. Its own kind of machine. A whole big living machine." (91)
Social groups that are able to control their environmental resources and thrive are subsequently then able to exert control and dominance over other, less-fortunate groups through the restriction of resources to them: “These days Mexico never saw a drop of water hit its border, no matter how much it complained about the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River. Children down in the cartel states grew up and died thinking that the Colorado River was… a myth” (12). When members of subordinate social groups gain admission to the residences of the overclass, the juxtaposition is pronounced. Maria, who previously had to recycle and reuse every drop of her body’s filthy waste water with clearsacs, now engages in profligate waste of pristine, fresh water:
"she filled it to the top... drank it all. She filled another… held the cool glass to her cheek. Drank it, too... water crashed into the glass as she filled it a third time. She couldn’t get enough. She was too bloated to drink it now, but she couldn’t let it go. She carried the glass back into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Gallons and gallons and gallons of water poured over her… gushed down her body and disappeared down the drain." (176)
Ultimately, the overclass are even able to control and use their water resources to destroy subordinate social groups, like the Harkonnens do to the Fremen, and like petro-capitalists on Earth do to Middle Eastern and South American populations. When water-rich California grows “tired of negotiating for its share of the river” (187), instead of sharing its accumulated wealth with poorer groups, it destroys a large dam, causing water to ironically “rush down through canyons, cross state lines, inundate towns, sweep away all traces of human activity along its margins” (187). In The Water Knife, humans do possess the ability to control and harness natural resources to shape their environment but, unfortunately, it is done irresponsibly by the privileged few who then use their control to destroy their subordinates to maintain the status quo.
Like in The Water Knife, in Dune, water shapes nearly every aspect of life. Arrakis is so devoid of water that human life is only made possible through the wearing of unnatural technology such as ‘stillsuits’, garments that recycle the body’s urine, faeces and sweat into potable water (Herbert 31). Due to a complicated and unnatural “tripod” political structure consisting of “the Imperial Household balanced against the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad, and between them, the Guild with its damnable monopoly on interstellar transport” (24), the waterless Arrakis sits economically and politically at the centre of the galaxy due to it being the only planet known to produce the valuable spice, melange. An analogy to the petroleum oil of planet Earth, melange is essential to facilitating intergalactic trade, and “squeeze[d]” (266) out of Arrakis by foreign occupiers like the Harkonnens and Imperials while driving the occupied Fremen “into utter submission” (4898), reflecting real events such as the Suez Canal Crisis, Abadan Crisis, and the ‘Scramble for Africa’ [see footnotes 3,4,5]. The centring of plot on a spice-exploited, waterless planet, and with the only recognised social protection system, the Imperial ‘faufreluches’, which provided “a place for every man and every man in his place” (592) being “not rigidly guarded on Arrakis” (3), water is “indeed, power” (144), and its possession determines both wealth and social status. When House Atreides first occupies Arrakis, the local populace riots due to the strain the increased immigration would put on existing water resources, knowing that the privileged ruling class, with their “cistern… holding[ing] fifty thousand liters… always kept full” would survive easily while “the very poor die” (68). The privileged and “Noble Born” (57) Lady Jessica experiences this disparity first-hand when she discovers the special arcology-esque climate room in the Arrakeen castle using the cistern’s precious water supply at the expense of the dying poor: “Water everywhere in this room - on a planet where water was the most precious juice of life. Water being wasted so conspicuously that it shocked her to inner stillness… it was a deliberate statement of power and wealth” (78). Arrakis is, put simply, “a one-crop planet… it supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings” (309). In the dry climate of economically exploited Arrakis, water simply equates to wealth, and its unfair distribution and allocation mean that the underclass Fremen simply have no chance of advancing up any rung of the social ladder.
The hyper-commodification of water and the resultant social stratification due to its unequal distribution mean that in Dune, social customs and practices are inextricably linked to it, albeit differently depending upon which end of the class spectrum the social group belongs to. Liet Kynes posits that the Arrakeen “climate demands a special attitude toward water… you waste nothing that contains water” (Herbert 126), and this maxim shapes nearly every aspect of Fremen social custom. In Fremen culture, the act of spitting in the direction of a new acquaintance, or giving “the gift of [the] body’s moisture”, is considered one of the highest tokens of respect that can be given, while the simple and usually involuntary act of shedding tears is known as giving “moisture to the dead” (354), a sacred Fremen ritual. Extreme water scarcity, coupled with its natural abundance in the human body, means that Fremen practices regarding death almost exclusively revolve around extraction and reallocation of water from corpses in the event of deaths: “all of a man’s water, ultimately, belongs to his people - to his tribe… it’s a necessity… a dead man surely no longer requires that water” (153). The water of all dead Fremen is recycled back into the tribe’s reservoirs, and if a tribe member is killed in combat by another tribe member, then “combat water belongs to the winner” (350). Collaboration between Fremen tribes and outside groups is also dependent upon making a “water decision” (235), which generally means the zero-sum sacrifice of at least one tribe’s member’s life for their water in exchange for help from the other group. While the social customs of the Fremen underclass revolve around the careful reallocation and preservation of the scarce resource, the opposite is true for the overclass, where the customs are centred on flaunting of wealth, waste and “every degradation of the spirit that can be conceived” to maintain the status quo and drive the underclass into submission:
"Flanking the doorway… were broad laving basins of ornate yellow and green tile. Each basin had its rack of towels. It was the custom... for guests as they entered to dip their hands ceremoniously into a basin, slop several cups of water onto the floor, dry their hands on a towel and fling the towel into the growing puddle at the door. After the dinner, beggars gathered outside to get the water squeezings from the towels." (141)
On present day Earth, where water scarcity is a nascent issue disproportionately affecting those with reduced ability to make meaningful changes, the capacity to imagine the consequences of water scarcity and its potential to negatively impact social and cultural customs, and make changes that could prevent them, is a powerful epistemological tool. Imagining possible social structures in the future in order to retroactively influence them through present action is analagous to Jean-Pierre Duquy’s strategy for social change (qtd. in Zizek in Otto 182), which states:
"We should perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past [the past of the future] counterfactual possibilities [“if we had done this and that, the calamity that we are now experiencing would not have occurred!”] upon which we then act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny - and then, against the backdrop of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past."
Put simply, without the capacity to imagine the potential future negative social dynamics arising from present courses of action or inaction, it is impossible to make meaningful and effective decisions that may improve them, and ecocritical SF serves as an epistemological tool for this.
In The Water Knife, extreme water scarcity and hyper-commodification has relegated the United States of America to a form of Dune-esque pre-democratic feudalism, evidencing both how fragile human political systems are, and how crucial resources like water are to social, political and economic stability. Compared with Dune, the so-called “gap between the actual world and the narrative world” (Otto 179) is drastically reduced, as it is set along the 100th meridian, encompassing the south-western US states of Arizona, California, Texas and Nevada. These areas have been severely water deficient for centuries (Boronkay & Abbott 137), and climate change is set to exacerbate the already serious problem by “alter[ing] the runoff of many rivers due to changes in precipitation patterns… increas[ing] the demand for river water, due to more frequent droughts and greater stress being placed on other sources of water,” thus increasing the risk of armed conflict (Tir & Stinnett 211). In The Water Knife, the conflict is centred on access to the Colorado River, one with a long history of actual ‘water wars’ dating back centuries, including the 1960 State Water Project and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where Northern California and Southern California engaged in heated legal debate over the construction of the State Water Project dam to redistribute water from the North to the South (Boronkay & Abbott 137-8); the opposition to hydraulic mining during the height of the California Gold Rush (138); the Owens Valley/Mono Lake-Los Angeles Aqueduct, revolving around violent public opposition to a Los Angeles aqueduct to divert water away from Mono Lake during the 1930s (138); the 1922 Colorado River Compact, a contentious agreement by various states on supposedly equitable division and redistribution of the river’s water (Dineen 212); and; various other conflicts that exist to this day. Using many of these real-life conflicts, particularly The Colorado River Compact, as the backdrop for its narrative, The Water Knife “takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions” (Otto 180). Bacigalupi’s “potentially devastating conclusion” is the consequence of a ‘Big Daddy Drought’ in North America drastically reducing the water volume of the Colorado River. Consequently, as in any ecosystem, complex Dune-esque interrelationships between component parts, coupled with feedback loops, mean that a range of unforeseen problems begin to manifest: “Snowpack up in the rockies… No one planned for that… dust storms and forest fires are playing hell with our solar grid. No one planned for that… all that dust is speeding snowmelt, so even when we get a good year, it melts too fast or else evaporates. No one planned for that… Hydropower… she laughed… that’s a shot except in the spring because you can’t get a decent head in the reservoirs” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 60). The use of real life ‘water wars’ and the depiction of the worst case, dystopian scenario as their resolution “raise[s] in readers the question ‘Does that seem like something we want to be going toward?’” (Otto 182) and strengthens the desire to change current practices, moving away from a cutthroat, neoliberal, extraction-oriented paradigm to a more ecologically sustainable one.
