I just finished reading an outstanding trio of dystopic science fiction novels. They are Plague Year, Plague War, and Plague Zone. As you can probably surmise, they are about plagues.

Nanotech plagues.

Jeff Carlson has frightened me. I am thoroughly convinced that nanotechnology will one day wipe humankind off the face of the Earth. How so? Read these three books, they’re like the Holy Bible writ with prophesies.

Plague Year opens with a horrific description of a small band of survivors eating one of their own.

They ate Jorgensen first. He’d twisted his leg bad—his long white leg. The man hadn’t been much more than a stranger, but Cam remembered five hundred things about him.

What has caused them to resort to cannibalism? A nanotech plague has eradicated all life below approximately 10,000 feet (the nanomachines have a ‘safety’ mechanism to cause them to self-destruct at a certain air pressure). The plague started with a group of research scientists attempting to find a cure for cancer. The irony is a killer.

We meet two intriguing characters that carry us through the trilogy: Cam Najarro and Ruth Goldman. Cam is an ex-ski guide and Ruth is a nanotech scientist floating around in the International Space Station searching a cure.

Ruth eventually reaches Earth where she meets Cam. Then in an amazing and rather well-hidden twist, all hell breaks loose at the end of book one.

Plague War picks up a year later where we find that Cam struggling to protect Ruth, one of the few people alive that can save humanity. The amazing waste and destruction of the United States is expressed powerfully by Carlson. Humanity’s despair can be tasted. Ruth has to make a difficult decision at the end of book two in order to save the world, thus setting up book three.

Finally, Plague Zone finds Cam and Ruth hiding in a tiny village in the Rocky Mountains. Ruth has a research tent and Cam is now married. The book opens with a jolt–ants attack one of the village’s greenhouses–and it doesn’t let go. Plague Zone is one of those rare books that you can sit down with and finish in a day due to its unrelenting intensity. If there is anything to complain about with Plague Zone is that there’s so much action we sometimes lose touch (emotionally) with the two main characters, Cam and Ruth. The series ends with a great battle involving the Russians, the Chinese, and the Americans (and Cam). The denouement ends the series perfectly, with a tender scene between two war-weary veterans, Cam and Ruth. They’ve been to hell and back.

If you love dark SF (and I presume you do or you wouldn’t be at the Apex website, right?), then you can’t go wrong with Jeff Carlson’s great ‘plague’ trilogy.

Carlson maintains a nice web site at www.jverse.com. Head over there and check it out.

Don’t miss today’s celebrity blog by Jeff Carlson.

Jeff is the author of two spectacular SF-thrillers (Plague War and Plague Year), winner of last year’s Writer’s of the Future contest, and is a current Philip K. Dick Award-nominee for Plague War.

The core concepts behind Plague Year were easy. I grew up in northern California, at sea-level, and yet the San Francisco Bay Area is just a three-hour drive from the Sierra mountains. I’m a lifelong skier and backpacker. My friends and I didn’t ever want to go back to work. As a writer, I’m always looking for cool ideas, and I began to think, “What if we could never go home again?”

Imagine if the geopolitical map was squeezed up into the world’s highest peaks and everywhere else was a death zone. How would Earth’s nations react?

On the face of it, you’d think I must be deeply disturbed! It’s a dark idea. For me, though, the real thrust of the story has always been the grit, intelligence, and determination of the characters.

I’m actually a normal, happy person. My wife and I have two strong, intelligent children, she’s pretty great herself, and I enjoy what I do. Once you accept the basic premise of the story, unfortunately, things get ugly in a hurry, which is why I think the books have been so popular. It’s an impossibly hard question to ask yourself. What would you do to survive? There are very, very few animals or plants to eat above 10,000 feet, no shelter, no technology, and no fuel.

In a crisis, some people will fail — but there are always others who rise to the occasion. Any occasion. Human beings are the smartest, toughest creatures on the planet, and yet it’s given us a blind spot, too. It works against us. We’re the cause of nearly all of our own problems. To me, that’s fascinating.

When I first began writing Plague Year, the threat was a virus, but I couldn’t make a biological threat obey a barrier. It kept coming up over the mountains and killing everybody. There’s a book in that, too, I guess, but it would be a story without any hope at all, whereas if the danger was a machine plague it might have limits. You might even be able to turn it off.

Researchers are publishing a lot of eye-popping stuff in medical technology these days, and I was especially intrigued by the way they’re using primitive nanobots to target and destroy tumors.

