Book Review: The Jupiter Plague

 

 

© 1982 by Harry Harrison

Minor spoilers for this 43-year-old SF thriller …

 

This is the second of my four-book haul this Halloween, a haul designed for some quick, distractionary reading as a counterpoint to The Three Musketeers and other epics I put away this year. It clocked in at 283 pages, a bit long but the typeface was slightly larger than normal. It was probably of a similar wordcount to my prior read, The Other Side of Time.

 

I picked it up more for the author than for the story (though the story did intrigue me) – Harry Harrison, a science fiction master whose pedigree stretches from 1951 to 2010. And like the author of my prior read, Keith Laumer, the centennial of his birth passed too earlier this year.

 

Never read much of Harrison. I do recall as a youngster seeing his name adorn many a hardcover spine whilst perusing the library’s science fiction shelves. The “Stainless Steel Rat” and “Bill the Galactic Hero” were names I did not know then but now know them as the typical Harrisonian protagonist – unlikely, anti-traditional, satirical, a middle-finger to Joseph Campbell and all those heroes on their heroic journeys – but most of all, comedic. Before I leave physical existence on this sphere I’d like to read the origin novels of the Rat and Bill; they go on my bucket list immediately.

 

However, I did read a trio of his works 10-15 years ago: Planet of the Damned, Deathworld, and its numerical sequel, Deathworld 2. Good reads but overall unremarkable; I think I ‘graded’ them all B’s, which – spoiler alert – I also ‘graded’ The Jupiter Plague.

 

But what of this Plague? I hear your exclamatory inquiries. That’s the word that tickled my ear. Since we’re all victims to a greater or lesser extent of a recent – ahem – plague, I wondered if it was too soon to read a science fiction tale about a deadly contagion. Truth be told, it wasn’t, for this one descends upon mankind not from the laboratory of a foreign competitor but from another world: Jupiter.

 

Published in 1982 but based on an earlier 1965 story, the setting appears to be the New York tri-state area around the year 2000. A weird blend of the area I grew up with rockets and spacepads thrown in. A lot of action takes place in my old stomping grounds – just across the Hudson River in New Jersey along Route 9. Most of the story, though, is centered in New York City, between the two poles of Kennedy Airport and Bellevue Hospital.

 

A mission to Jupiter returns after a long absence crashing into a runway at JFK. Our hero, Dr. Sam Bertolli, is the first on scene and helps the sole survivor out the hatch before the man seals the metal door behind him and dies. Sam is an ex-soldier turned medic, still technically an intern despite his age. The man he rescues, however temporarily, was the commander of the mission and his face is covered with bursting read pustules.

 

Sam, along with a beautiful bacteriologist who arrives shortly after, are placed in quarantine, but the disease – named Rand-alpha – soon escapes. It’s a fast-acting bug, killing victims within twelve hours of contact. Sam and the beautiful doctor, Nita, remain uninfected due to medical precaution, but the disease spreads through the population. In fact, it soon mutates into Rand-beta, affecting birds, and Rand-gamma, affecting canines. The army shows up to enforce a containment perimeter, and as society trapped within the 100-mile circle breaks down the race is on for Sam and Nita to find a cure before the tri-state area is nuked.

 

All this was by-the-book for me, but I didn’t see where the novel was heading. Ask yourself: why did the commander seal the ship shut? Hmm. Answer: because the cure is inside the ship, along with something that could make the plague a hundred times worse. And what this is … is, a real, live, breathing Jupiterian. How they found it, where they found it, and why the plague is unleashed is the subject of the final quarter of the novel, and made it worthwhile. In a sentence, the Jupiterians live on a giant ice rock in the planet’s upper atmosphere and harness energy like moray eels – bioelectric – but a failure in the communication of the two species leads to the unleashing of the plague as a sort of defense mechanism.

 

Bottom line, it was a quick, neat read. Like my prior read, no earths were shattered of paradigms shifted. But it beat watching a four-hour TV series on Netflix.

 

Grade: solid B.

 

N.B. Two other fun facts regarding Harry Harrison: 1) his 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! supplied the general plot for the Charlton Heston 1973 SF movie Soylent Green, and 2) the man taught himself Esperanto while bored by his duties as an Army Air Force officer in World War II and often incorporated it in his novels.