In The Water Knife, as in Dune, water often exists as a major form of currency to be traded, but with the underclasses, as usual, having less access to and control over it compared with the ruling classes. Inside the ruling Cypress Arcology where the water distribution of the Colorado River is controlled, it is traded as if on a present-day stock exchange: “Maps of the state of Nevada and the Colorado basin floor to ceiling on the walls… emergency purchase prices on streamflows and futures offers scrolled via NASDAQ, available open-market purchase options….” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 7). In addition to being broadly traded as a major commodity on international stock and resource markets, it is traded in cut-throat and hyper-capitalist fashion according to the laws of supply and demand among residents of the Fremen-esque slums of South-Western USA. Within each slum community, extreme demand and almost no supply means citizens must “do whatever they needed to get a little money, to buy a little water, to keep going for another day” (102). To perpetuate this hyper-capitalist, neoliberal structure, the overclass have installed a pump where residents can purchase volumes of water for market price according to “how much water is down underground… when it gets low, the price goes up so people will slow down and not take so much. When the aquifer gets full, the price goes down” (46). Water’s price in the free market is almost as fluid as water itself: “The pump’s glow flickered and dropped to $6.66. Went back up to $6.95. It flickered again. $6.20. And then back up to $6.95… $6.90… $6.50… $5.95. $6.05. The price was definitely falling… Market price, falling like an angel coming down from Heaven… Free fall… $5.85. $4.70. $3.60… it was almost like buying futures” (46-7). Something as simple as fluctuating value on water has immense impact on social activity in the slums as the suffering masses move to take advantage of the drop in water price: “people started running, seeing finally what was happening. Word spread into the Merry Perry tents and pulled people away from lighting candles… Others were swarming over to gawp at the price, then running to tell others about the miraculous plunge. People began crowding the other spigots” (48). The water price is, however, only ever lowered temporarily, causing the desired social turmoil before the upper classes bring its value back out of reach of the slums: “the big boys would sit up… automated systems would catch the fall and start pumping… rich people’s automated household systems caught the price break and started pumping gallons into cisterns” (49). Even when members of the underclass do accumulate water resources, their position is made precarious and they must “turn [it] into money… can’t just sit on it” (74). Any attempt by the underclass to leverage water as the overclass do is crushed, as Maria’s operation is thwarted by local, government-backed water-mafia: “Looks to me like you’re starting up some kind of water bank here. Got your own liquid empire… buying, selling, trading. Looks pretty icy, girl” (95). The underclass suffer the ultimate humiliation to the ruling class and, like Maria, are forced to hand back their water gains: “she reached into her bra and pulled out the wad of sweaty bills. Started to peel off singles in green and yuan in red. Cato held out his hand... reached over and took the whole cash wad” (95). In The Water Knife, water is just one of the keys to power, and even when the underclass begin to make small water gains, they are quashed by the overclass.
Compared with Dune, where water simply means wealth and therefore class, The Water Knife’s class structures are slightly more nuanced, and Bacigalupi constructs an apocalyptic, post-democratic and post-federalist United States of America that has returned to a state of quasi neo-feudalism, replete with complex interminglings of race and place. Feudalism is a pre-capitalist, pre-democratic, hierarchical social, political and economic system that centres on the relationship between property, land, resources and power (Brown 1). Put simply, more property and resources, or land, means more power, and formal systems of social, political and economic equality, in other words a social democracy, do not exist. In The Water Knife, this neo-feudalism manifests in land being strictly owned and physically walled off by social groups to preserve and control access to the flowing river, and never changing hands. This is contrasted with the bioregional, neoliberal political system prevalent in Dune, where the focus is less on land but more on resources, and where physical territory frequently and forcibly changes hands to facilitate their forced extraction. Like the medieval castles of old feudal times, the utopian, climate-controlled ‘arcologies’ in the The Water Knife represent ultimate wealth and decadence, with their resource-rich inhabitants oblivious to the suffering outside at their expense. In Nevada’s Cypress Arcology utopia, an almost carnivalesque atmosphere is created:
"mothers pushing double strollers; hourly girlfriends clinging to the arms of weekend boyfriends, tourists from all over the world, snapping pics and messaging home that they had seen the Hanging Gardens of Las Vegas. Ferns and waterfalls and coffee shops. Down on entertainment floors, the dealers would be changing shifts. In the hotels the twenty-four-hour party people would be waking up and taking their first shots of vodka, spraying glitter on their skin. Maids and waiters and busboys and cooks and maintenance staff would all be hard at work, striving to keep their jobs... " (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 7)
Even in the nearly-destroyed city of Phoenix, inhabitants of the Taiyang Arcology live as a sheltered overclass, juxtaposed against the dystopia outside: “Relief agency workers, drilling speculators, borderland contractors with gold teeth, smiling, the men and women who prospered in the heart of disaster... nice splashing waterfall to drink espresso next to; lots of Chinese office girls walking around in their short skirts,” while “out in the dark zone… that place is a fucking mess” (102-4). The dystopian ‘dark zone’ surrounding the arcologies is a complex intermingling of race and place, comprising the “gaunt refugees of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico” (84). The listing of the country of Mexico with two present-day USA states is an ironic allusion to present-day race relations in North America: in parts of the USA including those two states, Mexicans are feared as the ‘other’, labelled as ‘illegals’ and ‘border-jumpers’, but in Bacigalupi’s imagined world, those lines have blurred, with Texans and Arizonans ‘othered’ by states further North and with more access to water. Women from Texas are generally forced into prostitution and objectified as “Texas bangbangs” (31) and generally cling to the bottom rung of the social ladder: “desperate Texas girls… Jamie would never have stooped so low” (142). Instead of USA border guards protecting the entire country’s richer resources from international immigration from places such as Mexico, states with rich water resources now protect against immigration from the other, poorer states with “militias assigned to hunting down Zoners and Texans who cross [the] border” (59). The underclass now consists of a multi-ethnic, multinational and multilingual group of individuals of “people babbling in Spanish, English and Dallas Drawl, and all sounding pretty much the same in mourning” (123). The status of social groups in The Water Knife is less due to identity markers such as nationality, language or ethnicity. Water means power, and powerful social groups form where water is abundant regardless of the race or nationality, with formerly fluid and superficial state borders between rich and poor states now strongly enforced to preserve the status quo, while the formerly relevant and strongly guarded national border that divided race is now non-existent.
Chapter 3: The Politics of Energy in The Windup Girl
Like Dune and The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2009 biopunk novel The Windup Girl explores an ecology gone wrong, but with resource commodification focused more on calorie production and expenditure through food, genetic code, and labour. Set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, near-future Earth, climate change has resulted in massive sea level rise, fossil fuels have become depleted and are now obsolete, altering the energy paradigm. The world’s food supply has been eradicated due to a combination of the rising sea and the consequences of unfettered, neoliberal production and hyper-commodifcation of Genetically-Modified Organism (GMO) foods resulting in deadly mutated diseases, plagues, and inedible food crops. Ironically, however, calories from GMO foods now represent the only major energy source. Like water in The Water Knife and Dune, well-engineered food that can resist disease to remain fit for human consumption and like water, sustain life, is commodified to the extreme like currency or shares on a stock market: “A unique gene that resists a calorie plague or utilizes nitrogen more effectively sends profits sky-rocketing” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 7). Due to the depletion of fossil fuels and other natural resources, calories produced by human and animal labour are used as ‘fuel’ which is stored in ‘kink-springs’ (9), returning the world “to a state as it was before the Anthropocene” (Schmeink 79), thus creating a zero-sum game between labour and food, where “any calorie spent as energy finds painstaking correspondence in a calorie eaten” (79). Possession of, and control over food for its comprised calories then becomes central to power and class structures within the plot, as a person forced to produce more calories performing labour than they can consume in food is doomed to starvation, whereas characters with access to food and no requirement to perform labour thrive, and occupy powerful and respected class positions. Anderson Lake, the American ‘calorie man’ and Bangkok factory owner, is revered in almost godlike fashion by his local labourers who, despite scorning him as ‘farang’ [foreigner], ironically “look up and tear away their breathing protection to wai [see footnote 7] deeply to the man who feeds them” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 15). Outside of characters like Anderson, much of the world’s population “are starving” (11) due to depleted food availability, and consider the scavenged offal from the remains of a dead megodont “a lucky source of calories” (32) they can expend to keep producing paid labour. This is in stark contrast to Anderson, who is able to afford his own megodonts and humans to do the calorie-burning labour for him, thus perpetuating the stratification cycle: “their enormous heads hanging low, prehensile trunks scraping the ground as they tread slow circles around power spindles. The genehacked animals comprise the living heart of the factory’s drive system, providing energy for conveyor lines and venting fans and manufacturing machinery” (14). Anderson even employs human labour to wind his own personal cooling fan (87), and is able to gorge himself to excess on expensive GMO food that has stayed ahead of the diseases: “He rolls the ngaw around in his mouth, eyes closed, tasting the past, savoring the time when this fruit must have once flourished” (6). Large ‘calorie companies’, such as AgriGen and PurCAL, named like petro-corporations, exercise complete control over food production and distribution, and they ruthlessly compete with each other to produce the most valuable food to sell, growing richer and more powerful as more diseases and plagues kill off both natural food and competitors’ stocks: “Blister rust is mutating every three seasons now. Recreational generippers are hacking into our designs for for TotalNutrient and SoyPRO. Our last strain of HiGro Corn only beat weevil predation by sixty percent, and now we suddenly hear you’re sitting on top of a genetic goldmine” (10). In The Windup Girl, control over, possession of and access to food confer social status, and individuals and groups most able to exert control over food thrive, while the underclass remain “starving and begging for the scientific advances of the calorie monopolies” (7).
In the post-oil world of The Windup Girl, the depletion of Earth’s oil does not see the expected disappearance of the petro-capitalist and neoliberal ideologies its extraction and commodification was inextricably fused to. Instead, Bacigalupi replaces petro-corporations with calorie-corporations whose underlying doctrines are capitalist free trade and resource acquisition, both of which are conducted exclusively at the expense of ecology. The Windup Girl makes no mention of ‘The United States of America’ as a country, suggesting that it has morphed into a conglomerate of capitalist corporate entities, keeping in line with neoliberalism’s underlying principle of expanded corporate power at the expense of the nation state (Donnelly 161). In contrast, Thailand, under the leadership of its environment ministry, has resisted neoliberalism and remained utterly protectionist, banning free trade through its borders, resulting in strong government institutions and limited calorie-corporate control, but complex environmental red tape and prehistoric technology: “it will take time to win an approval from the crown to cut another tree of this diameter, and then to float the log down from the North… and all that time we will be running under constrained power” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 34). Even the manual kink-springs, prehistoric by today’s standards, are considered a “revolution in energy storage… we haven’t had power this portable since gasoline” (10). Donnelly (162) posits that Bacigalupi’s ironic imagining of a future featuring a “contradiction between hi-tech innovation and historical regression” is a metaphor for the “perplexing doubleness… of atavism and new-fangledness” (Retort, qtd. in Donnelly 162) inherent in neoliberalism. Bacigalupi’s dystopian solution to the problem of capitalist and neoliberalist endurance appears to be, in the absence of ecologically literate humans, the self-destruction of them due to their ecological meddling, and their subsequent replacement with better-evolved or better-engineered posthumans who can progress from the atavism of capitalism and neoliberalism:
"But you die now because...you people refuse to adapt. You cling to some idea of a humanity that evolved in concert with your environment over millenia, and which you now, perversely, refuse to remain in lockstep with… our environment has changed. If we wish to remain at the top of our food chain, we will evolve. Or we will refuse, and go the way of the dinosaurs… Evolve or die. It has always been nature’s guiding principle." (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 323)
In other words, according to Donnelly (167), Bacigalupi is “didactically galvanising social and political change in the present” to correct the “dilemma of social organization” that capitalism and neoliberalism represent, suggesting that our current political and social structures must evolve, and attitudes towards resource management and allocation must improve if a utopian solution to the environment is to be achieved.
