White Plague - Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert is one of the best authors of all time, not just science fiction. And if you need any proof of this, I’d recommend a fairly non-sci-fi book like this. It covers a massive range of issues, from morality and religion to violence and war, science and politics and of course, the ever interesting “what-if” doomsday scenarios.

There’s also a range of characters, predominantly American, Brits and fucked up Irish. And not the great, St. Patrick’s Day everyone wearing green and listening to U2 or Dropkick Murphy’s Irish, I’m talking about the real Irish. The ones who are violent, hateful dickbags with a penchant for getting under people’s skin and holding grudges with them until the end of the world looms near.

But through all the violence and hatred, Frank Herbert has a way of conveying the heart of the issue without actually writing anything of the violence. You just hear about it after it has already happened, it is really quite brilliant. The very beginning is the only time in which violence is described in detail, and that is what sets off the entire plague.

An American (of Irish descent) in Dublin loses his family courtesy the IRA and basically goes batshit. He spends the next stage of his life retracting into a home-made basement laboratory creating a disease that will kill women. All women. So that Ireland (the place he lost his family), the source of their extremists’ weapons (Libya), and the source of their pain (Great Britain) will know his despair when their women parish. Scientists and politicians from around the world unite to find a cure, or even just to know what is happening with this disease. Women in quarantine are held in captivity against their wills, and are unsurprisingly targeted by the lonely, mad male population. But of course, being raped by a man who is a carrier (with no way of knowing if he is a carrier or not at this point) will only kill you later on anyway. Eventually the same united scientists/politicians begin to suspect who may find the cure first and use it as leverage to become a superpower, or who may use it to protect their women and call for others as there is about a 10,000:1 ratio of male to female on the planet.

So there is unrest globally and within the groups fighting for a cure. There is also a new pope because the previous one had a heart attack as the Catholic Church is blamed by so many for their ties to the Irish and the violence in that country. This loose end is tied just enough to talk about how the new pope is assassinated because he’s fucking crazy. But in typical Herbert fashion, this isn’t a failure of religion, it is a failure of bad politics. The religion is actually a huge part of the antagonist’s soul-searching, as he is teamed with a Priest and a devastated boy to a firsthand viewing of all his damage. Then there is the asshole Irishman, starting shit and beating the Priest on occasion, coming on way too strong and making himself an opponent of not only religion, but the quest everyone is on to make it to the labs and work towards a cure (which, also in typical Herbert fashion, isn’t really what’s happening).

I also freaked out, healthwise, when I read this book…seriously. I jotted down the following passage as I crossed the quarter mark of the book:

I did realise in the early goings of reading this, though it is very terrifying and well written, I am possibly too much of a hypochondriac to read about plagues, outbreaks of disease and biological warfare. There's a couple chapters; one in which Herbert explains the creator of the disease's reaction to it, catching a stray from the lab I believe he calls it, and is overcome by less-than life threatening but still serious symptoms. In the next chapter we learn the symptons first hand from a lady intent on explaining to scientists/doctors exactly what is happening to her as she loses everything. The symptoms begin to make me nervous, and all of a sudden I'm consciously aware that, on some minor scale, I share some of these symptons with her. For example, as she's lying on her deathbed recalling everything that she has noticed lately that was even slightly different, she mentions she woke up horny, very horny. Hey, I was really horny this morning, I thought. And she follows this up by explaining how hungry she was in the morning, ate two breakfasts. Hey I could have eaten two breakfasts, I was that hungy! She goes on to mention the headache, which was no doubt similar to the one I had (and I forgot as I was reading at the time that mine was due to dehydration and alcohol consumption the prior night). Then it's the current symptoms, elevated heartrate (Oh no, my heart is beating faster than normal too), sweating and feeling cold (I think I just got the chills myself!) and dizziness (Wait for it...this is the feeling I usually get before a wave of dizziness comes. Holy Mother of God, he got me! John Roe O'Neill got me! The sonnovabitch!). But like a crazy person with a message to send as the world ends and fades to black, I hear my conscience, the voice of reason inside my head, running against the current of destruction and trudging through the rubble, arms waving and screaming to get my attention. Shouting all the while "It's not real! It's all in your head, you actually feel quite fine." And when I hear this I realise I do actually feel quite fine, and I'm not going to die of a disease Frank Herbert made up in a basement in Seattle....though, suspiciously enough, I was reading this book the same time I was in Seattle, and about the same time I'd had medium-rare pork for the first time.

So yeah, hypochondria, it'll ruin anything I'm reading about human health, disease and illness you can think of.

Anyway, if you have time to read a doomsday book, or like Sci-Fi authors bridging the gap into more of a thriller role of fiction, or just hate the lousy Irish (I am very Irish for those of you who don’t know me, so I feel fine talking this way), then I recommend this as one of the best late-Herbert books out there.

