Customer Reviews

Plague from Space a (Sphere science fiction)

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4 star:		(2)
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OK it's a bit dated in places, both in social attitudes (to women in particular) and the odd mis-step in futuristic technology. But the world is well imagined, the plot runs at a fair clip and the characters are well drawn. The plague itself is highly intriguing and the breakdown in society very realistically drawn. Only the ending feels a bit rushed.

Not one of Harrison's best, that honour belongs to the early Stainless Steel Rat books, but a decent read nonetheless.

I only know the works of Harry Harrison through reputation, one could say, and through his fairly flat collection in Prime Number. Some say his novels are fun or youthful, which strikes me as another way of saying that he doesn't take a plot all that seriously. Plague from Space (also irksomely published as The Jupiter Plague and The Jupiter Legacy.) is exactly as I thought it would be: a plot based on one man, a big problem with no regard to either the start or end of the novel. So, in this regard the novel could be said to have met my expectation and therefore give it 5-stars. And yet I was hoping for my preconceptions to be false and was met with a fairly cardboard-like novel, easily read in a few days without giving much thought to it.

Rear cover synopsis: "The space probe returned carrying a cargo of writhing death! No form of life on Earth seemed safe from the savage epidemic brought back from a distant planet. Quickly and mysteriously it spread over the earth's surface, drawing its victims into a slow and violent death. If Earth was to escape annihilation, the horrible plague had to be stopped! But there was so little left to track down the cause of the Jupiter Legacy!"

The line where it says, "Quickly and mysteriously it spread over the earth's surface, drawing its victims into a slow and violent death" is as faulty as the wiring in my condo. The plague was limited to New York and the area of New England rather than the entire earth's surface and the plague killed its victim rather quickly, within the day... nothing so slow or violent about a fever and some boils.

One thing Harrison has down to an art (mmm, that's a bit of a stretch) is plot flow. It starts with a bang when Sam, our intern doctor and to-be heartthrob is raced to an accident involving a dismemberment and being raced back to the hospital to be warned of a pending danger of unknown proportions at the airport... which is where the behemoth spaceship has returned to Earth while crushing one plane and burning another to a cinder. Sam observes the astronaut descend from the ship and fall. Caring for him, Sam sees blisters around his face and neck with a fever of 105. Knowing he's near death, Sam and his love-interest-to-be (of course) give the man a notepad where he write something like "sick in ship." I considered this a key in understanding WHAT was inside the ship and was especially interested when the police closed the ship off. In the end, the message played no importance and it was all fairly predictable.

For some added flavor, Harrison has thrown in some medical terminology, which, as a fan of anatomy, I just love. Harrison also added some more ridiculous elements of extremely large handguns with calibers of .50 and 0.75 inches, which are ALL recoilless, the author must note. Other elements of science fiction include some ideas about traffic control, Mach 5 air transport and life on a Reef in Jupiter (?).

If you're looking for a fast-paced requiring very little brain power and a few annoyance (i.e. the ending), then look no further than Plague from Space . Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, while different in format, was actually a better read. This book, however, is going back to the second-hand books store.

1978 printing, so presumably the original and shorter version of this novel, which has apparently been published at two different lengths and under several titles. First published in 1965, and thus dated in odd little ways -- not least being the lack of some 1990s-level consumer technology in a story set in a then near future where we have the technology to send a manned mission to Jupiter.

The story opens with that manned mission's return to earth in dramatic fashion, with an emergency landing right on top of Kennedy Airport in New York, one which wreaks havoc on the airport. Young emergency room doctor Sam Bertolli is part of one of the first ambulance teams on the scene, and is directed to the ship itself. Thus he is the first to encounter the sole survivor -- who dies within a few minutes of a deadly disease brought back from Jupiter.

There follows a medical mystery drama, as the city medical services follow standard quarantine procedures, and the situation escalates. Harrison does an excellent job of showing the hard decisions that need to be made and the human reactions -- the people desperate to protect their beloved animals from a vital culling programme, the people trying to cover their own backs in the political games being played, the conflicting priorities in the battle to prevent the disease from spreading beyond the city. There's a lot of good world-building detail about what the medical teams actually *do* in such a situation, rather than simple hand-waving. Unfortunately the mismatch between extrapolated technology levels and we really ended up with can break suspension of disbelief for current audiences, in part because Harrison did such a good and careful job with this. But for all that it's dated in places, it's a good read, with a strongly drawn near-future world, some great characters, and a deadly serious task for them to do.

"Plague From Space" by Harry Harrison, ©1965

This is an ordinary science fiction story. The premise is similar to the one in "The Night of the Living Dead": something comes to earth on a spaceship that wreaks havoc on the people here. In this story the hero sees the solution and has to disobey orders to the contrary to obtain it. A sort of 'shoot 'em up' ending. It was a good fast paced story.
I was interested in the social conventions that were revealed in the story. The hero finds himself in the company of a beautiful woman of his own station. They go off to do battle and he cannot help but see how wonderful she is to work with and all. She becomes a cheerleader for him as he goes off to save the world. If it was not for this story being futuristic, it could have been 1964 or 1965.