In The WIndup Girl, water is a complex and ironic symbol: despite its Dune-esque commodification due to scarcity for some characters, it is also ironically a problem to be overcome due to its overabundance for others. On the one hand, many characters, including Emiko, the titular ‘windup girl’, must carefully gather, store and conserve clean water for drinking and bathing: “She… goes to the bucket she stowed the night before. There is no water on the upper levels, no pressure to reach so high… so every night she struggles up the stairs with her water bucket… it is a ritual process, a careful cleansing… a precise thing… a worship of scarcity” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 138). On the other hand, characters on the ground find water an ever-present nuisance, and even existential threat to their survival. Climate change has caused a massive rise in sea level, and Bangkok has survived only through construction of a large seawall that “hold[s] back the weight of the blue ocean… which has swallowed New York and Rangoon, Mumbai and New Orleans” (13). Much of the city is subject to “heat… so intense that it seems no one can breathe” (93), yet ironically, if the nearby seawall failed, “the entire slum would drown in nearly cool water” (93). Even water through humidity plays havoc with “manufacturing process[es] conceptualised in drier climes” (17), and water is a dangerous and unpredictable variable that seems to attack from all angles, at any time: “...massive holes cut into the red earth, lined to keep out the seep of the water table that lies close below. Wet land, and yet the surface bakes in the heat. The dry season never ends. Will the monsoon even come this year? Will it save them or drown them?” (317). Perhaps the greatest irony, however, is Emiko’s relationship with water: due to her not being designed for a tropical climate, she constantly overheats, then requires cooling down with water or ice (55). On one of her frequent escapes from her brothel, she overheats to a point approaching death, and Anderson is forced to submerge her in the ocean, however, she “sinks like a stone” (150) due to her heavily engineered body. Anderson is forced to keep her semi-submerged so that the water cools her body and saves her life, but also so that its excess does not drown and kill her. This complex irony stems from Emiko’s identity as unnatural: her aversion to water, the most critical natural substance for maintaining life, is a constant reminder of her being as a construct of technology and an antithesis to nature.
Secondary to control over and access to food and calories, in The Windup Girl, social status is also afforded via a complex interplay of place and race, with these factors crucial in individual agency to control resources. Hock Seng, a Malaysian ‘yellow card’, in other words an ethnic Chinese-Malaysian purged from Malaysia into Thailand by the ethnic Malays several decades earlier, is afforded varying degrees of social status depending upon his present context. As a manager for the foreign AgriGen factory with control over its resources and finances, Hock Seng, known as “king of yellow cards” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 180) seems, superficially at least, to enjoy a position of elevation compared to the ethnic Thais and other yellow cards that he denigrates in his factory: “You think another fifty Thais wouldn’t like your job? A thousand yellow cards?” (177). ‘King of the yellow cards’ is “not a title to aspire to” (180), however, and Hock Seng is continually hamstrung by his ‘otherness’ and non-Thai ethnicity by most Thai institutions and groups:
"The white shirts [the armed enforcement wing of the Environment Ministry]… their favourite target is yellow cards. They like to test their batons on yellow card skulls, like to teach them lessons... The Environment Ministry sees yellow cards the same way it sees the other invasive species and plagues it manages. Given a choice, the white shirts would slaughter every yellow card Chinese." (298)
Mirroring the centralised control the Emperor in Dune holds over all intergalactic trade, Hock Seng, due to his yellow card status, is prevented from engaging in various business activities, and must seek the approval of the imperial-esque Thai ‘Dung Lord’ in order to become a ‘yellow card shipping king” and therefore “truly legitimate” (187). Lao Gu, another yellow card, seems to exist below Hock Seng and the ethnic Thais, but still far above the rest of the yellow cards due to his employment. Using parallelism for emphasis, he is objectified and dehumanised as “nothing but a scarecrow, dressed in rags, but still, he is lucky. Alive, when most of his people are dead. Employed, while his fellow Malayan refugees are packed like slaughter chickens into sweltering Expansion towers. Lao Gu has stringy muscle on his bones and enough money to indulge in Singha cigarettes. To the rest of the yellow card refugees he is as lucky as a king” (8). Ethnic Thais, like yellow cards, occupy a range of social positions dependent upon their place of origin and employment. While generally above the illegitimate yellow card refugees, many rural Thais are faced with a dichotomy between back-breaking, dangerous low-paid factory work and its inherent subordination to foreigners like Anderson and Hock Seng, or being “back in Thonburi, picking through chicken guts and hoping you aren’t hit with flu” (178). Thais who are lucky enough for roles in important government ministries form the social overclass: as the leader of the ‘white shirts’, Jaidee rises to “hero of the people” (301), and even rank-and-file workers enjoy positions of authority over regular Thais: “the job... had the potential to pay well and a pretty girl might pay attention to a man in dress whites, a man who also had the authority to shut down her pad thai cart (258, original emphasis). In The Windup Girl, the two most significant factors determining social rank and access to resources are race and place, which in turn affect economic power, and a complex interplay between these factors determines an individual’s status.
In the post-oil world of The Windup Girl, the depletion of Earth’s oil does not see the expected disappearance of the petro-capitalist and neoliberal ideologies its extraction and commodification was inextricably fused to. Instead, Bacigalupi replaces petro-corporations with calorie-corporations whose underlying doctrines are capitalist free trade and resource acquisition, both of which are conducted exclusively at the expense of ecology. The Windup Girl makes no mention of ‘The United States of America’ as a country, suggesting that it has morphed into a conglomerate of capitalist corporate entities, keeping in line with neoliberalism’s underlying principle of expanded corporate power at the expense of the nation state (Donnelly 161). In contrast, Thailand, under the leadership of its environment ministry, has resisted neoliberalism and remained utterly protectionist, banning free trade through its borders, resulting in strong government institutions and limited calorie-corporate control, but complex environmental red tape and prehistoric technology: “it will take time to win an approval from the crown to cut another tree of this diameter, and then to float the log down from the North… and all that time we will be running under constrained power” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 34). Even the manual kink-springs, prehistoric by today’s standards, are considered a “revolution in energy storage… we haven’t had power this portable since gasoline” (10). Donnelly (162) posits that Bacigalupi’s ironic imagining of a future featuring a “contradiction between hi-tech innovation and historical regression” is a metaphor for the “perplexing doubleness… of atavism and new-fangledness” (Retort, qtd. in Donnelly 162) inherent in neoliberalism. Bacigalupi’s dystopian solution to the problem of capitalist and neoliberalist endurance appears to be, in the absence of ecologically literate humans, the self-destruction of them due to their ecological meddling, and their subsequent replacement with better-evolved or better-engineered posthumans who can progress from the atavism of capitalism and neoliberalism:
"But you die now because...you people refuse to adapt. You cling to some idea of a humanity that evolved in concert with your environment over millenia, and which you now, perversely, refuse to remain in lockstep with… our environment has changed. If we wish to remain at the top of our food chain, we will evolve. Or we will refuse, and go the way of the dinosaurs… Evolve or die. It has always been nature’s guiding principle." (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 323)
In other words, according to Donnelly (167), Bacigalupi is “didactically galvanising social and political change in the present” to correct the “dilemma of social organization” that capitalism and neoliberalism represent, suggesting that our current political and social structures must evolve, and attitudes towards resource management and allocation must improve if a utopian solution to the environment is to be achieved.
In The WIndup Girl, water is a complex and ironic symbol: despite its Dune-esque commodification due to scarcity for some characters, it is also ironically a problem to be overcome due to its overabundance for others. On the one hand, many characters, including Emiko, the titular ‘windup girl’, must carefully gather, store and conserve clean water for drinking and bathing: “She… goes to the bucket she stowed the night before. There is no water on the upper levels, no pressure to reach so high… so every night she struggles up the stairs with her water bucket… it is a ritual process, a careful cleansing… a precise thing… a worship of scarcity” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 138). On the other hand, characters on the ground find water an ever-present nuisance, and even existential threat to their survival. Climate change has caused a massive rise in sea level, and Bangkok has survived only through construction of a large seawall that “hold[s] back the weight of the blue ocean… which has swallowed New York and Rangoon, Mumbai and New Orleans” (13). Much of the city is subject to “heat… so intense that it seems no one can breathe” (93), yet ironically, if the nearby seawall failed, “the entire slum would drown in nearly cool water” (93). Even water through humidity plays havoc with “manufacturing process[es] conceptualised in drier climes” (17), and water is a dangerous and unpredictable variable that seems to attack from all angles, at any time: “...massive holes cut into the red earth, lined to keep out the seep of the water table that lies close below. Wet land, and yet the surface bakes in the heat. The dry season never ends. Will the monsoon even come this year? Will it save them or drown them?” (317). Perhaps the greatest irony, however, is Emiko’s relationship with water: due to her not being designed for a tropical climate, she constantly overheats, then requires cooling down with water or ice (55). On one of her frequent escapes from her brothel, she overheats to a point approaching death, and Anderson is forced to submerge her in the ocean, however, she “sinks like a stone” (150) due to her heavily engineered body. Anderson is forced to keep her semi-submerged so that the water cools her body and saves her life, but also so that its excess does not drown and kill her. This complex irony stems from Emiko’s identity as unnatural: her aversion to water, the most critical natural substance for maintaining life, is a constant reminder of her being as a construct of technology and an antithesis to nature.
