He vows vengeance against Ireland (for the Provisional IRA), Britain (the Provos’ ancient foe) and Libya, which supplied the terrorists with the explosives. His wife dead, O’Neill is driven mad with grief. She is killed by a Provo bomb detonated opposite St Stephen’s Green (Herbert spent months researching in Ireland and you can’t fault his meticulousness). The White Plague opens with Irish-American scientist John Roe O’Neill visiting the old sod with his wife. You might say the only thing missing is a scene in which the mad scientist is put on trial by a head kept alive in a jar of whiskey – but, no, Herbert squeezes that in too. The story then takes in gene manipulation, bio-warfare, mental illness, Celtic mythology and the death of 99 per cent of the world’s female population. The White Plague, which remains bafflingly obscure even as Villeneuve’s Dune devours the box office, begins with a terrorist outrage in which the Provisional IRA bomb Grafton Street in Dublin. All he had to do was predict TikTok and he’d have the full bingo card. In 1982, Herbert published a zippy techno-thriller in which a global plague unleashes upon humankind not only death and destruction but a wave of toxic masculinity. But for an even more compelling example of Herbert speaking to the times in which we live, it is necessary to travel forward 17 years from Dune’s 1965 publication. Such things will never go out of fashion, which is why Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the book is proving so successful at the box office.
Society, religion, and morality are all irrevocably transformed by the White Plague.Īt the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. As government security forces feverishly hunt for the renegade scientist, he wanders incognito through a world that will never be the same. The plague is the work of a solitary individual who calls himself the Madman. The few surviving women are locked away in hidden reserves, while frantic doctors and scientists race to find a cure. Infected areas are quarantined or burned to the ground.
As fully half of the human race dies off at a frightening pace and life on Earth faces extinction, panicked people and governments struggle to cope with the global crisis. It begins in Ireland, but soon spreads throughout the entire world: a virulent new disease expressly designed to target only women. What if women were an endangered species? From Science fiction grandmaster Frank Herbert, creator of the Dune universe, comes this novel of bioterrorism and gendercide.
0 kommentar(er)
