Monday, December 1, 2008

Plague War


Plague War by Jeff Carlson was originally published in August, 2008. My paperback copy has 289 pages. This is the sequel to the previously reviewed Plague Year. If you want to pursue this series, you really do need to read them in order. Plague Year was better than Carlson's Plague War. No rating on this book.

Synopsis from the cover:
Earth has been ravaged by the machine plague, a nanotech virus that exterminates all warm blooded organisms below altitudes of ten thousand feet. The remains of humanity cling to life on isolated mountain peaks around the world.

Nanotech researcher Ruth Goldman has developed a vaccine with the potential to inoculate the world's survivors against the plague, but the fractured U.S. government will stop at nothing to keep it for itself. Determined to share the cure, Ruth and Cam Najarro, a man who lived through the aftermath of the plague at great personal cost, must brave the devastated wasteland America has become.

Together they begin a cross-country odyssey during which they will encounter both the best and the worst in human nature - unaware that an even greater threat is poised to strike.
Quotes:

"Ruth kicked her way through another tangle of bones, stumbling when her foot caught in a fractured chunk of ribs and vertebrae." opening sentence

"A lot of survivors called it Plague Year, or Year One, but it wasn't only human history that had crashed in the long fourteen months since the machine plague. The invisible nanotech devoured all warm-blooded life below ten thousand feet elevation." pg. 5

"...Ruth and other top researchers became sure they could put together a nano capable of protecting the body from within, like a vaccine... The Leadville government thought the situation was far too gone to simply share this new technology and trust in any peace. Overseas, starving armies ate each other's dead and kept prisoners like cattle, and there had been atrocities here as well." pg. 6

"Up here the air was frigid and thin. Every survivor has acclimated to elevation or they hadn't survived, but headaches and nausea were very common among the population in Leadville, and that was down near ten thousand feet." pg. 51

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