Secondary to control over and access to food and calories, in The Windup Girl, social status is also afforded via a complex interplay of place and race, with these factors crucial in individual agency to control resources. Hock Seng, a Malaysian ‘yellow card’, in other words an ethnic Chinese-Malaysian purged from Malaysia into Thailand by the ethnic Malays several decades earlier, is afforded varying degrees of social status depending upon his present context. As a manager for the foreign AgriGen factory with control over its resources and finances, Hock Seng, known as “king of yellow cards” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 180) seems, superficially at least, to enjoy a position of elevation compared to the ethnic Thais and other yellow cards that he denigrates in his factory: “You think another fifty Thais wouldn’t like your job? A thousand yellow cards?” (177). ‘King of the yellow cards’ is “not a title to aspire to” (180), however, and Hock Seng is continually hamstrung by his ‘otherness’ and non-Thai ethnicity by most Thai institutions and groups:
"The white shirts [the armed enforcement wing of the Environment Ministry]… their favourite target is yellow cards. They like to test their batons on yellow card skulls, like to teach them lessons... The Environment Ministry sees yellow cards the same way it sees the other invasive species and plagues it manages. Given a choice, the white shirts would slaughter every yellow card Chinese." (298)
Mirroring the centralised control the Emperor in Dune holds over all intergalactic trade, Hock Seng, due to his yellow card status, is prevented from engaging in various business activities, and must seek the approval of the imperial-esque Thai ‘Dung Lord’ in order to become a ‘yellow card shipping king” and therefore “truly legitimate” (187). Lao Gu, another yellow card, seems to exist below Hock Seng and the ethnic Thais, but still far above the rest of the yellow cards due to his employment. Using parallelism for emphasis, he is objectified and dehumanised as “nothing but a scarecrow, dressed in rags, but still, he is lucky. Alive, when most of his people are dead. Employed, while his fellow Malayan refugees are packed like slaughter chickens into sweltering Expansion towers. Lao Gu has stringy muscle on his bones and enough money to indulge in Singha cigarettes. To the rest of the yellow card refugees he is as lucky as a king” (8). Ethnic Thais, like yellow cards, occupy a range of social positions dependent upon their place of origin and employment. While generally above the illegitimate yellow card refugees, many rural Thais are faced with a dichotomy between back-breaking, dangerous low-paid factory work and its inherent subordination to foreigners like Anderson and Hock Seng, or being “back in Thonburi, picking through chicken guts and hoping you aren’t hit with flu” (178). Thais who are lucky enough for roles in important government ministries form the social overclass: as the leader of the ‘white shirts’, Jaidee rises to “hero of the people” (301), and even rank-and-file workers enjoy positions of authority over regular Thais: “the job... had the potential to pay well and a pretty girl might pay attention to a man in dress whites, a man who also had the authority to shut down her pad thai cart (258, original emphasis). In The Windup Girl, the two most significant factors determining social rank and access to resources are race and place, which in turn affect economic power, and a complex interplay between these factors determines an individual’s status.
Chapter 4: Ecofeminist Politics in Dune, The Windup Girl & The Water Knife
Ecofeminism is a philosophical and political theory that posits that humanity’s failure to recognise and act upon its various ecological crises is due to it having lost its immersion in ‘nature’, which is also reflected in the poor treatment of human minorities and the ‘other’, including women (Alonso 2). As Dune, The Water Knife and The Windup Girl present differing degrees of human treatment of ecologies, they present differing treatments of women. In Dune, the various women characters, like the various planets, are treated differently depending on their perceived value by men. The Bene Gesserit order are a large, all-female and extremely powerful religio-political organisation that demands measures of both fear and respect throughout the galaxy. The “witchlike, nunlike adepts” (Reid 175) of the order are sought throughout the galaxy in various contexts: the young as brides by the the most powerful, exclusively male-dominated groups in the galaxy, including Princess Irulan in the Imperium and The Lady Jessica in House Atreides. Early in the novel, the Emperor’s truthsayer, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, and The Lady Jessica meet to discuss their plan to produce the ‘Kwisatz Haderach’, a male adept who would enable the group to see into the past, present and future at every location, effectively becoming masters of all knowledge (Herbert 13). Mohiam is able to exercise full control of the male Paul by using “The Voice… which permits an adept to control others merely by selected tone shadings of the voice” (607), a feature of the school that gives them direct control over all male characters. Their power, however, is not limited to an individual’s control over another. Through their religious arm, the Missionaria Protectiva, which is “charged with sowing infectious superstitions on primitive worlds, thus opening those regions to exploitation” (598), the group are able to infiltrate various social groups and thus elevate the status of women inside them, including among the Fremen, who appoint their own Bene Gessit-inspired ‘Reverend Mothers’ into powerful shaman-like leadership positions. Ironically, however, the Bene Gesserit’s primary goal of achieving the ‘Kwisatz Haderach’ is fundamentally androcentric, even self-deprecating, as their very existence is premised upon producing a male who is more powerful than themselves. The Lady Jessica, while regal, educated and powerful, remains “totally devoted to her husband and son” (Reid 175) and never becomes the Duke’s actual wife as his “unwedded state gives some Houses hope they may yet ally with [him] through their marriage-able daughters” (115). Even the Fremen women, who are given adulation for being “as fierce as the men” (41) in battle, are objectified as mere possessions to be traded for the use of men, exemplified when Paul bests Jamis in battle and Fremen social rules dictate that all of the possessions of the defeated man, including his body’s water, his wives, and any offspring, belong to the male victor (386). Men are offered the deceased fighter’s wife as either “woman or servant” (387), whichever object the man chooses. Even Princess Irulan, the galaxy’s most senior woman and historian, is objectified, dehumanised and valued only in terms of male characters to which she is connected or by what she can provide in wealth to other males. When Paul defeats the emperor, he objectifies her by remarking that she is merely his “key to the throne, and that’s all she’ll ever be” (534). In simple terms, “women's' roles still did not liberate the male authors' characterizations from underlying assumptions that women exist for the furtherance of the men around them and have no independent goals of their own” (Reid 176). With a key focus of Dune being ecological improvement, it could be argued that in Dune, resources, planets and ecologies are actually treated better than most women.
In general, women in The Water Knife are afforded more social rank and agency than in Dune. Like in Dune, it seems that the ability of women to advance up the social ladder is utterly dependent upon which social group they belong to, but unlike Dune, gender roles are for more ambiguous and unclear. In water-rich California, Catherine Case, the “Queen of the Colorado” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 10), is given royal status and reigns as the most powerful individual of the most powerful social group, making every decision on distribution of the sole remaining water resource, the Colorado River: “Case had decided they didn’t deserve their water anymore… [she] had slaughtered the hell out of these neighbourhoods … her first graveyards, created in seconds when she shut off the water in their pipes” (10). Ironically, her actual power and ferocity stand in glaring contrast to her sexualised, diminutive and overtly feminine physique: “Slight and blond, skirt clinging to her hips. Her high heels clicked over broken glass. Tiny waist. Half-jacket in dark blue over the gold shimmer of her blouse. A splash of makeup that made her eyes large and dark…. The woman seemed too small and delicate to be the mastermind who turned towns into blowing dust” (52). The disconnect between Case’s appearance and her actions is further evidenced in description of her sharp intellect: “her data, her planning - all perfectly analyzed and arranged. Case liked details, all details. She found patterns, fit them together, and then turned them into her use” (55). Case’s description as an ironically intelligent and determined yet ferocious, calculated, analytical killing machine is juxtaposed against other women characters who inhabit different social groups. Lucy, the “muckracking journo extraordinaire” (134) from Phoenix possesses far less power than Case, yet is ironically masculised when she takes on the feminine Case: “Lucy was crazier than a body chaser… the woman had balls” (134). Even when compared directly with another male, Lucy is masculised in comparison: “Lucy, grubby from a week without a shower; Jamie, so polished that he almost glowed in the low light. Trimmed nails. Clean blond hair, not stringy with grease like hers, not gritty with the desert” (30). Women in groups further down the social ladder, for example, Texans, are objectified and zoomorphised as “little piece[s] of Texas tail” (204) and generally forced to work as prostitutes for wealthy men who live in the arcologies. Again, and with irony, the only outside women that are allowed into the arcologies and nearby clubs are in fact the lower-rung prostitutes: the sexualised “girls in skintight sheaths stood on tiptoe” are admitted by security, while for the journalist Lucy, her “outdoorsy dust mask… jeans [and] T-shirt told them she didn’t belong” (143) and she is ejected despite holding superior social rank. The ambiguation of gendered portrayals in The Water Knife, and the differing social status awarded different women suggests that in the novel, gender is less important than social class, but women in higher social groups generally fare better than their underclass counterparts depending upon their occupation. Despite the destruction of the natural ecology in The Water Knife, treatment of women is complex, but often more positive than in Dune.
Like The Water Knife, in The Windup Girl, gender is generally not an impediment to macro social advancement, and despite some female characters on a micro scale occupying positions subordinate to men, female characters do occupy various positions of power and wealth on a macro scale, including the most powerful of all. Upon Jaidee’s death, Kanya is promoted to leadership of the white shirts, and even despite the monks’ ironically having “taken vows not to touch women”, like the rest of the population they “lower their heads in courtesy to her, acknowledging her authority” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 461). Kanya is able to assert dominance and leadership over every male character she encounters as she orchestrates the final coup that will free Thailand from the calorie companies: “She nods sharply, and shoves him aside. He huddles against a wall as she begins barking orders to her men… Hock Seng is surprised at how quickly the unsmiling woman musters her troops... there can be no doubt that she is the one who is the master of the place” (464). In micro terms, however, women are often subservient to men, and even objectified for sexual gratification. It is common for working males to have a “pretty Thai girl doing [their] bidding” (180), and, during exotic performances in the Thai strip bar, men are expected to exercise dominance over sexually objectified women: “You call yourselves men? Fuck her! Look how she jerks. Look at her arms and legs when you push. Make her do her heechy-keechy dance” (341). The ambiguation of status between genders is continued further with the introduction of non-gender binary characters who are “boy and girl, together” (471). In The Windup Girl, while gender is generally not an impediment to social advancement on a macro scale, in micro terms, gender roles are blurred, but women are generally subservient to men, find it more difficult to gather wealth and resources, and are often objectified as a resource for sex. While differing in their respective treatments of gender, Dune, The Water Knife and The Windup Girl all possess what philosopher Warren (qtd. in Alonso 216) refers to as a hierarchical, “oppressive conceptual framework… a set of basic beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions… [that] ‘justify’ relationships of unjustified domination and subordination” which explains both the treatment of women, and the treatment of ecology within them.
