Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

Ace Books, $7.99, 292 pp

The first few lines of a novel can be critical to its success. Plague Year opens with this one: “They ate Jorgensen first.” Immediately you’re hooked. In just four words the tone of this post-apocalyptic tale is set.

A garage laboratory, researching a cancer cure, has unleashed a sea of nanotechnology which has been dubbed “The Machine Plague.” The plague is capable of infecting its victims through breathing passages, the soft tissue of the eyes, and open wounds. Plague victims are then eaten from within.

Fortunately for mankind, the nanotech fails at high altitudes. The communities above the 10,000 foot mark, like Denver, will ensure that mankind will survive, but for a handful of survivors on a California mountain top, they are one summer of meager scavenging away from serving each other up for lunch. Then comes a message of hope, in the form of a young man who has braved the trek between peaks to bring Cam Najarro and the others back with him where a second batch of survivors have food enough for both groups.

The story switches to the space station crew in orbit around the earth. Ruth Goldman is a nanotech expert and desperately working on a solution for the Machine Plague. Her problem is that in the zero-g environment and with the limited resources that are available to her, she is not effective in her efforts. She demands that the shuttle bring her back to earth and eventually what is left of the United States government agrees to evacuate the space station.

And then Carlson, as a good author will do, takes us in a different direction. Up to this point we have the pretty standard tale of survivors attempting to prevail. It takes a third of the book before we discover that one of the cannibals in California helped create the nanotech plague and develop a solution. That would be great, except the government in Colorado doesn’t exactly want the problem to go away.

The characters in this story are in a desperate situation and Carlson does a good job of making it gritty enough for the reader to feel it. I especially enjoyed his treatment of nano-technology as a virus. A man-made, mechanical, bio-engineered virus that makes E-bola look like the weak baby brother in the disaster family. I felt the story was at its best when the California survivors crossed through the sea of nanites to reach the other peak. This section felt like the typical post-holocaust novel.

This is a first novel for the author, who has had short fiction appear in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Writers of the Future XXIII. I believe his inexperience shows in the early part of the book. During the trek between peaks, he used a series of flashbacks that didn’t move the story forward as much as they interrupted its flow. Additionally, the formatting breaks intended to emphasize the movement from scene to scene made it seem a bit jumbled to me. Despite these minor imperfections, Plague Year was a good read. I expect that we will be seeing more novels coming from Mr. Carlson in the future. – Randy Lindsay