Hard Rain by Andy Waddell

Hard Rain is dystopian science fiction. This isn’t usually my thing. I generally either find it horribly depressing, or unrealistically redemptive. Hard Rain is an exception. Andy builds his world by starting with a scene that is immediately familiar–boys playing a video game and killing each other. But things are slipped in that make it clear that this is the future and this virtual world is a few steps ahead of where we are now. Not many, mind you. Read this book in ten years’ time and we might be there.

There is one central sinister premise–the boys have chips in their necks, inserted at age ten. Chips that control their emotions. Without the chips they won’t get into the best school.

‘Suddenly it was easy to be “good”, to be the mature young man everyone wanted him to be. No longer would he slam the door and scream “no fair!” about things that did not matter. He never cried again. The grownups were right; there was nothing to cry about.’

The chips don’t just dampen emotion, they remove pain. No pain lasts for more than a minute. It’s not even called pain. It’s called a ‘pang’.

Franc, the boy at the heart of the story, decides to remove his chip. He knows about the emotion and the pain. He knows how to get around the things his chip does for him, like open locked doors, what he doesn’t know is that the world around him is not as he was seeing it.

‘When they passed the end of Golden Gate Park, Franc saw what looked like bundles of old clothes all over the slope and in the bushes. One of the bundles sat up, and he could see that these were people sleeping on bits of cardboard and covered with old coats and tattered blankets.’

That’s right we are in San Francisco–a San Francisco remarkably similar to the present, just spread beyond the Tenderloin.

‘As they drew up beside, Franc saw the officer in the van give a signal. Suddenly a group of guards in brown uniforms like Franc had never seen before surrounded the car. A man jumped out, knife in hand and three of the guards began beating him with their clubs, while two more reached into the car and pulled a baby from the arms of a screaming mother. One was prying her fingers off the child while the other smashed the woman in the head.’

The best dystopian writing takes the undercurrents  lurking in contemporary attitudes and develops them into concrete actions. Hard Rain was published in April 2024.

Andy has a sensitivity towards young people–the way they think, what worries them, what fascinates them and how incredibly brave and resilient they can be. In many ways this is a coming of age story, for not just Franc but for several characters. But there is nothing saccharine about it, rather a genuine feeling for young people and the way they struggle through those teenage years.

The struggle is more than adolescent angst. It’s a fight for the right to be a whole human being while living on the fringes of a society that determines everyone's potential. It is also a story of resistance.

About a third of the way through the book Franc’s experiment with knowing the world as it really is turns into something much more adult. ‘And that was when he began to be afraid’. In a moment reminiscent of the hobbits sensing the black riders on the road Franc’s world is turned upside down and a whole new section of the story begins.

Which I’m not going to tell you about because that would spoil it.

Just this:

‘The bridge rises before me, the red light flashing at the top of the tower. To my right the backside of the Pres, the lights of the evening, and further on, the glow and twinkle of the Sunset. Each light a person, and all of them trapped in their own heads. Everyone thinks they’re the center of the universe, but out here, on the edge of the immense Pacific, you know you’re a speck, that you could just disappear and life would go on just fine without you.’

To me there’s something very powerful about an imaginary world that is your own world gone wrong. Something frightening–a wake-up call perhaps. Something more than an escape into video games.