In general, women in The Water Knife are afforded more social rank and agency than in Dune. Like in Dune, it seems that the ability of women to advance up the social ladder is utterly dependent upon which social group they belong to, but unlike Dune, gender roles are for more ambiguous and unclear. In water-rich California, Catherine Case, the “Queen of the Colorado” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 10), is given royal status and reigns as the most powerful individual of the most powerful social group, making every decision on distribution of the sole remaining water resource, the Colorado River: “Case had decided they didn’t deserve their water anymore… [she] had slaughtered the hell out of these neighbourhoods … her first graveyards, created in seconds when she shut off the water in their pipes” (10). Ironically, her actual power and ferocity stand in glaring contrast to her sexualised, diminutive and overtly feminine physique: “Slight and blond, skirt clinging to her hips. Her high heels clicked over broken glass. Tiny waist. Half-jacket in dark blue over the gold shimmer of her blouse. A splash of makeup that made her eyes large and dark…. The woman seemed too small and delicate to be the mastermind who turned towns into blowing dust” (52). The disconnect between Case’s appearance and her actions is further evidenced in description of her sharp intellect: “her data, her planning - all perfectly analyzed and arranged. Case liked details, all details. She found patterns, fit them together, and then turned them into her use” (55). Case’s description as an ironically intelligent and determined yet ferocious, calculated, analytical killing machine is juxtaposed against other women characters who inhabit different social groups. Lucy, the “muckracking journo extraordinaire” (134) from Phoenix possesses far less power than Case, yet is ironically masculised when she takes on the feminine Case: “Lucy was crazier than a body chaser… the woman had balls” (134). Even when compared directly with another male, Lucy is masculised in comparison: “Lucy, grubby from a week without a shower; Jamie, so polished that he almost glowed in the low light. Trimmed nails. Clean blond hair, not stringy with grease like hers, not gritty with the desert” (30). Women in groups further down the social ladder, for example, Texans, are objectified and zoomorphised as “little piece[s] of Texas tail” (204) and generally forced to work as prostitutes for wealthy men who live in the arcologies. Again, and with irony, the only outside women that are allowed into the arcologies and nearby clubs are in fact the lower-rung prostitutes: the sexualised “girls in skintight sheaths stood on tiptoe” are admitted by security, while for the journalist Lucy, her “outdoorsy dust mask… jeans [and] T-shirt told them she didn’t belong” (143) and she is ejected despite holding superior social rank. The ambiguation of gendered portrayals in The Water Knife, and the differing social status awarded different women suggests that in the novel, gender is less important than social class, but women in higher social groups generally fare better than their underclass counterparts depending upon their occupation. Despite the destruction of the natural ecology in The Water Knife, treatment of women is complex, but often more positive than in Dune.
Like The Water Knife, in The Windup Girl, gender is generally not an impediment to macro social advancement, and despite some female characters on a micro scale occupying positions subordinate to men, female characters do occupy various positions of power and wealth on a macro scale, including the most powerful of all. Upon Jaidee’s death, Kanya is promoted to leadership of the white shirts, and even despite the monks’ ironically having “taken vows not to touch women”, like the rest of the population they “lower their heads in courtesy to her, acknowledging her authority” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 461). Kanya is able to assert dominance and leadership over every male character she encounters as she orchestrates the final coup that will free Thailand from the calorie companies: “She nods sharply, and shoves him aside. He huddles against a wall as she begins barking orders to her men… Hock Seng is surprised at how quickly the unsmiling woman musters her troops... there can be no doubt that she is the one who is the master of the place” (464). In micro terms, however, women are often subservient to men, and even objectified for sexual gratification. It is common for working males to have a “pretty Thai girl doing [their] bidding” (180), and, during exotic performances in the Thai strip bar, men are expected to exercise dominance over sexually objectified women: “You call yourselves men? Fuck her! Look how she jerks. Look at her arms and legs when you push. Make her do her heechy-keechy dance” (341). The ambiguation of status between genders is continued further with the introduction of non-gender binary characters who are “boy and girl, together” (471). In The Windup Girl, while gender is generally not an impediment to social advancement on a macro scale, in micro terms, gender roles are blurred, but women are generally subservient to men, find it more difficult to gather wealth and resources, and are often objectified as a resource for sex. While differing in their respective treatments of gender, Dune, The Water Knife and The Windup Girl all possess what philosopher Warren (qtd. in Alonso 216) refers to as a hierarchical, “oppressive conceptual framework… a set of basic beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions… [that] ‘justify’ relationships of unjustified domination and subordination” which explains both the treatment of women, and the treatment of ecology within them.
Chapter 5: Science Fiction and the Politics of Science & Technology
If, as according to Alonso, humans have lost their embeddedness in nature, they may have found it in the ‘new-fangledness’ of science and technology, for better or for worse. As in Dune, characters in The Water Knife must make use of various unnatural technological resources in order for their bodies to survive, and this overreliance on technology appears to diminish characters’ sense of humanity and grounding in ‘nature’. In order to protect their naturally sensitive respiratory tracts and eyes from the now unnaturally harsh conditions in Arizona, characters must use unnatural “filter mask[s] and grit goggles” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 27) to simply see and breathe. Further, and ostensibly in allusion to Dune, the poor must recycle the body’s water with stillsuit-like ‘clearsacs’: “Maria closed the door and... crouched over the trench, wrinkling her nose at the stink, opened the Clearsac, and peed into it. When she was finished, she hung the sac on a nail, then finished her business, wiping with ragged squares of newsprint… pulled up her shorts and hurried out…” (75). In such a brutal, water-scarce environment, water consumption is a dehumanised, zero-sum game, meaning that for one individual to drink and survive, another has to perish, which is expressed by Angel’s maxim “somebody’s got to bleed if anybody’s going to drink” (164). Consequently, as in Dune, the body and its blood are extremely valuable commodities, and when Maria owes a local crime boss money, she fears he will “drain her blood and black market it and sell her ass to make up [the] quota” (76). Faced with utter misery and desolation in their eco-dystopian environment, the dehumanised and objectified Maria and Sarah turn to the psychoactive drug ‘bubble’ for escape and reassertion of their humanity and sexuality, much like the Fremen do in Dune with their spice-fuelled sietch orgy. In Dune, Paul remarks that they should let the Fremen “have their orgy… They’ve little enough pleasure out of life” (Herbert 404). Maria and Sarah allow themselves a similar blissful escape:
"Maria inhaled, and Sarah triggered the dose… Her body was alive. For the first time, she was truly alive. Maria felt everything… Everything was a caress... Every connection sent bubbles through her. She was horny, she realized... Maria danced, feeling ecstatic. Feeling free for the first time in her life. Not caring about anything. Not fearing anything. Maybe tomorrow they couldn’t pay rent and they were dead. Maybe this was the last good thing that would ever happen to her." (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 149 - 50)
This passage appears to be Bacigalupi alluding to and criticising the current ‘ignorance is bliss’ attitude of politicians towards climate change action, and preference for focussing on issues of much less importance. It is also a compelling vision of potentially negative human response towards an ecology gone wrong.
While on the one hand, Bacigalupi appears to warn against human over-reliance on science and technology at the expense of nature, on the other hand, he appears concerned that the world has turned away from science and reason as epistemological ways of knowing, instead turning to paradoxical epistemic faith, with potentially catastrophic consequences. According to Wapner & Elmer (qtd. in Milkoreit 1), “The need for imagination is particularly evident in the case of climate change” due to humanity’s slow and ineffective response to date. Bacigalupi, in a 2017 public post to his official Facebook social media account, stated he wrote The Water Knife due to concern “about America's willingness to pretend that climate change wasn't real, and wasn't a pressing problem” (Bacigalupi, Facebook Post 2017), and “wants his audience to consider the potential effects of not acting on climate change in the present and the massive future implications for human wellbeing” (Bacigalupi, qtd. in Milkoreit 12). Human-induced climate change is obviously a very real thing, the science behind it is quite settled, and its impacts will certainly affect human societies, yet in real life, anti-science, often pro-faith imaginaries often defeat pro-science imaginaries:
"In the United States, the conservative business-as-usual fossil-fuel powered imaginary of a future where climate change is a non-issue has so far been politically more successful than a liberal socio-climatic imaginary that relies on renewable energy, community-based adaptation and urban resilience… alliances of conservative actors in the US have been able to leverage their financial resources to shape the American climate discourse, keeping it focused on the question whether climate change is a problem rather than how to address it." (Milkoreit 7-10)
In The Water Knife, Bacigalupi uses the cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix as metaphors for the unchecked conclusions of these liberal and conservative imaginaries. On the one hand, Las Vegas, which “chose to rely on long-term data and careful planning” (Milkoreit 12), and according to Bacigalupi, said “the data doesn’t look good, let’s start planning” (qtd. in Milkoreit 12), not only survives, but thrives to become the most water-rich city in the US south-west. On the other hand, Phoenix and Texas, which disregarded the scientific data and chose the pro-faith, ‘Merry-Perry’, conservative path, said, “maybe it won’t be as bad” (Bacigalupi, qtd. in Milkoreit 12) and are both consequently devastated. Further, Bacigalupi’s characters metaphorise these sentiments themselves, and characters who rely on science and reason as epistemic ways of knowing generally succeed, whereas characters who rely on the paradox of epistemic faith and belief do not. On the one hand, Catherine Case, a case in point, rose to her supreme position of power through adherence to reason, scientific data and sense perception:
"You think someone like Catherine Case up in Vegas believes things? This was about looking and seeing. Pure data. You don’t believe data - you test data… if I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around… this should have been about testing and confirmation, and we turned it into a question of faith"(Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 31).
On the other hand, characters who cling to epistemic faith and belief uniformly fail. The novel’s Texan ‘Merry Perrys’, continually “praying for rain… they thought God would give them more rain when all the climatologists were predicting less, not more” (31) eschew science and reason in exchange for faith. In what is a real-life allusion to former Texas Governor and current United States Secretary of Energy Rick Perry who, during a 2011 Texas drought, proclaimed three days of prayer for rain (Montopolli), Merry Perrys are some of the novel’s poorest and most despised people: “They’re like roaches. You really can’t smash them fast enough” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 85). Put simply, The Water Knife, as an imaginary, provides readers with an image of “what is attainable through science and technology” (Jasanoff, qtd. in Milkoreit 2), and warns of the potentially devastating consequences of their disregard.
