Plague Year

I just finished reading Plague Year by Jeff Carlson. I would highly recommend this book for fans of the science fiction, future struggle, scientists as heroes genre. SPOILER ALERT. Do not read further if you plan on enjoying the book yourself.

The short summary of the book is that an engineered self replicating nano-machine gets loose and almost destroys humanity. The book focuses on the survivors and their desire to reverse the machine plague.

I thought I was into a poorly written and possibly disappointing book as I started it out. I didn't care about the characters stranded on a mountaintop in California, or the whiny self centered astronaut-scientist at the other focal point of the story. What compelled me to continue was the basic premise of the story.

The machines that nearly wiped out humanity did not work over 10,000 feet. People throughout the world retreated to mountainous regions and struggled to survive. Tiny pockets of survivors clustered on lone mountaintops in California, while some 14 million people made it to the highlands in Colorado, preserving the core of the American government. Some strange war is being waged in the highlands of Asia, which you are only given tantalizing glimpses of.

While you are treated mid-story to an interesting landing of the Space Shuttle on a highway near Leadville Colorado, up to that point in the book, I was still wondering what I was waiting for. Things quickly unravel at that point. You find that the remnant of the American government is brutalizing the survivors and using their carefully collected scientists not to find a cure for the machine plague, but a way of weaponizing it further so they can destroy the Chinese and Muslim survivors and emerge to rule the world. While the astronaut-scientist plots to cure the plague and thwart the evil machinations of the corrupt government, the other big reveal happens at the other end of the story. One of the survivors of the plague on an isolated mountaintop turns out to be the designer of the nano-machines. He makes a harrowing trip to a nearby mountaintop where there is a radio and contacts the government.

Now the book really jells together in an exquisite fashion. The government flies out the astronaut-scientist who teams up with the designer. They figure out how to fix the mess, and go down to raid the original lab that the machines were designed in. There is a mini-coup and the scientist quickly engineers an anti-machine plague from the remnants of the lab. Angered at their defiance, the corrupt government sends in troops to quell the coup and snatch the technology and information. The heavy handedness of the response virtually guarantees the destruction of the prize, but the scientist manages to slip away with the cure and 3 survivors of the coup. The book ends with the coup survivors infecting themselves with the cure and splitting up to strike out and spread the cure among any other survivors.

The book has some nice embedded ironies. The designer resorts to cannibalism to survive, which is what his invention did to the human race. The surviving government, rather than providing refuge and seeking to cure the plague, brutalizes the survivors and seeks to make things even worse. The savior scientist has to go rogue in order to be effective and ends up working almost alone against overwhelming odds. In the end, the cure is passed on by drinking the blood of the inoculated ushers of the cure, which is resonant of a religious salvation.

In the end, well worth the read, and a good story to be made into a movie.