Dust: A Novel
by Charles R. Pellegrino
Mass Market Paperback: 450 pages
Publisher: Avon; (March 1999)
ISBN: 0380787423
Summary: An living nightmare is unleashed upon the Earth as the entire ecology is caught up in a chain-reaction catastrophe. Earth's best scientists desperately try to determine the cause of the problem and find a remedy before the surface of all the Earth becomes nothing more than... dust.
Review:
Short Review: This book is *terrifying.* It's one of the scariest books I've ever read, and I used to read Stephen King novels to help me fall asleep. But it's really good. If you like scary disasters, it's worth the money. That being said, I will now review it in detail, with some spoilers.
Okay, this is the crisis novel to end all crisis novels. This is biological Apocalypse, Armageddon with Murphy as Anti-Christ. Everything that can go wrong with Earth's ecosystem, does go wrong. However, for a wonder, it's not our fault - it's got nothing to *do* with mankind. We're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You see, a biological alarm clock is going off... and all the insects are dying.
Sounds great... for about three seconds. Then you remember that ants aerate most of earth's soil, insects pollinate a lot of our food crops, bats and birds need bugs to eat, without termites wood just falls and very slowly rots. And that's just the beginning.
Swarms of ordinary dust mites become horrifying incarnations of the all-consuming Blob. Vampire bats begin gathering in territory previously inhabited by insect and fruit eating bats and massacring whole populations. Fungus, unchecked by fungus gnats, destroys the food crops of India and leads to a nuclear war over the last remaining food stocks in the region. And this is only a sampling. All of it totally plausible, all of it totally logical.
The book's author, Dr. Charles Pellegrino, is one of the smartest people on the planet: a polymath with a wide variety of interests, he knows everything from new-age propulsion systems to paleobiology. (He was one of the orignators of the "maybe we could clone extinct critters from stuff we find in amber" idea which Crichton turned into "Jurassic Park.") And it shows. I learned a huge amount of stuff from reading this book, from the basics of Prion disease and the Stanley protein to why we break bottles of champaigne against ships at launching.
The human element of the book is also excellent: the sheer horror at many levels, from personal tragedy to national destruction, is captured brilliantly. And while we know humanity must survive - nobody'd publish a book where *everybody* dies - this is no 50's "and then in the nick of time they saved the world" drive-in flick. People die. A lot of them. Including some of our heroes. And nobody really lives happily ever after.
Survivalist-wise, this book is nonspecific. There are no true survivalists in the book and, while the book explains reasonably well how fragile the economy, especially the energy and food distribution networks, actually is, and the social consequences of its breakdown, it does not give advice on meeting those needs. (Other than to say obliquely, "Keep a lot of multivitamins around." Scurvy is Not Fun.) However, it does praise self-reliance, acknowledges that governments are not all-powerful, and throughout, has a tone of, "It doesn't matter if you live or die: always act as though you mean to live." It could be used as inspiration for a really, really rough TEOTWAKI scenario.
I enjoyed the book tremendously (I like scary stories) and found it well-written and fast-paced despite its length and involved treatment of the issues. (You do not need a degree in biology to enjoy the book, but you need to be a fairly intelligent person with a basic understanding of the interconnectedness of things.) My only complaint is the "villain:" while he was quite nasty, he seemed mostly a plot-driver, necessary to get our heroes to hunker down and then to get ready to flee exactly when they needed to. (The reason they needed to was very clever: I'll never look at Frank Sinatra the same way again.) He felt sort of tacked-on, as if the chaos and fury of the ecosystem wasn't enough of a bad guy and we needed concrete assurance that people would still do bad things, and in fact worse things, if this happened.
If you like to be scared, this is a new and different approach from monsters, slashers, and things that go "bump" in the night. You'll learn a lot. And you'll wonder if it's ever possible to be *totally* prepared for anything.
St. Marc
by Charles R. Pellegrino
Mass Market Paperback: 450 pages
Publisher: Avon; (March 1999)
ISBN: 0380787423
Summary: An living nightmare is unleashed upon the Earth as the entire ecology is caught up in a chain-reaction catastrophe. Earth's best scientists desperately try to determine the cause of the problem and find a remedy before the surface of all the Earth becomes nothing more than... dust.
Review:
Short Review: This book is *terrifying.* It's one of the scariest books I've ever read, and I used to read Stephen King novels to help me fall asleep. But it's really good. If you like scary disasters, it's worth the money. That being said, I will now review it in detail, with some spoilers.
Okay, this is the crisis novel to end all crisis novels. This is biological Apocalypse, Armageddon with Murphy as Anti-Christ. Everything that can go wrong with Earth's ecosystem, does go wrong. However, for a wonder, it's not our fault - it's got nothing to *do* with mankind. We're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You see, a biological alarm clock is going off... and all the insects are dying.
Sounds great... for about three seconds. Then you remember that ants aerate most of earth's soil, insects pollinate a lot of our food crops, bats and birds need bugs to eat, without termites wood just falls and very slowly rots. And that's just the beginning.
Swarms of ordinary dust mites become horrifying incarnations of the all-consuming Blob. Vampire bats begin gathering in territory previously inhabited by insect and fruit eating bats and massacring whole populations. Fungus, unchecked by fungus gnats, destroys the food crops of India and leads to a nuclear war over the last remaining food stocks in the region. And this is only a sampling. All of it totally plausible, all of it totally logical.
The book's author, Dr. Charles Pellegrino, is one of the smartest people on the planet: a polymath with a wide variety of interests, he knows everything from new-age propulsion systems to paleobiology. (He was one of the orignators of the "maybe we could clone extinct critters from stuff we find in amber" idea which Crichton turned into "Jurassic Park.") And it shows. I learned a huge amount of stuff from reading this book, from the basics of Prion disease and the Stanley protein to why we break bottles of champaigne against ships at launching.
The human element of the book is also excellent: the sheer horror at many levels, from personal tragedy to national destruction, is captured brilliantly. And while we know humanity must survive - nobody'd publish a book where *everybody* dies - this is no 50's "and then in the nick of time they saved the world" drive-in flick. People die. A lot of them. Including some of our heroes. And nobody really lives happily ever after.
Survivalist-wise, this book is nonspecific. There are no true survivalists in the book and, while the book explains reasonably well how fragile the economy, especially the energy and food distribution networks, actually is, and the social consequences of its breakdown, it does not give advice on meeting those needs. (Other than to say obliquely, "Keep a lot of multivitamins around." Scurvy is Not Fun.) However, it does praise self-reliance, acknowledges that governments are not all-powerful, and throughout, has a tone of, "It doesn't matter if you live or die: always act as though you mean to live." It could be used as inspiration for a really, really rough TEOTWAKI scenario.
I enjoyed the book tremendously (I like scary stories) and found it well-written and fast-paced despite its length and involved treatment of the issues. (You do not need a degree in biology to enjoy the book, but you need to be a fairly intelligent person with a basic understanding of the interconnectedness of things.) My only complaint is the "villain:" while he was quite nasty, he seemed mostly a plot-driver, necessary to get our heroes to hunker down and then to get ready to flee exactly when they needed to. (The reason they needed to was very clever: I'll never look at Frank Sinatra the same way again.) He felt sort of tacked-on, as if the chaos and fury of the ecosystem wasn't enough of a bad guy and we needed concrete assurance that people would still do bad things, and in fact worse things, if this happened.
If you like to be scared, this is a new and different approach from monsters, slashers, and things that go "bump" in the night. You'll learn a lot. And you'll wonder if it's ever possible to be *totally* prepared for anything.
St. Marc
