The White Plague - Frank Herbert

Berkley, 1983, original copyright 1982, 502 pages
ISBN: 0-425-06757-2
Read:  November 2014, at age 36
First time read.

What it is:  a stand-alone... hmm... thriller, I guess.  There isn't really that much tension.  Maybe horror?  The stuff that goes on is pretty terrifying to think about.

From the back cover:

A car bomb explodes on a crowded Dublin street... and an American scientist whose wife and children are killed plots a revenge so total that it staggers the imagination.  Molecular biologist John Roe  O'Neill unleashes a synthesized plague that kills only women.  Unstoppable, selective, and invariably fatal, it spells the doom of all humankind...

Reactions after the break:

Overall:

There were a lot of really interesting ideas in this book - the idea that great adversity makes for significant progress is one of them - but overall, there just wasn't much of a story.

So, basically, bad things happen.  An evil genius makes it horribly, horribly worse, and then the scientific community bands together to fix it.  They can't, until our mad scientist stops his inexplicable wandering across Ireland and gives them clues.  Then they cure aging, cancer, and genetic diseases and in a couple of generations, fix everything to much better than before.  Yay, science!

The biggest problem is that the only character that I cared even a little about was busy killing off all of humanity (well, just the women, but, well... needed for species survival and all), so, really, someone should go ahead and stop that.  But all the characters who did that pretty much did all their work offscreen, (heroically working in a lab, or just thinking, so it's not like we missed much) and then reported the  results in meetings.  Other characters randomly died of heart attacks and such...it was just really not a character-driven novel.

The plot was insufficient to make up for the lack of characters to care about, and while the setting (the modern-for-the-time world responding to an existential threat of a plague) was really interesting, and sparked a lot of ideas, most of the ideas were explored cursorily or merely alluded to.  A few things were run out to logical conclusions, but even there (what does a 10,000:1 male:female society mean for social norms, to pick one) I didn't find them particularly compelling.

It was also dense writing, and slowly-paced, so I found I got to luxuriate in all the problems of the book.  It just wasn't an enjoyable read, despite some interesting big ideas.

Rating: 2

Other Opinions:

The Literary Omnivore
Pretty negative.

Geek Speak Magazine
Also pretty negative.  This, and the previous, match with my reading.

Jeff's Book Reviews
Not all of them agreed with me.