RAINWALKERS

In a California valley that has become an embattled, self-sufficient community following national collapse, scientists, soldiers, and survivors cope with the increasing toxicity of the frequent rainfall.

Ritter, also a nature writer, sets his apocalyptic SF tale in a future that will be familiar enough to most genre readers—a post–United States California where national order, communication, and cooperation have dissolved, and it’s pretty much every district for itself. For decades, the Salinas Valley, a major agricultural region, has been self-sufficient and fairly functional despite a bitter ongoing border war with their neighbors. But an attempt at cloud seeding to produce crop-yielding rain went horribly wrong. Now the frequent precipitation in the Valley carries bacteria fatal to human life (though it becomes normal water seconds after contact with the soil). Willie Taft, a former hero soldier in the nation state’s ubiquitous military, goes rogue as the situation grows more chaotic. Adding to the dystopian ordeal is the emergence of “rainwalkers,” rare individuals who go unharmed by the lethal rain that otherwise poses an extinction-level threat. Taft’s school-age daughter is swept up in a cruel government scheme to find and weaponize any rainwalkers—all in the name of Valley patriotism, of course. Male characters are all named after past U.S. presidents, a peculiar affectation in an otherwise straightforward tale of authoritarian nationalism, political desperation, scientific arrogance, and eco-doom gathered under the same...umbrella. Ritter doesn’t do too badly himself at invoking an oppressive, menacing atmosphere in which the question of who’ll stop the rain is a lot more than a song title. And, of course, the whole thing can be taken as an extended, gloomy climate change metaphor.

A bleak, well-written environmentalist/SF actioner; good (or not) for rainy-day reading.