Frank Herbert's White Plague

Frank Herbert's White Plague
Began: 2/07/07
End: 02/20/07
Quality: Six Out of Ten.
Reason: Unread. Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.
Genre: Fiction. Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.
Number: First.
Thoughts:

About a month ago, I decided that I wanted to read more post-apocalyptic stories. It's just the sort of thing that I decide on a regular basis which usually ends up meaning my reading lists expands exponentially every couple of days, but I digress. I was looking over a list that I discovered on wikipedia and found one by Frank Herbert. I have been a huge Frank Herbert fan for many years, due to his Dune Series. I have been picking at his other fiction for a while now and decided to go and grab a copy of this particular work, White Plague.

The novel begins in Dublin. A microbiologist, John Roe O’Neil, has just moved to Ireland to conduct research. His wife and two children are killed by an IRA bomb. This sends him over the edge of sanity and he creates a disease which kills only women and sets it loose in Ireland, England and Libya. The rest of the novel follows three plot track lines, O’Neil arriving in Ireland to sabotage whatever work the Irish are doing to stop the plague, the governments of the world dealing with the pandemic crisis and a group of scientists working on the cure.

I liked this novel overall. I think Herbert raises some very interesting and complex issues. I really enjoyed thinking and reading about the sociological impact of a pandemic of this magnitude would cause throughout the world. I found Herbert’s political and philosophical musing, either coming from a character or from the narrator, to be worthy of some ponderings. Yet, at the same time, I didn’t think it was really the best writing that Herbert had produced. I think that the novel was just not big enough for its britches. I mean that Herbert just tried to fit too much into a 500 page novel and that sometimes it got tangled down beneath the weight of all that Herbert was trying to get across. I also felt that this would have been much more interesting to me if Herbert had written the novel starting from the point where the
Governments had found a cure and the shift in culture that occurs because of the magnitude of differences between gender populations.

. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but a Herbert fan or to a post-apocalyptic fan but even then…I didn't feel it was quite as strong as it could be.

Here’s the list of post-apocalyptic fiction….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction