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Dystopian Warnings
One Grain of Sand is a near-future dystopian world where people are treated as expendable, and one inmate must choose between survival and becoming a sacrifice to the system. What was your moral goal when writing this novel, and do you feel you’ve achieved it?
My goal in writing the novel was speculative and extrapolative: I wanted my imagination, my subconscious, to answer the hypothetical question of “What could happen if the US continued on its current trajectory, and many of the secret programs that are now public continued in kind, across the board?” When I began writing One Grain of Sand a few years ago, I thought some of the trajectories were too extreme. But then I began seeing a lot of what’s in the book actually take shape before our very eyes. So, do I feel I’ve achieved the goal of answering that question? To a degree. I think it shows what could happen, what is happening (although obviously not literally), and where the country is headed sociologically. If Books Two and Three go the way I want them go, those two books remaining in the trilogy will answer that question more robustly.
Your future America feels exaggerated yet disturbingly familiar. Which real-world trends most influenced this setting?
I think the question also partially answers itself in that it feels disturbingly familiar. It wouldn’t feel familiar if we as a society weren’t seeing elements in and of the book, of that future today. The trends I saw influencing were, at least some of them, I think is how so much of daily discourse has become rich in hate, cruelty, bias, exploitation of fear, fear of education, of fairness and equality, of multiculturalism – when in reality science, history, biology, and history all show us that embracing multiculturalism, culture, education, fairness, equality, and embracing a future-minded perspective all make us as humans healthier emotionally and creatively. No society that shuts itself off from those forces survives for very long. Logic alone dictates there is no way for a sealed-off culture to make it, while the opposite makes it thrive. The rich disinformation online, hobbling of education systems and practices, and the turning away from our shared humanity; those are trends I find distasteful, fear-based, and tribal.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Themes run rampant in the novel for a reason, because we’ve abandoned our role as responsible stewards of the future. Some of those themes are democracy and equality crumbling, hedonism rising, and climate change assuming its natural path, whether we believe in it or not.
When will Book Two be available? Can you give us an idea of where that book will take readers?
I plan to write Books Two and Three at the same time, and I’m currently working on outlines for both now. Where will those Books take readers? I want to facetiously say “straight to Hell,” but the idea of the trilogy as a whole (and hence Books Two and Three) is to show the reader as full a picture as I possibly can muster of where I see this speculative, potential, hypothetical future headed, what I see it manifested as, depicting what matters most in the grand scheme of our lives when it’s all said and it’s time to lie our collective head upon the pillow one last time. The characters have lives, emotions, back-stories, hopes, and dreams that have to be resolved at least partially, and they can’t just be left alone with no one to tell that to.
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In which citizens must compete in reality TV programs for healthcare, citizenship, the right to travel, higher education, or “freedom” to live in private segregated communities?
In which tribes of hybrid creatures live in primitive outlier compounds scattered throughout the country; societal outcasts and rejects from government-sponsored human genome experiments gone awry?
What would you do if you were falling for a beautiful biracial climatologist and artist who might be a member of a radical “terrorist” network?
And whose twin sister “might” be part of that same group or a secret government organization oppressing and controlling the public?
And you knew someone, somewhere, probably has placed a bullseye on your head?
This is the future in which Noah Harpster, humble incongruent anachronism, pickpocket, and three-time loser, finds himself cast.
Like you, he’s got some tough decisions to make with too few options.
To the government, and everyone else, he’s just one more grain of sand in society’s hourglass.
And time’s running out….
One Grain of Sand
One Grain of Sand is a near-future dystopian novel that follows two lives on a collision course. Parlisse Hardamon grows up in a world of Category Six hurricanes, collapsing ecosystems, and insulated privilege, while Noah Harpster is a poor kid turned repeat offender who ends up serving a brutal fifty-year sentence in Hood State Penitentiary. Through Noah we move into a nightmare of prison violence, game-show politics, and a chilling “rehabilitation” effort called the Rahu program, a medical trial that offers freedom in exchange for becoming a human test subject for new avian flu vaccines. Around them, the Hardamon family wrestles with their own role in this world: Doc Hardamon builds strange machines and new technologies, Parlisse grows into an activist whose movement takes the name “One Grain of Sand,” and in the end Noah’s path circles back toward both the Hardamons and his own scarred childhood, with a closing image of cardinals, a tree, and a final fragile sense of inner freedom.
Some pages were fast, sharp, and emotional. Noah’s sentencing to fifty years for petty theft, handed down in an almost empty courtroom, made me angry in a very real way. The prison sequences are soaked in detail: the cardinal hopping along the fence, the guards taking bets on whether Noah will survive a gang attack, Weller’s slow, awful death traded for a carton of ecigs. The book conveys sensations that most stories rush past. That heavy descriptive style works. It slows everything down so you sit with the ugliness of the world instead of gliding over it. At times, I did feel worn out by it. Yet I also never doubted the reality of this future. It feels like an exaggerated version of what we already know, not a cartoon.
The novel leans into systemic cruelty, and that part really stuck in my head. The Rahu program is a perfect example. It is framed as “rehabilitation,” wrapped in clinical language about survival statistics and public health, but in practice, it is a state trading the bodies of the poor for a shot at safety for everyone else. The book does not debate this in abstract terms. It shows Noah sitting in front of a robot counselor that praises him with “Good job, inmate” while quietly stripping away his rights with a digital contract that waives any appeal. I liked that the story keeps the focus on lived experience rather than speeches. Noah’s flashbacks to shoplifting food and toilet paper, his father’s gambling and violence, his mother sobbing over a coat that falls apart in her hands, make the politics feel very close and very personal. I think the late shift into more overt science fiction, with Doc Hardamon’s transdimensional portal and ultradimensional beings, felt like a curveball. It adds a cosmic layer that hints at something larger than this broken America, and I liked the ambition. For me, that thread was more intriguing than satisfying.
Noah’s last emotional break, in front of the fence, watching cardinals at the birdhouse that mirrors a vision Parlisse gave him, has a small, quiet power. He lets go of his parents, forgives them without excusing them, and chooses to move on. There is no big speech. No neat fix. Just a man who has survived a lot, deciding not to carry it all anymore. That felt honest to me. The title clicks there, too. The book keeps returning to sand, to beaches that never offered Noah peace, to one grain that jams the machine, oils it, or simply lies there while the tide rolls in. It is a simple image, yet after watching these characters grind through so much, I did not mind the lack of subtlety.
I would recommend One Grain of Sand to readers who like dystopian fiction that leans more on character and social critique than on gadgets or action. If you appreciate slow, sensory prose, tough themes like abuse, poverty, and prison violence, and a story that mixes grim realism with a touch of speculative weirdness, this will be a good book for you. For me, it worked best as a long, rough meditation on pain, survival, and the tiny, stubborn ways people push back against systems that want them silent.
Pages: 473 | ASIN : B0FBHGYJDL
