Plague Year by Jeff Carlson
Ace, $7.99, 292pp, pb. Science fiction. ISBN: 9780441015146.
Nanotechnology, once it’s perfected, may be a godsend. Just before it’s perfected, it may be the ultimate uncontrollable weapon. Plague Year is set in the days just before nanotechnology is perfected.
If the nanotech that gets loose and becomes the ultimate weapon is designed by someone with good intentions, we may get lucky and survive. But if that weaponized stuff was designed with malicious intent, it may be the end of life as we know it. There aren’t too many times when you pray for an accident. In the case of Plague Year, the characters got lucky: it was an accident, and the little bugger that got loose had some controls built into it.
The book starts with a small group of characters, who we quickly get to know, faced with a big problem. A problem that could consume people for an entire book (or more). And Carlson tells an engrossing story that pulls the reader in quickly. They’re stuck on a mountain top, trying to stay alive above the sea of death that the lower atmosphere has become with the release of a nanotech machine.
But then Carlson swerves. You know that all-consuming problem, which the characters you’re reading about are focused on solving above all else? Well, it turns out that that problem isn’t so big, and there’s actually another, even bigger problem that they’re going to have to work on. Of course, there are also other characters (again, well realized and attention-grabbing) working on that problem.
But then there’s another problem, even bigger than that one. And so on. I think it’s four iterations of “there’s a bigger problem,” and that’s perhaps my biggest problem with the book. Not, mind you, that the author’s wrong. Each of those problems really should, logically, come about in the world he’s set up with the conditions as they are, so after finishing the book, it all flows easily and naturally. And when the smartest woman in the world is calculating human permutations at lightning speed, and she turns out to be right (and we slower folk realize that of course that’s how things would happen), well, there’s no reason to throw the book across the room. But it is a depressing book (not all of it: Carlson did throw the reader a properly arrived at, upbeat ending, but still…): the end of the world and all that.
Don’t read this book if you’re feeling suicidal, or if you’re looking for a pick-me-up, and most especially not if you’re a Luddite. But if you’re looking for a good science fiction read that’ll make you think, fret, and hope for intelligence in the future, this is a good book. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but it is a good story, and I think the time I spent reading it was well spent.