As a biopunk work of SF, Bacigalupi’s 2009 The Windup Girl is primarily concerned with human overreliance on biotechnology at the expense of ‘nature’, and the work features a race of genetically-engineered posthumans, or ‘New People’, who challenge real humans for class status. Emiko, a ‘new person’ is designed by the Japanese as a resource for skilled labour: “we have calories but no one to provide the labor. We need personal assistants. Workers” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 394). Despite often being hyper-humanised as “more Japanese than the Japanese” by her makers and “better than human in almost all other ways… faster, smarter, better eyesight, better hearing” (471), she is still objectified as a purely utilitarian device: “as necessary as a hoe for a farmer or a sword for a samurai” (395), replete with robotic servitude and obedience to humans genetically engineered in her temperament (397). Emiko’s social status descends further when outside of her natural habitat, in Thailand, where despite possessing full human sentience and range of emotion, she is one of the “soulless creatures imagined out of hell that the forest monk Buddhists claim... a creature unable to ever achieve a soul or a place in the cycles of rebirth and striving for Nirvana” (49). Occupying a place even below the yellow cards, who are “not as disadvantaged as that sorry creature” (42), Emiko is forced to work as a prostitute in a bar, where she is repeatedly raped by her superiors and other patrons as a novelty sexual act: “She forces Emiko down on the table. The men gather round as Kannika begins her abuse. Slowly, it builds, first playing at her nipples, then sliding the jadeite cock between her legs… The men cheer at Emiko’s degradation” (340). For the reader, witnessing Emiko’s suffering endears them to her common human nature, thus humanising her (Derrida, qtd. in Schmeink 100) while dehumanising her abusers. In spite of her relegation to an inferior position within social structures by human characters, Emiko makes numerous attempts to reassert her stolen humanity and sexuality, beginning an intimate relationship with Anderson, who “pay[s] her bar fines for days at a time” to see her, and making numerous attempts to escape her misery to the north where she believes she will achieve class equity among a rumoured community of other ‘new people’. When her requests to go north are ultimately denied and her “flight to freedom dies inside” (Schmeink 112), she asserts her hyper-humanity over the humans by killing them:
"Her fist is very fast. Raleigh-san’s throat is very soft. The old man topples, hands flying to his throat, eyes wide with shock… By the time Raleigh hits the floor, Emiko is already bolting across the room, toward the VIP door and the man who hurt her most. The man who sits and laughs with friends and thinks nothing of the pain he inflicts. She slams into the door. Men look up with surprise. Heads turn, mouths open to cry out. The bodyguards are reaching for their spring guns, but all of them are moving too slow. None of them are New People." (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 345)
Despite Emiko’s violence, she is shown to be more human than her dehumanising yet dehumanised attackers, as the abuse and violence of her rape scenes were so overtly described that readers are driven to empathise with and forgive her for the revenge she took upon them (Schmeink 99). Emiko thus occupies a fluid, complex social rank that fluctuates between and even exceeds the two extremes of human nature: the sub-human “evil half, ruled by the animal hungers of their genes”, to the human “civilised self, the side that knows the difference between niche and animal urge” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 3119), to the posthuman that, according to Schmeink (112), “asserts itself and realizes its full potential and natural superiority to the human.” Put simply, the unnatural Emiko is better than the natural humans.
The Water Knife also offers imaginative insight into how an ecology gone wrong might in turn interplay with human biology and psychology to further diminish ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’, with a range of complex analogies, metaphors and imagery at play. The uninhabitable desert, which is ever encroaching upon the last habitable cities, is anthropomorphised as the “Big Daddy Drought” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 10). Ironically, the anthropomorphic desert is anything but the fatherly figure for which it is named, and represents the most destructive force imaginable for the natural anthropod body, an analogy that perhaps human activity is, ironically, humanity’s largest existential threat. When Lucy enters the supposedly fatherly, anthro-desert even for a few short hours without technology, she “cough[s] into her hands. Last night’s storm had messed with her chest more than usual, bits of dust burying themselves deep in the dead-end branches of her lungs. She was coughing up blood and mucus again. More and more, the blood was a common thing that they never spoke about” (38). The altered climate is so harsh that even rocks and trees evolved for the desert are not spared, described with vivid visual imagery: “The Mojave lay sere and open, a burned, wind-abraded scape of oxidized [sic] gravels and pale clays, scabbed with creosote bushes and twisted Joshua trees. One hundred twenty degrees in the shade, and heat rippling off the pavement…” (80). The omnipresent, extreme heat is presented ironically through the reversal of human body temperature versus that of the environment with heat-detecting technology: “The combat software started picking out living creatures, cool spots in the dark heat of millennial suburban skeleton” (10), as opposed to naturally ‘warm’ spots that such software would look for in today’s climate. In The Water Knife, the anthropomorphised, ever-threatening desert, coupled with the ambiguation between the human and nonhuman, is an extended analogy suggesting that human activity is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity’s continued existence.
"Maria inhaled, and Sarah triggered the dose… Her body was alive. For the first time, she was truly alive. Maria felt everything… Everything was a caress... Every connection sent bubbles through her. She was horny, she realized... Maria danced, feeling ecstatic. Feeling free for the first time in her life. Not caring about anything. Not fearing anything. Maybe tomorrow they couldn’t pay rent and they were dead. Maybe this was the last good thing that would ever happen to her." (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 149 - 50)
This passage appears to be Bacigalupi alluding to and criticising the current ‘ignorance is bliss’ attitude of politicians towards climate change action, and preference for focussing on issues of much less importance. It is also a compelling vision of potentially negative human response towards an ecology gone wrong.
While on the one hand, Bacigalupi appears to warn against human over-reliance on science and technology at the expense of nature, on the other hand, he appears concerned that the world has turned away from science and reason as epistemological ways of knowing, instead turning to paradoxical epistemic faith, with potentially catastrophic consequences. According to Wapner & Elmer (qtd. in Milkoreit 1), “The need for imagination is particularly evident in the case of climate change” due to humanity’s slow and ineffective response to date. Bacigalupi, in a 2017 public post to his official Facebook social media account, stated he wrote The Water Knife due to concern “about America's willingness to pretend that climate change wasn't real, and wasn't a pressing problem” (Bacigalupi, Facebook Post 2017), and “wants his audience to consider the potential effects of not acting on climate change in the present and the massive future implications for human wellbeing” (Bacigalupi, qtd. in Milkoreit 12). Human-induced climate change is obviously a very real thing, the science behind it is quite settled, and its impacts will certainly affect human societies, yet in real life, anti-science, often pro-faith imaginaries often defeat pro-science imaginaries:
"In the United States, the conservative business-as-usual fossil-fuel powered imaginary of a future where climate change is a non-issue has so far been politically more successful than a liberal socio-climatic imaginary that relies on renewable energy, community-based adaptation and urban resilience… alliances of conservative actors in the US have been able to leverage their financial resources to shape the American climate discourse, keeping it focused on the question whether climate change is a problem rather than how to address it." (Milkoreit 7-10)
In The Water Knife, Bacigalupi uses the cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix as metaphors for the unchecked conclusions of these liberal and conservative imaginaries. On the one hand, Las Vegas, which “chose to rely on long-term data and careful planning” (Milkoreit 12), and according to Bacigalupi, said “the data doesn’t look good, let’s start planning” (qtd. in Milkoreit 12), not only survives, but thrives to become the most water-rich city in the US south-west. On the other hand, Phoenix and Texas, which disregarded the scientific data and chose the pro-faith, ‘Merry-Perry’, conservative path, said, “maybe it won’t be as bad” (Bacigalupi, qtd. in Milkoreit 12) and are both consequently devastated. Further, Bacigalupi’s characters metaphorise these sentiments themselves, and characters who rely on science and reason as epistemic ways of knowing generally succeed, whereas characters who rely on the paradox of epistemic faith and belief do not. On the one hand, Catherine Case, a case in point, rose to her supreme position of power through adherence to reason, scientific data and sense perception:
"You think someone like Catherine Case up in Vegas believes things? This was about looking and seeing. Pure data. You don’t believe data - you test data… if I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around… this should have been about testing and confirmation, and we turned it into a question of faith"(Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 31).
On the other hand, characters who cling to epistemic faith and belief uniformly fail. The novel’s Texan ‘Merry Perrys’, continually “praying for rain… they thought God would give them more rain when all the climatologists were predicting less, not more” (31) eschew science and reason in exchange for faith. In what is a real-life allusion to former Texas Governor and current United States Secretary of Energy Rick Perry who, during a 2011 Texas drought, proclaimed three days of prayer for rain (Montopolli), Merry Perrys are some of the novel’s poorest and most despised people: “They’re like roaches. You really can’t smash them fast enough” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 85). Put simply, The Water Knife, as an imaginary, provides readers with an image of “what is attainable through science and technology” (Jasanoff, qtd. in Milkoreit 2), and warns of the potentially devastating consequences of their disregard.
As a biopunk work of SF, Bacigalupi’s 2009 The Windup Girl is primarily concerned with human overreliance on biotechnology at the expense of ‘nature’, and the work features a race of genetically-engineered posthumans, or ‘New People’, who challenge real humans for class status. Emiko, a ‘new person’ is designed by the Japanese as a resource for skilled labour: “we have calories but no one to provide the labor. We need personal assistants. Workers” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 394). Despite often being hyper-humanised as “more Japanese than the Japanese” by her makers and “better than human in almost all other ways… faster, smarter, better eyesight, better hearing” (471), she is still objectified as a purely utilitarian device: “as necessary as a hoe for a farmer or a sword for a samurai” (395), replete with robotic servitude and obedience to humans genetically engineered in her temperament (397). Emiko’s social status descends further when outside of her natural habitat, in Thailand, where despite possessing full human sentience and range of emotion, she is one of the “soulless creatures imagined out of hell that the forest monk Buddhists claim... a creature unable to ever achieve a soul or a place in the cycles of rebirth and striving for Nirvana” (49). Occupying a place even below the yellow cards, who are “not as disadvantaged as that sorry creature” (42), Emiko is forced to work as a prostitute in a bar, where she is repeatedly raped by her superiors and other patrons as a novelty sexual act: “She forces Emiko down on the table. The men gather round as Kannika begins her abuse. Slowly, it builds, first playing at her nipples, then sliding the jadeite cock between her legs… The men cheer at Emiko’s degradation” (340). For the reader, witnessing Emiko’s suffering endears them to her common human nature, thus humanising her (Derrida, qtd. in Schmeink 100) while dehumanising her abusers. In spite of her relegation to an inferior position within social structures by human characters, Emiko makes numerous attempts to reassert her stolen humanity and sexuality, beginning an intimate relationship with Anderson, who “pay[s] her bar fines for days at a time” to see her, and making numerous attempts to escape her misery to the north where she believes she will achieve class equity among a rumoured community of other ‘new people’. When her requests to go north are ultimately denied and her “flight to freedom dies inside” (Schmeink 112), she asserts her hyper-humanity over the humans by killing them:
"Her fist is very fast. Raleigh-san’s throat is very soft. The old man topples, hands flying to his throat, eyes wide with shock… By the time Raleigh hits the floor, Emiko is already bolting across the room, toward the VIP door and the man who hurt her most. The man who sits and laughs with friends and thinks nothing of the pain he inflicts. She slams into the door. Men look up with surprise. Heads turn, mouths open to cry out. The bodyguards are reaching for their spring guns, but all of them are moving too slow. None of them are New People." (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 345)
Despite Emiko’s violence, she is shown to be more human than her dehumanising yet dehumanised attackers, as the abuse and violence of her rape scenes were so overtly described that readers are driven to empathise with and forgive her for the revenge she took upon them (Schmeink 99). Emiko thus occupies a fluid, complex social rank that fluctuates between and even exceeds the two extremes of human nature: the sub-human “evil half, ruled by the animal hungers of their genes”, to the human “civilised self, the side that knows the difference between niche and animal urge” (Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl 3119), to the posthuman that, according to Schmeink (112), “asserts itself and realizes its full potential and natural superiority to the human.” Put simply, the unnatural Emiko is better than the natural humans.