Nanotechnology gets its name from a unit of measurement. A millimeter is one thousandth of a meter. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. As a general term, a “nano” is something about the size of a virus! “Nanotechnology” is now being used to describe any sort of chemical or mechanical science being devised at the scale… and in the twenty-first century, it’s everywhere. You can find “nano-particles” of zinc or titanium dioxide in sunscreen that make the lotion clear instead of giving you a funny white face. There is “nano silver” in socks as an anti-odorant.

For a field that concerns itself with microscopic things, nanotechnology is incredibly vast and pervasive. You’re surrounded by it right now.

For the purposes of the book, though, the characters are mostly concerned with nanoscale machines. The Holy Grail of the most ambitious researchers in the field is to develop a high-level robot that can follow directions not only create more of itself — because one nanobot is basically useless, being so incredibly small — but to be able to construct or rearrange things at the molecular level.

In theory, nanobots like this could make gold out of dirt. Or food. Or medicine. Or a cold fusion reactor. Once you control the most basic building blocks of the universe, you can create almost anything.

We’re still a long way from this magic. Right now, what people are doing with nanotech is creating better sunscreen and socks and new optical fibers and microprocessors.

However, there are also remarkably clever people who are using crude nanobots to identify tumors in patients. Tumors are more acidic than healthy tissue, and people have manufactured nanoscale carriers that, when injected into the body, will react to that acidity and begin to release markers which are then used to precisely target the tumor in MRI scans.

All of this sounds great, right? Here’s where it gets scary. The problem with even passive nanotech such as what you find in sunscreen that doesn’t look white or socks that don’t smell is that particles of this size are impossible to contain. The junk in the sunscreen can be absorbed into your body, where, in sufficient amounts, it will disrupt hormone production. The stuff in your socks washes out and filters into the ground water, where it plays equal havoc with biological lifeforms, and I’m not just talking about frogs and fish. It affects people, too, because it returns to you in your drinking water….

And that’s just the beginning.

There are hundreds of private labs who aren’t publishing what they’re doing, some commercial, some military. You don’t even want to think about nanobots as a weapon. Even nuclear bombs are nothing to worry about in comparison to an invisible, worldwide blanket of nanobots that can disarm and disintegrate missiles before they’re launched. Or rip apart anyone who tries to object.

In Plague Year, I posit that there are research teams who have moved beyond “dumb” nanobots to active, “smart” machines that will find and remove malignant tissues inside their living human host.

For all we know, there are science teams who have already developed machines like this in real life. The researchers in the lab imagined in Plague Year are also some of those who aren’t publishing, not because they’re evil but because it’s proprietary information. The first group to come out with such a thing will make trillions of dollars, although money becomes a secondary concern at that point.

There’s an even better pay-off than being rich, because if you can improve your cancer cure by another level or two, you nearly have immortality — and you can smoke, drink, and eat donuts all day long besides! Machines like this could keep your lungs clean, your liver strong, and correct any and all failing such as diabetes or multiple sclerosis while also protecting you from AIDS, nerve agents, or even the common cold.

My characters are still in the early stages of creating their device, which they call archos, a Greek word meaning “master form.” Eventually, they hope to use the same prototype to accomplish all of the wildly complex aspects of maintaining the human body against age and disease. For now, however, they’ve taught the archos tech to use its host’s body heat as an energy source and they’ve taught it build more itself using the carbon and iron it would find in malignant tissues. That’s it.

That’s when it breaks loose from their lab during an act of industrial espionage.

There’s nothing anyone could do. The only thing in the world’s favor is that the archos tech has one weakness. The research team built a hypobaric fuse into their machine as of their controls. They planned to treat their patients inside a hermetically sealed room, and, when they were done, they’d drop the air pressure to 70% of an atmosphere, causing the nanotech to self-destruct, after which the patient would emerge, happy and cancer-free.

The bad news is that 70% of an atmosphere is about 10,000 feet up. This barrier fluctuates with the weather, but not by much, and there aren’t a great many places on Earth at that elevation. Below the death line, the uncontrolled nanotech devours all warm-blooded creatures, leaving only some insects, amphibians, and reptiles.

Mayhem ensues.

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Jeff Carlson is the author of the internationally acclaimed sci fi thrillers Plague Year and Plague War. To date, his work has been translated into eight languages. Plague Year is also available as an audiobook from Recorded Books and Audible.com, and has been optioned for film. More than twenty of his short stories and nonfiction articles have appeared in venues such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Boys’ Life, and the Fast Forward 2 anthology.

Currently, Jeff is at work on a new stand-alone thriller. He lives with his wife and sons in California, and welcomes correspondence at www.jverse.com, where readers can find free fiction, videos, blog, contests, and more.

