Dust

_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 f

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 s

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

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.