Guardians of Water

Amy Wachspress

What happens in a world that runs out of gas?

Six diverse women friends meet for the weekend at a beach house to celebrate the year in which they all turn forty. Two weeks later, a petroleum-eating bacteria unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico to contain a spill goes rogue and devours all the raw petroleum products in the world. After the Systems Collapse, each of these women follows her own path to try to survive in a previously unimaginable altered life. From a Washington, D.C. suburb to a survivalist community in Kentucky, from Manhattan to a working class neighborhood in a town in upstate New York, from Oakland to a Native Rancheria in rural northern California, these women, their families, and their communities summon extraordinary ingenuity, resilience, and vision in the hopes of forging a viable future. A genre-bending work of speculative fiction, Guardians of Water is combination eco-fiction, humanistic sci-fi, and disaster fiction told from women’s perspectives.

This narrative explores relationships between people and communities, with each other and the environment, when the established infrastructure and systems fail. As new ways of being emerge and people rethink their values and cultural norms, which communities will survive in the new ecology and which will crumble? The characters must engage with their communities in new and challenging ways if humans hope to survive as a species. Priorities, relationships, cultures, ethics, and assets shift. reveals the things that truly matter for human survival while honoring the resilience, resourcefulness, and brilliance of the human spirit.