Plague War is the engaging follow-up to the entertaining SF thriller Plague Year. (You can read my earlier review of Plague Year here.) I’m pleased to report that Plague War is that rare sequel that improves upon the original.

In Jeff Carlson’s torn-apart world, humanity has become scattered across the mountain peaks of the world at an elevation of 10,000 feet or higher. Nanotech originally created as a cure for cancer escapes in an accident (referenced in Plague Year and explained in more detail in Plague War) into the atmosphere, where it finds warm-bodied mammals to feed its replication engine. The nano-plague functions much like a flesh-eating virus.

Plague War begins soon after Plague Year ends, with researcher Ruth Goldman on the run after having created a weak vaccine against the nano-plague. Joining her is Cam Najarro, a crafty and smart former ski instructor. The remaining superpowers of the world (the US, China, and Russia) are in a race to perfect the vaccine and mold the remnants of the world in their own nationalistic fashion.

Plague Year was a strong novel. If there was any true criticism of the novel, it lay with a group of characters that were slightly less than empathetic to the reader. Carlson gives Plague War a stronger emotional core with the emotional dynamics between Ruth and Cam. They’re an interesting pair of anti-heroes who make great sacrifices for the greater good of the world.

Carlson also amps the destruction in Plague War—on top of the nano-plague, an international war breaks out and nuclear bombs are detonated. By the end of the book, I was starting to think if there was anything left on earth to salvage. And truthfully, I’m anxious to read the series finale (Mind Plague) that is due in December of 2009.

Fans of fast-paced cinematic plots will enjoy Plague War. Carlson has done a fine job of balancing plot and character in one of my favorite novels of the past year. A Philip K. Dick Award-nominee, Plague War receives 4.5 out of 5 and is recommended to fans of Apex-style fiction.

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Jason Sizemore is the editor-in-chief of Apex Publications.

The first sentence of the book is the succinct: “They ate Jorgensen first.”

Sounds wild, right? Plague Year is wild.

In this near-future, action-packed novel, humanity finds itself on the brink of extinction thanks to one research group’s good intentions. Nanobots designed to devour cancer cells are misprogrammed and thus they devour anything warm-blooded. This leaves fringe groups of people trapped in various mountainous locations around the United States.

The nano-plague dies at atmospheric pressures that exist around 10,000 feet elevation. Only those smart enough to flee or who were already living above this height scrape out an existence via whatever means necessary, including cannibalism. It’s in this setting that we meet Cameron Najarro and Albert Sawyer, who have a most unusual symbiotic hate/love relationship. This relationship is put to the test when a young man named Hollywood makes the dangerous trek below 10,000 feet to reach their outpost. Hollywood makes a convincing case to Cam and Sawyer to make the trip back with him, as Sawyer has a secret plan.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ruth Goldman and a group of researchers are orbiting in the International Space Station. During the course of the Plague Year, they listen with horror to the events unfolding via intermittent radio conversations with ground control and other scientists. Ruth believes she can create an antibody (called ANN) that will cure the nano-plague.

I’ve probably given away too much plot as it is, so I’ll stop except to say that Cam, Ruth, and the enigmatic Sawyer cross paths and partake in an intense battle to save humanity from itself and the plague.

Perhaps the only complaint I can level against Carlson’s debut is that it lacks a strong emotional center. Ruth isn’t quite someone you can root for: she’s shallow, stubborn, and standoffish. I suspect this is Carlson’s view of scientists in the field of nano-technology. Cam has some great character moments, but his attachment to Sawyer perplexed me at times (Sawyer being a complete ass).

Jeff Carlson’s Plague Year was a rare impulse buy. Somehow, I’d missed all marketing for the book and the multitudes of reviews. But I’m glad I was drawn to the book’s catchy cover design and cover copy. If you’re a fan of dark SF, this is one thriller you don’t want to miss.

A sequel, Plague War, was released in July of 2008 and was recently shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award. Expect to read my review of Plague War in the next few weeks. The third book of the series, Mind Plague, is schedule to be published in December, 2009.

I heartily recommend Plague Year for those who enjoy Apex published literature.

Pick up Plague Year in the Apex aStore.
Pick up Plague War in the Apex aStore.

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A young writer and editor from Appalachia Kentucky, Jason Sizemore has seen his fiction appear in nearly two dozen books and magazines. He’s a prolific non-fiction writer, having dozens of essays, reviews, and editorials published in print and on the web on varied subjects such as gaming, geek culture, and politics. He earned his college degree from Transylvania University, making him an ideal candidate to head a horror magazine. He was a 2006 Stoker Award nominee for his work on the Aegri Somnia anthology.

Jason invites you to visit his personal webspace.