The Eden Plague

The best science fiction thrillers are built around new and interesting ideas. Not just any sort of implausibly outlandish nonsense, but the sort of thing that brings my reading to an abrupt, even startled halt as I acknowledge that the author has just given me something genuinely fascinating, something that never would have occurred to me without his or her help, and something that makes sense.

A first-rate example, taken directly from The Eden Plague, is the new-to-me notion that the aging process is not something innate and natural that can't be escaped except through death. Instead, suppose that aging, in all its damaging manifestations, is best construed as a systemic disease. And imagine that we could develop a vaccine that would bring its over-time devastation to a halt.

A systemic-disease interpretation of aging is insightfully novel, and the same holds for the possibility of inoculation against age-related decrepitude. Far-fetched? Maybe so. But in today's world of intensive research in genetics and molecular biology, this way of understanding aging has just enough conceptual plausibility to hook me and pull me into The Eden Plague's chaotic world of science fact, science fiction, international intrigue, and some pretty basic moral questions.

OK, so not all lives are worth living, and people do kill themselves. But imagine that the same processes that prevent damage due to aging also heal pre-existing wounds to our bodies and minds, rendering them sound and happy. Now we're getting really far-fetched! But all this is still consistent with the idea that there is an optimal state of physical and mental health that we naturally tend toward. And why not? In the abstract, does this really sound less likely than an unfortunate tendency to incur pathology? After all, wounds do heal. Breaks try to mend. The body's immune system really does fight disease, even if often ineffectively. What we need, then, is to find a way to ramp up our inborn tendency toward an optimal state. Speaking figuratively, we have to overcome the debilitating consequences of Eve's indiscretion with the forbidden fruit.

Thus, David VanDyke's novel The Eden Plague introduces us to holistic medicine at its most powerful: the body as a smoothly functioning, friction-free system that tends toward abundant life and fulsome well-being once its rid of alien processes, substances, entities, patterns ... whatever their source. A really new way of looking at the world of individual human beings.

And think of the social implications! An innovative and interesting idea seems invariably to generate a whole host of outcomes that need to be thought through. Some of them, like exaggerated over-population, are immediately evident. Others, such as crippling fear of any remaining source of death, say a highly unlikely bullet in the brain, may not be immediately apparent. After all, if old age and disease aren't going to kill us, death is no longer inevitable, and we may become so protective of our immortality that we turn into a useless collection of risk-averse cowards. Why gamble with the opportunity to live forever? We might tremble and freeze, falling into desuetude at the prospect of coming out from behind our dead-bolts and leaving our gated communities. How would anything get done?

And who's to say that those who find or develop something like the ironically named Eden Plague won't quickly try to turn it to their advantage, milking a monopoly on immortality for all they can get? The implications are hard to fathom in their totality, and some seem frightening and ultimately self-destructive, no matter who is in control.

By raising interesting and unanticipated questions such as this, The Eden Plague has hooked me and reeled me in several times over. I'm definitely buying the sequel. It'll be worth it to find out what happens to the female Marine in scuba gear, and the high-flying interstellar students of the history of our world. Intriguing characters can be almost as interesting as genuinely new ideas, and The Eden Plague has both.

For readers who find that The Eden Plague loses energy and drifts off topic about half way through, stick with it. VanDyke pretty quickly recovers, the book regains it verve and purpose, and the finish is thematically multifaceted, powerfully suggestive, and begins to introduce its sequel.

This is the first volume in a sci fi series. It holds the reader's attention and has some thought provoking aspects. Especially good on tactical detail.

This book is a non-stop action thriller, one of those where you finally look up from it and say "wow... is it that late already?" but you still don't want to put it down. It's set in today's world, with today's leading-edge technology, but with a twist of the "it could be happening right now" variety that will change life as we know it in a fundamental way.

Van Dyke tells the story through the adventures of a diverse group of well-developed, believable characters, all very human, each with his or her own set of virtues and faults. It's a complete book in its own right, with the main story action resolved at the end; but it's obviously meant to be the lead in to an ongoing series (and includes a "teaser" for the next book as an epilogue). I don't care much for "cliffhangers" but this really doesn't feel like one (for all that it makes me really want to read the next one).

If SciFi action thrillers are your thing, by all means get a copy of this one. Then open it up, and hang on for a wild ride.