Subject: Review: "The White Plague" by Frank Herbert

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: 24 Aug 1997 19:40:24 GMT

"The White Plague" by Frank Herbert
		A Postview, copyright 1997 p-m agapow

Genius scientist goes wacko after death of wife and cooks up killer
disease that offs the female half of world.  Social implications at 11.

Perhaps we should have pity for poor Frank Herbert.  Shackled by the
success of "Dune," from this distance his later career seems like an
endless parade of sequels.  Herbert himself may not have felt this way,
but even the "BuSab" and "Pandora" books have faded against the weight of
the "Dune" juggernaut.  So you have to give him credit for trying
something different, even if it isn't entirely successful.  In an attempt
to avoid spoilers, the following discussion will obliquely talk around
some plot elements.

"The White Plague" sits, at times uncomfortably, between the modern
technothriller and an end-of-the-world social upheaval SF novel.  The
first half of the book could have come from the pen of Frederick Forsyth
or Tom Clancy.  Although not as prone to apropos lectures as either of
those two -- in fact some of the biology used is downright wobbly --
Herbert keeps the story strictly prosaic for the first half of the book.
Swapping between different story threads, we see the creation of the
plague as an act of revenge, its' spiralling out of control, the lives of
a couple trapped in a containment facility, a scientific team attempting
to thwart the spread of the disease.  In content and style it is barely SF
at all.  This, of course, is not necessarily a problem.  However, this
section of the book is a trifle dull.

Towards the end of the novel SFnal elements start to creep in, depicting
the social changes wrought by the plague.  Unfortunately these sit
uneasily with the previous material.  Rather than a natural turn of the
story, it feels as if the author had lost his nerve.  Similarly the plague
passes from being an unstoppable menace to something nasty but solvable.
Astonishingly, a large chunk of the plot - the quest to find a cure - just
fizzes.  There is also a vaguely misogynistic air to some of the plot
elements, although this impression is admittedly subjective.  The
amazonian qualities of a female research scientist -- who is smart,
aggressive and brave -- and the unattractiveness of a surviving girlfriend
who complains a lot are lingered over.  The social changes occurring at
end of the book are hardly favourable to women, yet this fact goes largely
without note.  Despite its speculative elements "The White Plague" seems
to be promoting a curiously archaic pictures of gender, with women pleased
to be child-bearing units and men slaves to their reproductive and sexual
urges.  The end of the book thus leaves a faintly bad taste.

These complaints aside, "The White Plague" is not an entirely bad read as
it is sturdily written.  Although not as good as it might be, it is
moderately entertaining if disposable.  [**/ok] and the quality shelf of
an airport bookshop on the Sid and Nancy scale.

%A Frank Herbert
%T The White Plague
%D 1982

paul-michael agapow ([email-masked])
Postviews SF/F reviews site: <www.cs.latrobe.edu.au/~agapow/Postviews>