...Rash, by Pete Hautman, is about polar bears, pizza, artificial intelligence, mass hysteria, football, head transplants, and a talking monkey. It takes place about seventy years in the future when everything fun is against the law. You can get sent to jail for road rage, or eating too much, or forgetting to wear your safety equipment. Twenty percent of the people living in the United Safer States of America are in jail, so all the manual labor in the country is done by prisoners. I thought this was a sports book when I picked it up because of the cover, but it’s more like science fiction. Some parts are pretty funny, but it’s also kind of sad because the future looks like it could be no fun at all, kind of like that book Feed, which is good too, only by some other guy with initials instead of a first name. Bo Marsten, the hero, is in love with this girl, and when she goes out with another guy he loses it and tries to hit the other guy and ends up in prison in Canada making pizzas for McDonalds and being chased by polar bears and playing tackle football which is illegal because everything that can possibly hurt anybody is against the law. Bo has only two friends--a talking troll he invented on his computer for his AI class, and an unstoppable fat kid named Rhino. It sounds goofy, but it all makes sense when you read it, except for maybe the part about the mechanical dog that does everything a real dog does including pooping. The funniest parts of the book are when Bo talks...
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