The Handmaid's Tale

My first Margaret Atwood book. It was fair to say this book was highly anticipated in the book club to which I belong, mostly because it marks the beginning of a set of science fiction books hereon until the end of this list. Something like eight books remained (including this one) and they all can be classed as science fiction.

I had no idea what to expect for the plot of this story, and the only warning I had going into it was the level of despair with which the antagonist recounts her days in the dystopian society. Ah, my fave, dystopias and human despair. But I think reading Doctor Zhivago (review coming up soon) just prior to this desensitized me to any sort of sad, terrible emotions the dark and depressing style with which Atwood writes was supposed to instill in me. This left me, I thought, able to appreciate the story for all it was worth. And I looked very much forward to what was going to happen without being slowed down or deterred by how awful this fictional society really is. In other words, I could see through the main character’s pain to appreciate everything this story was really about. But, to my dismay, it wasn’t about much.

I liked the idea, don’t get me wrong. It was powerful, and it represents actual societies that we know about in existence today (Taliban rule in Afghanistan, for example). But there just was not enough of a story line to make me feel it was worth all the shit she goes through. It was just a telling of what happens, almost a documentary, as there was no real climax or resolution to the plot. No solving anything.

So if I could shelve this one under “fictional documentaries,” it would probably be tops on that list. Unfortunately, it goes in my dystopian society list, and with the potential it has at the beginning I feel it disappoints by the end.

In a more positive light, I do like her writing style. It made me feel it was actually written by a reformed woman who may once have been an educated member of society but couldn’t resist the severe oppression of her new patriarchal police state. I also very much enjoyed the mysteries, the ideas that no one really knows what’s going on because viciously governed police states are great at censorship, and keeping from their people any idea of what the outside world is like (1984 anyone?). And the first page of the first chapter lets you know that this is how this society operates.

I may give Atwood another go, but overall I’d have a difficult time recommending this book to anyone who was not particularly a fan of the dystopian sci-fi genre like I am.

The Gunslinger - The Dark Tower Series: Book One

Ah yes, Stephen King. An author I gave up on when I realized he didn’t give a shit if I found his stories scary, well-thought out with plots and characters well developed or forced out with the grace of an explosive fart. There is not much out there he’s written that I’ve read, and even less that I’ve enjoyed, but I’ve never met someone who read the Dark Tower series and had anything bad to say about it. In fact, the closest thing to a negative review I’ve ever heard from any of my friends about the books is that some in the series are “very Stephen King-y.”

This had me worried at first, but after finishing the Gunslinger (and now finished with The Drawing of the Three) I think I can say this is that bit of Stephen King I enjoy. Besides, I don’t dislike all of his work, I just find him a bit too bizarre and gory for me sometimes; really drawing out the scenes that are intended to make one uncomfortable but don’t add much, if anything at all, to the story.

But this book was a mix between a slow, painful trek through the desert (don’t I know a thing or two about those having lived here all my life) and some mind blowing revelations. There is also a little bit of action, which helps define what the Gunslinger is, rather than whom.

We don’t know much about whom he is, really, there are some brief flashbacks, but for the most part he is a man of mystery. It’s a while until we even hear his name. We know he is skilled, but we don’t know where he comes from. For that matter, we don’t know where he is. Is this place in our world or not? It seems like it, as he recognizes the lyrics to ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles, but does not refer to it as a Beatles song.

There are also hints of some terrible apocalypse, as this world has “moved on” and left behind some technologies like pianos and revolvers, but not all that we have. For a better speculation by a very thorough book reviewer, I recommend you see what the good people at Tor.com have to say about this book, which includes more speculation and more guessing than I did as I followed the story:

Constant Reader analysis from Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/features/series/a-read-of-the-dark-tower
Very inquisitive review, for sure, by Tor.com

The last bit of description about the Gunslinger’s world is when the boy, Jake, says “there are other worlds than this one.” And this comes after he describes to him how he died and the Man in Black brought him back to this world. So it is like a freaky, Stephen King-y purgatory, I gather.

The book ends with his conversations with The Man in Black. This involves some pretty weak tarot card readings (didn’t like that addition) but ultimately sets up the next book.

I felt it was so short and brief that it really did nothing other than set up the rest of the series, but it did a good enough job of that. The scene in which he gets the Pentecostal preacher woman off with his pistol, then blasts the rest of the town one at a time with a gun in each hand really made everything worth it. Plus, getting to know a bit more about the Dark Tower at the end made me feel better about being dragged through the desert not knowing what the hell for.

Really looking to vent about The Drawing of the Three soon. Stay tuned.