The Water Knife also offers imaginative insight into how an ecology gone wrong might in turn interplay with human biology and psychology to further diminish ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’, with a range of complex analogies, metaphors and imagery at play. The uninhabitable desert, which is ever encroaching upon the last habitable cities, is anthropomorphised as the “Big Daddy Drought” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 10). Ironically, the anthropomorphic desert is anything but the fatherly figure for which it is named, and represents the most destructive force imaginable for the natural anthropod body, an analogy that perhaps human activity is, ironically, humanity’s largest existential threat. When Lucy enters the supposedly fatherly, anthro-desert even for a few short hours without technology, she “cough[s] into her hands. Last night’s storm had messed with her chest more than usual, bits of dust burying themselves deep in the dead-end branches of her lungs. She was coughing up blood and mucus again. More and more, the blood was a common thing that they never spoke about” (38). The altered climate is so harsh that even rocks and trees evolved for the desert are not spared, described with vivid visual imagery: “The Mojave lay sere and open, a burned, wind-abraded scape of oxidized [sic] gravels and pale clays, scabbed with creosote bushes and twisted Joshua trees. One hundred twenty degrees in the shade, and heat rippling off the pavement…” (80). The omnipresent, extreme heat is presented ironically through the reversal of human body temperature versus that of the environment with heat-detecting technology: “The combat software started picking out living creatures, cool spots in the dark heat of millennial suburban skeleton” (10), as opposed to naturally ‘warm’ spots that such software would look for in today’s climate. In The Water Knife, the anthropomorphised, ever-threatening desert, coupled with the ambiguation between the human and nonhuman, is an extended analogy suggesting that human activity is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity’s continued existence.
Chapter 6: The Role of Language in Ecological Imagining
Language is key to imagination and knowledge, and like Dune, The Water Knife offers an imagined dystopia featuring an ecology gone wrong with vivid visual imagery used as a literary device so that the reader can better imagine the world as an entirely possible consequence of current actions. Epistemologically, creating imagery through language is critical to the gaining of knowledge, as according to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, reality is perceived and structured by the language resource we possess, and therefore, without the requisite lexical and linguistic resource pertaining to a concept, it is impossible for individuals to properly conceptualise it (Hussein 642-3). Bacigalupi’s female supervillain, Catherine Case, alludes to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis when describing the population’s inability to imagine and foresee the impending climate catastrophe: “There’s a theory that if we don’t have the right words in our vocabularies, we can’t even see the things that are right in front of our faces. If we can’t describe reality accurately, we can’t see it. Not the other way around. So someone says a word like Mexico or United States, and maybe that word keeps us from seeing what’s right in front of us. Our own words make us blind” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 59, original emphases). Repeated allusions to the hypothesis occur throughout the text, ostensibly to comment on the importance of possessing a shared lexicon with which to properly imagine, and therefore know, eco-dystopia. Almost every standard dictionary or encyclopedic denotation and connotation of the word ‘drought’ makes reference to the word ‘period’, suggesting droughts are temporary, and the Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as “lack or insufficiency of rain for an extended period that causes a considerable hydrologic [water] imbalance and, consequently, water shortages, crop damage, streamflow reduction, and depletion of groundwater and soil moisture” (Encyclopedia Britannica). In The Water Knife, no action was taken against the impending climate crisis because the required words and semantics to discuss and imagine the problem did not exist: “weather anchors used the word drought, but drought implied that drought could end; it was a passing event, not the status quo” (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 27, original emphasis). Without the lexical resource to define or categorise an ‘endless drought’, the population could not imagine one, and therefore failed to prepare for it with disastrous consequences. Through Bacigalupi’s vivid imagery, this gap in imagination is filled, and readers can better imagine and know the presented future as an entirely possible consequence of current actions.
With the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ostensibly in mind, Bacigalupi uses vivid visual imagery, and even the creation of new lexicon, to conjure images of the eco-dystopian desolation and human misery in the readers minds. Bacigalupi’s works “tell stories and create images of worlds that have not merely been climatically changed, but whose characters, communities and societies have fundamentally altered” (Milkoreit 5), and he constructs an entirely new lexicon of imaginable human suffering when Lucy hears the account of Jamie’s death:
"Electrical burns on the genitals. Adrenaline injected into the body: Signs of trauma at the anus. Rape with blunt object. Probably a club if some kind… He was probably killed several times, then revived. The adrenaline in his system points to revivification. The eyes were removed pre-mortem. Of the other body parts, only the hands and feet were removed pre-mortem. The legs and the rest happened after he was dead. It appears that there was some attempt to tourniquet the limbs and prolong life longer still." (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 114)
The use of the word ‘revivification’ casually in the context of vividly describing such a brutal and horrendous torture, which is not presently a context for that word, suggests that this practice and the lexicon have entered the English vocabulary and are, to some extent, commonly experienced, easily imaginable to all, and now, to readers as well. Bacigalupi extends his lexical visual imagery to the landscape and population, using a complex intermingling of zoomorphism, objectification, personification and pathetic fallacy to blur the lines between the living and the dead. Riders on scooters in the refugee diaspora are objectified as lifeless “Ghost images: a woman clutching the back of a scooter” (99), while people and their body parts are objectified by inclusion in ambiguous lists with other objects:
"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… More traffic. More life. Heads and faces shrouded by scarves and masks against the dust. Headlight beams, tunnels of light in the haze. People all along the roadsides, shovelling out from another storm, sweeping off cars." (99)
As the protagonist, Angel, watches from inside his Tesla where “cool A/C pumped in a steady hiss… cocooned from the world outside” (99), the refugees outside are zoomorphised into “shadow ants, working furiously” (99). If not zoomorphised, the refugees are objectified into the waste products of their body and their place using parallelism for emphatic effect: “the sweat of a woman bent double in an onion field… the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico… the sweat of a ten-year-old boy staring into the barrel of a SIG Sauer… the sweat of a woman struggling across the desert” (2-3). Ironically, and using an intermingling of personification and the pathetic fallacy, objects and places in the eco-dystopia are humanised by the objectified refugees as they set about “ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping bones out of a corpse. They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes” (27). Even the desert, responsible for much of the death and destruction, is anthropomorphised using the pathetic fallacy as “swallow[ing]” the cities in its path (28) and “always hunting for its next sip. The desert never forgot itself” (80). The obfuscation and ambiguation of the line between the living and the dead provides readers with powerfully vivid imagery, and gives them a lexicon with which they can imagine potential eco-dystopia, and how to avoid it.
With the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ostensibly in mind, Bacigalupi uses vivid visual imagery, and even the creation of new lexicon, to conjure images of the eco-dystopian desolation and human misery in the readers minds. Bacigalupi’s works “tell stories and create images of worlds that have not merely been climatically changed, but whose characters, communities and societies have fundamentally altered” (Milkoreit 5), and he constructs an entirely new lexicon of imaginable human suffering when Lucy hears the account of Jamie’s death:
"Electrical burns on the genitals. Adrenaline injected into the body: Signs of trauma at the anus. Rape with blunt object. Probably a club if some kind… He was probably killed several times, then revived. The adrenaline in his system points to revivification. The eyes were removed pre-mortem. Of the other body parts, only the hands and feet were removed pre-mortem. The legs and the rest happened after he was dead. It appears that there was some attempt to tourniquet the limbs and prolong life longer still." (Bacigalupi, The Water Knife 114)
The use of the word ‘revivification’ casually in the context of vividly describing such a brutal and horrendous torture, which is not presently a context for that word, suggests that this practice and the lexicon have entered the English vocabulary and are, to some extent, commonly experienced, easily imaginable to all, and now, to readers as well. Bacigalupi extends his lexical visual imagery to the landscape and population, using a complex intermingling of zoomorphism, objectification, personification and pathetic fallacy to blur the lines between the living and the dead. Riders on scooters in the refugee diaspora are objectified as lifeless “Ghost images: a woman clutching the back of a scooter” (99), while people and their body parts are objectified by inclusion in ambiguous lists with other objects:
"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… More traffic. More life. Heads and faces shrouded by scarves and masks against the dust. Headlight beams, tunnels of light in the haze. People all along the roadsides, shovelling out from another storm, sweeping off cars." (99)
As the protagonist, Angel, watches from inside his Tesla where “cool A/C pumped in a steady hiss… cocooned from the world outside” (99), the refugees outside are zoomorphised into “shadow ants, working furiously” (99). If not zoomorphised, the refugees are objectified into the waste products of their body and their place using parallelism for emphatic effect: “the sweat of a woman bent double in an onion field… the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico… the sweat of a ten-year-old boy staring into the barrel of a SIG Sauer… the sweat of a woman struggling across the desert” (2-3). Ironically, and using an intermingling of personification and the pathetic fallacy, objects and places in the eco-dystopia are humanised by the objectified refugees as they set about “ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping bones out of a corpse. They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes” (27). Even the desert, responsible for much of the death and destruction, is anthropomorphised using the pathetic fallacy as “swallow[ing]” the cities in its path (28) and “always hunting for its next sip. The desert never forgot itself” (80). The obfuscation and ambiguation of the line between the living and the dead provides readers with powerfully vivid imagery, and gives them a lexicon with which they can imagine potential eco-dystopia, and how to avoid it.
