The Nanotech Plague
Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy , Staff Picks
Sometimes it’s worth taking a flier on a debut paperback original. I found this was the case with Plague Year, Jeff Carlson’s post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller.
A small band of men and women cling to survival on a tiny peak in the Sierra Nevada. The group made it through a terrible winter, following the outbreak of plague worldwide. They've done so by eating their dead.
Most of the human and animal life on Earth perished two months after an experimental nanotech virus was stolen from a Sacramento laboratory. The nanotech was developed with the promise of ridding the human body of disease and pollutants – such as cancer – as well as offering greatly extended lifetimes. But the untested, self-replicating machine virus was released into the atmosphere hours after it was stolen. Simply breathing it was a death sentence.
The scientists who developed the nanotech virus built in a safeguard: a hyperbaric fuse. At 70% of standard atmosphere (about 9600 feet above sea level), the nanotech self-destructs. Human life is possible only at altitudes above 10,000 feet. And, of course, in orbit.
Aboard the International Space Station, leading nanotech researcher Dr. Ruth Ann Goldman has been working on a vaccine, but she desperately needs to get back to Earth for better equipment and collaboration with other scientists. But Goldman doesn't know that a civil war rages outside Mission Control in Leadville, Colorado. In the power struggle over a new order, the nanotech antidote could be used, or withheld, for political means. Scientists are choosing sides.
After the Space Shuttle Endeavor crash-lands on I-24 in the Rocky Mountains, a military expedition is mounted to escort Goldman and others to the lab in Sacramento where structural secrets of the nanotech might be found. Factionalism and treachery, however, threaten the success of the mission, and, possibly, Goldman's only chance to reengineer the deadly machine plague.
Readers of post-apocalyptic fiction and technological thrillers will enjoy Jeff Carlson's fresh and well-imagined take on a world-shattering catastrophe: mass extinction by nanotechnological mayhem.
