Customer Reviews

Dust

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I've just read some of the less charitable reader reviews for Dust. All of them point to the book's didactism and woden characterizations as its ultimate failing. Yes, the science is over-wrought, and yes, the characters are as flat as my shadow. BUT, no one reads Pellegrino for those things. We read him for the unique way in which he makes real and unusual science relevant to everday life. Dust certainly does that. This ain't Hemmingway, people, but more like Scientific American packaged more readably as a novel.

_Dust_ was a gripping and unique end-of-the-world novel, unlike any that I have read before and I consider myself a fan of the genre. The book is set in the relatively near future, in the first decade or two of the 21st century.

The action begins when Richard Sinclair, a paleontologist, working at a scientific research facility near his Long Island home, narrowly escapes with his nine year old daughter Tam - purely by accident - an attack by an unknown entity on his neighborhood. Taking dozens of people by complete surprise, the entity looks like a living black carpet. Killing in minutes innocent bystanders, police officers, and later a television reporter crew (as well as Sinclair's wife), the media dubs the threat motes. As the area is quarantined, Sinclair and other scientists come to the conclusion after a harrowing trip into the infected town that the "motes" are mites, a massive horde of starving mites that attack and devour literally to the bone anyone that cannot escape them.

Sinclair and the other researchers of Brookhaven (also called the City of Dreams) discover that the threat of the motes - however bad - is merely the tip of the iceberg and not only the United States but all of humanity faces a grave threat. Looking at data from bee keepers - who were virtually of business - the astronomical rise in orange juice prices, and a host of other bits of data not previously integrated by researchers (bringing to mind for me some of the separate bits of intelligence prior to September 11th), Sinclair and the others come to a startling conclusion; the world's insect have vanished. They have all died out, disappeared completely, and this seemingly good bit of news (at least at first glance, to the uninitiated) rapidly produces vastly dire consequences. With the extinction of fungal gnats (a bit of data an entomologist died procuring), massive fungal blooms are spreading throughout the world's crops (aided by the fact that most of the world's crop plants are of extremely limited genetic diversity). With no insects to control the fungus (and farmers having gotten away from spraying their crops due the gradual decline in insect pests the last few years), the fungus spreads amok, first wiping out crops in India (precipitating an ugly war between it and Pakistan and Sri Lanka as India seeks to annex areas with uninfected croplands, dragging the U.S. into the conflict), later to other countries. Large numbers of animals die throughout the world - insect eating bats, later, fruit eating-bats (which as they die out no longer pollinate plants themselves), many omnivorous animals, freshwater fish that rely upon larval aquatic insects for food - and with no flies or other insect scavengers to remove the bodies, freshwater throughout the world is rendered toxic by the massive amounts of bacteria that now teem in it. Much of this runoff spreads into the sea, creating low or no oxygen areas, wiping out those fish species not already being depleted by frantic nations desperate to replace declining crops as a food source. Even the motes are a result of the end of insects; no longer held in check by insect predators nor having to compete with insects, reach plague proportions in some areas, once harmless mites killing hundreds of people.

Things of course in this novel get worse, much worse. The economy goes into a freefall in the United States as non-mote infected areas refuse to have anything to do with those under quarantine or even suspected of having a mote problem. Entire industries collapse, such as the trucking industry, while those reliant on trucking, such as grocery stores which need regular shipments of goods, collapse as well. As crops start to fail in the United States and as gasoline starts to become scarce thanks to a broken down transportation system, riots begin to happen. Stepping into these chaotic and turbulent times is Jerry Sigmond, a corrupt former talk-show host with unfortunately real skills in making others into fanatical followers of a new mass movement he begins to lead, one that sees scientists and engineers ("eggheads" and "Einsteins") as the real cause of all these problems. Sigmond emerges as a major villain in the book and a direct threat to Sinclair's efforts.

But wait! It gets worse! In some of the scariest parts of the book - it is a horror story after all, though one firmly grounded in science fact with an extensive non-fiction epilogue and bibliography - vampire bats emerge as a villain (yes you read right). The booming cattle industry of Central and South America unfortunately becomes infected with Mad Cow disease and the disease jumps vectors. Transmittable now by vampire bats -which won't feed on sick cattle - they move onto humans, wiping out virtually the entire population of several Caribbean islands as they move in vast numbers from the mainland in search of food. Those that do not die directly from being fed on (a harrowing chapter described one such incident where two researchers meet a very unfortunate demise), die from rapid onset of the disease, a disease that was to have major repercussions in the novel's endgame.

A very enjoyable novel, I found myself really rooting for Sinclair as he and his colleagues race to uncover the nature of the problem - the sudden demise of insects worldwide - and conclude that it is perhaps due to a genetic "timebomb," that the Earth's mass extinctions approximately every 33 million years are not due to a comet or asteroid impact but from the dormancy of the world's insect species (in a manner not unlike the massive periodic bamboo die offs in China that nearly wipe out the pandas periodically). They race to find a solution to this, working in an increasingly chaotic world, working with research stations in other parts of the world that one by one gradually drop off the face of the earth in the growing chaos. A gripping book, it had an action-packed ending.

We as humans live in a comfy little world, using the resources on this planet without a second thought we always thought that we were the most important species in the world. Then when as something as simple as the insects becoming extinct, the whole wbecome man-eating, swarms of mites devour whole town, all because of the death of the insects, but what nature is doing to us, is nothing compared to what human will do to themselves. Dust ia a provocative and at times bone chilling novel, making us contemplate about our lives and how quickly and esily it could come crashing down.