Conclusion
SF serves an incredibly important function for humanity in facilitating imaginative ‘possibility thinking’ about states of the world not perceivable with sense perception, usually the future. With the power of possibility thinking in mind, SF authors can create compelling and distressing imagined visions of how the world may ‘look’ if action is not taken to address pressing problems in the present, for example, climate change. Frank Herbert’s 1965 Dune was fundamental in establishing the subgenre of ‘ecocritical SF’ and one of the first to explore the social, political and economic dimensions of ecology, climate science and climate catastrophe. Using water and the spice melange as symbols for petroleum oil and other minerals, Herbert takes real-world conflicts resulting from flawed social theories such as neoliberalism to their natural conclusion, which is social, political and economic ruin. Through the specific symbol of water, which due to economic ruin is now the main form of currency, Herbert has created a distressing vision of a broken, ruined society that could be very much a possibility of a ruined Earth ecology. Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2015 ecocritical SF novel The Water Knife continues many of Herbert’s themes and visions of political, social and economic ruin due to a ruined ecology, this time on near-future Earth. In North America, severe drought caused by climate change has depleted the water resources of the Colorado River, which has left American democracy and federalism in ruin, replacing it with a form of anarchic neo-feudalism based around the accumulation and control of the remaining water resources. The distressing vision presented in The Water Knife is very similar to that presented in Dune, but much more imaginatively ‘possible’ due to the more familiar setting and allusions to the present day. Bacigalupi’s 2009 novel The Windup Girl delves into the biopunk subgenre, and allows hyper-commodification of resources to extend to food and its stored energy. Bacigalupi’s post-oil setting allows the transfer of the neoliberal paradigm from petro-capitalists to ‘calorie corporations’ that produce one of the only remaining forms of energy in food calories, which are hyper-commodified and result, again, in social, political and economic ruin. Each of the three texts treats class and gender differently, but each contains a stratified and hierarchical structure which engenders poor treatment of the ‘other’, most notably women. Viewed through the lens of ecofeminist criticism, these novels present a compelling vision that humanity’s failure to care for their ecology stems from its loss of ‘embeddedness in nature’ in favour of embeddedness in consumerist ‘ new-fangled things’ brought about by neoliberalism. Each of the three texts, while differing in treatment of themes and tropes, use the power of language and imagination to convey the same, stunningly simple message: looking after each other and our environment is important, and failure to do both has a strong possibility of leading to social, political and economic ruin.
Works Cited
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Anderson, Daniel. “Critical Bioregionalist Method in Dune.” The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster (Eds.) U of Georgia P; Athens, 2012.
Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Water Knife. Random House, 2015.
- - - The Windup Girl. Night Shade Books, 2009.
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Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. U of Chicago P, 1983
Boronkay, Carl and Abbott, Warren J. “Water Conflicts in the Western United States”. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, vol. 20, no. 2, 1997, pp. 137-166.
Brown, Elizabeth A.R. “Feudalism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 4 May 2018, www.britannica.com/topic/feudalism.
Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2014.
Dineen, Ciara. “Drought and California’s Role in the Colorado River Compact”. Journal of Legislation, vol. 42, no. 2, 2016, pp. 211-231.
Donnelly, Sean. “Peak Oil Imagining in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.” English Academy Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2014, pp. 156-169
Herbert, Frank. Dune. Penguin, 2005.
Hussein, Basel A. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today”. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2012, pp. 642-646.
Milkoreit, Manjana. “Imaginary Politics: Climate change and making the future. Elem Sci Anth, vol. 5, no. 62, 2017, pp. 1-18, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.249
Montopoli, Brian. “Texas Gov. Rick Perry Proclaims ‘Days of Prayer for Rain.’” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 22 Apr. 2011. www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-gov-rick-perry-proclaims-days-of-prayer-for-rain/
Otto, E. “The Rain Feels New: Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi.” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson (Eds). Wesleyan UP, 2014.
Parkerson, Ronny. "Semantics, General Semantics, and Ecology in Frank Herbert’s Dune." et Cetera. vol. 67, no. 4, 2010, pp. 403-11.
Reid, Robin Anne. Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Overviews. Greenwood Press, 2009.
Schmeink, Lars. “The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal.” Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, Liverpool UP, 2016, pp. 71–118. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ps33cv.6.
Stinnett, Douglas M. and Jiroslav Tir. “Weathering Climate Change: Can Institutions Mitigate International Water Conflict?” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 49, no. 1, 2012, pp. 211-225
Stratton, S. “The Messiah and the Greens: The Shape of Environmental Action in Dune and Pacific Edge.” Extrapolation (pre-2012), vol. 42, no. 4, 2012, pp. 303-316
Anderson, Daniel. “Critical Bioregionalist Method in Dune.” The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster (Eds.) U of Georgia P; Athens, 2012.
Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Water Knife. Random House, 2015.
- - - The Windup Girl. Night Shade Books, 2009.
- - - (@PaoloBAuthor). “I wrote THE WATER KNIFE because…”. 1 February 2017. Facebook Post. https://www.facebook.com/PaoloBAuthor/posts/10154946832703904
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. U of Chicago P, 1983
Boronkay, Carl and Abbott, Warren J. “Water Conflicts in the Western United States”. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, vol. 20, no. 2, 1997, pp. 137-166.
Brown, Elizabeth A.R. “Feudalism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 4 May 2018, www.britannica.com/topic/feudalism.
Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2014.
Dineen, Ciara. “Drought and California’s Role in the Colorado River Compact”. Journal of Legislation, vol. 42, no. 2, 2016, pp. 211-231.
Donnelly, Sean. “Peak Oil Imagining in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.” English Academy Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2014, pp. 156-169
Herbert, Frank. Dune. Penguin, 2005.
Hussein, Basel A. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today”. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2012, pp. 642-646.
Milkoreit, Manjana. “Imaginary Politics: Climate change and making the future. Elem Sci Anth, vol. 5, no. 62, 2017, pp. 1-18, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.249
Montopoli, Brian. “Texas Gov. Rick Perry Proclaims ‘Days of Prayer for Rain.’” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 22 Apr. 2011. www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-gov-rick-perry-proclaims-days-of-prayer-for-rain/
Otto, E. “The Rain Feels New: Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi.” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson (Eds). Wesleyan UP, 2014.
Parkerson, Ronny. "Semantics, General Semantics, and Ecology in Frank Herbert’s Dune." et Cetera. vol. 67, no. 4, 2010, pp. 403-11.
Reid, Robin Anne. Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Overviews. Greenwood Press, 2009.
Schmeink, Lars. “The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal.” Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction, Liverpool UP, 2016, pp. 71–118. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ps33cv.6.
Stinnett, Douglas M. and Jiroslav Tir. “Weathering Climate Change: Can Institutions Mitigate International Water Conflict?” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 49, no. 1, 2012, pp. 211-225
Stratton, S. “The Messiah and the Greens: The Shape of Environmental Action in Dune and Pacific Edge.” Extrapolation (pre-2012), vol. 42, no. 4, 2012, pp. 303-316
Footnotes
1. ‘Biopunk’, a subgenre of SF with roots in ‘cyberpunk’, focussing on biotechnology, often encompassing themes such as the genetic engineering and synthetic biology. For more information on the subgenre see Schmeink, Lars.. “Introduction.” Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and SF, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2016, pp. 1–17. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ps33cv.4.
2. ‘Neoliberalism’ and ‘late capitalism’ are used interchangeably here to describe what is known as ‘neoliberalism’ today due to the term’s lack of use in the 1960s: a theory “concerned with the deregulation of the economy, the liberalization of trade and industry, and the privatization of state-owned enterprises”. For more information see Ganti, T. “Neoliberalism”. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 43. 2014
3. For more information on the Suez Canal Crisis see Auerswald, David P. Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force. University of Michigan Press, 2000. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.16724.
4. For more information on the Abadan Crisis see Beck, Peter J. “The Lessons of Abadan and Suez for British Foreign Policymakers in the 1960s.” The Historical Journal, vol. 49, no. 2, 2006, pp. 525–547. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4091626.
5. The ‘Scramble for Africa’ refers to the forced occupation and partition of the African continent for extraction of resources by various European powers during the 19th and 20th centuries. For more information see Yates, Douglas A. “Introduction.” The Scramble for African Oil: Oppression, Corruption and War for Control of Africa's Natural Resources, Pluto Press, London, 2012, pp. 1–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183p3hq.6.
6. The ‘wai’ is a traditional Thai greeting that, among other things, confers status to the receiver. For more information, see Powell, L., Amsbary, J., & Hickson, M. (2014). The wai in thai culture - greeting, status-marking and national identity functions. Journal of Intercultural Communication, (34)
7. ‘Megodont’ is a fictional, genetically-engineered, elephant-like creature in The Windup Girl, used primarily for its labour. For more information see location 187 of the text, or https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/406379566348106088/
2. ‘Neoliberalism’ and ‘late capitalism’ are used interchangeably here to describe what is known as ‘neoliberalism’ today due to the term’s lack of use in the 1960s: a theory “concerned with the deregulation of the economy, the liberalization of trade and industry, and the privatization of state-owned enterprises”. For more information see Ganti, T. “Neoliberalism”. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 43. 2014
3. For more information on the Suez Canal Crisis see Auerswald, David P. Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force. University of Michigan Press, 2000. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.16724.
4. For more information on the Abadan Crisis see Beck, Peter J. “The Lessons of Abadan and Suez for British Foreign Policymakers in the 1960s.” The Historical Journal, vol. 49, no. 2, 2006, pp. 525–547. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4091626.
5. The ‘Scramble for Africa’ refers to the forced occupation and partition of the African continent for extraction of resources by various European powers during the 19th and 20th centuries. For more information see Yates, Douglas A. “Introduction.” The Scramble for African Oil: Oppression, Corruption and War for Control of Africa's Natural Resources, Pluto Press, London, 2012, pp. 1–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183p3hq.6.
6. The ‘wai’ is a traditional Thai greeting that, among other things, confers status to the receiver. For more information, see Powell, L., Amsbary, J., & Hickson, M. (2014). The wai in thai culture - greeting, status-marking and national identity functions. Journal of Intercultural Communication, (34)
7. ‘Megodont’ is a fictional, genetically-engineered, elephant-like creature in The Windup Girl, used primarily for its labour. For more information see location 187 of the text, or https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/406379566348106088/
Markers' Notes
