Dual Violence of Ecology and Society: A Critical Reading on the Horror of Anthropocene in The Water Knife

Abstract

Set within a dystopian narrative of water scarcity in a near future America, The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi in 2015 can be regarded as a paradigmatic work of climate fiction, which has received much scholarly attention since its publication. In the trend that Anthropocene is the third wave of western ecocriticism (Zhang 1), this essay applies Sarah Dillon’s theory of Anthropocene horror based on John Clute’s framework of horror narrative structure and Rob Nixon’s "slow vio-lence" to analyze how this cli-fi stages ecological collapse as a system-ic horror. By examining its storylines of the characters Angel Ve-lasquez, Lucy Monroe and Maria, this paper argues that The Water Knife concretizes Dillon’s idea that the Anthropocene as a terror sur-passes traditional horror genres with the characters’ suffering on their body, gender and race by institutional violence as well as ecological collapse. The analysis reveals that Bacigalupi has applied narrative structure, character development, and symbolic imagery to clarify the intersection of ecological crisis and social violence, thereby the fiction provides a new perspective to comprehend the cultural representation of climate anxiety.