We have always thought we as humans were the rulers of this planet, yet when the insects begin to die off we circle into chaos and that chaos caused by nature spirals into man-made anarchy which is even more terrifying. Dust is a novel which will question your own thoughts on humans place in this world and understand that our place in the food chain is easily interchangable and not to underestimate other creatures on this Earth.

In the Killing Star he used relativistic bombs to destroy the Earth and wrote a plausible story of why the universe is silent.

Now in Dust he takes us down another grim but plausible path. Not your ordinary ecological disaster epic. That's Charles Pellegrino's speciality, writing fiction that in a few years you hope won't be reality. Highly recommended, but be warned don't expect happy endings....This author scares Stephen King!

His works in non-fiction are really good too, insightful and thought provoking and should be read.

This is great, frightening fun! Pellegrino devises a rather clever way to destroy life on earth as we know it. Earth's ecology is all topsy-turvy, and the foodchain has reversed itself. All over the world, crops are dying, insects are swarming, animals are acting out of character, and people are beginning to riot and kill as they realize that the end may truly be near. Paleobiologist, Richard Sinclair, starts to piece together little clues as to the causes of these bizarre ecological occurrences. He bands together with others to try to come up with a way to ensure that human life survives on the planet. Along the way, we get to see nature at its most frightening (I love the bat sequences faced by Bill and Janet, they gave me major chills!). I think the most frightening aspect of the novel is the tendency of the humans to sink to the lowest level when faced with extraordinary circumstances.
This is a smart, taut little thriller. Pellegrino throws in some pop culture references, some humor (the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Stephen King musical production of "Survivor Type" is worth several chuckles), ethical questions and a lot of science to round out this novel. I enjoyed the story, I liked the characters, and I loved the images presented in the writing. This one's a winner.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I read this on an international flight and it kept me in such good company I hardly noticed the fatigue. There are plenty of interesting concepts. Some of them seem bizarre and yet totally plausible. Pellegrino is indeed a great author, scientist and adventurer!

this is by far one of the best books i have ever read. not only because it is mildly frightning because of the realistic possibilities, but also because it is very well written fiction. There are real people in this book who really exist and really are the experts in the particular fields described. But after you have read the book, the final chapter is the section that tells you what parts of the book are true and which are creative changes by the author. So you will know what the real possibilities are. I work in a book store and have recommended it to others who also enjoyed it who in turn bought copies for others.

This novel just chilled me to the bare bones. The characters, even those who appeared for just a short while before entering the book's rather extensive obituary, were so fleshed-out that I was sometimes tricked into believing that they were about to become main characters. The evangelistic Jerry Sigmond seemed so real to me that I was certain that Pellegrino was describing something terrible that had really happened to him in life. His co-author on "Chariots for Apollo" (another 5 star book) has told me that an evangelical radio personality, and other anti-Darwin types did indeed send mobs to destroy his two New Zealand laboratories and bring him before "ad hoc committees" during the early 1980's, whereupon he was forced to renounce his theories about oceans under the ice of Jupiter's and Saturn's moons, ancient bacteria reaching Earth from Mars, and what everyone now knows as the "Jurassic Park" theory. Like Galileo, Pellegrino's ideas have turned out to be correct, but that did not stop New Zealand from putting him on trial as some sort of heretic, and passing sentence (Luckilly, he was able to get out of the country in 1982). Commenting on the New Zealand Jerry Sigmonds vs Pellegrino, Sir. Arthur C. Clarke ("2001: A Space Odyssey") has written, "Evidently, some New Zealanders are dumber than the sheep - which outnumber them!" So, this is certainly a scientist who has paid his dues, and it shows in his fiction. He reads like the B.B. King of the eco-thriller. Stephen King's "The Stand," to which this book has been compared, is bright and cheery by comparison. One cannot sing the blues so well if his life has been easy. Perhaps some truths can only be sung as Blues, or written as fiction. Also true to life is the story's failure to select one answer from the many theories about the scientific (and in some cases even theological) causes given for the insect extinction at the root of the Dust crisis. This is exactly how science works - differing from religion in that it is based far more on questions than on answers. In real science, most of the time we just never know. For more than two thousand years of using asprin, no one really knows how it works, and though we now know how to clone people like carrots, we've barely a clue as to how the first diploid cell really becomes a human being. Which brings me to another truth: Dr Charles Drew. The man who developed blood typing but bled to death was, as Pellegrino writes, driven away from a "whites only" hospital after a severe accident. The current "urban myth" seems to arise from recent revisionist historians who (these past two years) have insisted that driving Dr. Drew away from a "Whites only" hospital had something to do with "lack of proper medical facilities" and nothing at all to do with his being a black man in the deep south in 1950. None other than NASA's Jesco von Puttkamer happened to be in the neighborhood when it happened, and the incident became one more reason, on the heels of the still fresh lessons of Auschwitz, that America simply had to wake up, and change its ways. That's just the two cents I have to add, but I'm just an aerospace engineer. What do I know?

Just finished and found, for a change, an intelligent book, laced with science, founded in theory and chaos, and presented in a believable way. This is TRUE science fiction. The science is real, the possibility is real, and the characterizations are real. I only reget that so many individuals (whose educational shortcomings are manifested in their diatribes against the book)could not see past this freshman fiction effort and embrace the logic and power of the story.

Good read by the pool, but not while lying in your mite encrusted bedsheets.

Toodles