White Plague
What if women were an endangered species? It begins in Ireland, but soon spreads throughout the entire world: a virulent new disease expressly designed to target only women. As fully half of the human race dies off at a frightening pace and life on Earth faces extinction, panicked people and governments struggle to cope with the global crisis. Infected areas are quarantined or burned to the ground. The few surviving women are locked away in hidden reserves, while frantic doctors and scientists race to find a cure. Anarchy and violence consume the planet. The plague is the work of a solitary individual who calls himself the Madman. As government security forces feverishly hunt for the renegade scientist, he wanders incognito through a world that will never be the same. Society, religion, and morality are all irrevocably transformed by the White Plague.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
15mentions
12people
2013–2026years
53% recommend47% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- One of the scariest science fiction stories I've ever read is "The White Plague" by Frank Herbert... yeah, the Dune guy. In this story a molecular biologist's family is murdered in a terrorist event, goes insane, and decides to create a plague that is carried by men but kills women, so that everyone else has to experience the loss he did. It's not scary because the story is any more particularly filled with death or destruction or gore or other viscerally scary things like that. It was scary because as I was reading it, there was no hole in the logic I could take refuge in. There's simply no reason that book can't happen.
And that was my reaction 15 or 20 years ago. It is only harder to poke holes in the logic now than it was then.
- Read The White Plague by Frank Herbert. Scared the heck out of me as a teen. Considering how humanity still hasn't escaped tribalism even after two hundred millennia, just the thought of genealogically targeted viruses are a wonderful thought.
- The classics are classics for a reason. Huxley and Flaubert are both wonderful authors, but all the joy was sucked out reading their works when I was forced to do it. I don't know why. Personal failing, maybe.
I thought Herbert's non-_Dune_ works were very good while also being very disturbing. I read _The White Plague_ in my teens and am reminded of it whenever I read about modern gene drive technology. The ConSentiency stories and books have stayed with me to this day, and I periodically re-read them. Both _Hellstrom's Hive_ and _The Santaroga Barrier_ are fantastic utopias crossed over with deep horror; I love them but can't bring myself to re-read them!
Everybody's different. I can't stand Asimov or Clarke or Drake or Heinlein, despite reading nearly all of their respective science fiction oeuvres, but that Ursula Le Guin isn't in your top five is a damn shame. _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is one of my favorite books, and _The Dispossessed_ primed a political conversion completed by Iain Banks' Culture novels years later. Le Guin and Banks are probably my two favorite authors now, and in that order, with Bradbury and Adams a very close third and fourth.
I'm so tired of trilogies and tetralogies and so on and so forth. I wish authors would just finish the damn story. I think that's why I like Le Guin and Banks so much. You can read out of order and it's no big deal. In fact, I read _The Tombs of Atuan_ before _A Wizard of Earthsea_, and all of Le Guin's Hanish stories are stand-alone. The same goes for Banks' Culture novels, where I started with _Excession_ and back-tracked to _Consider Phelebas_ and read in release order (mostly).
Anyway, I heartily recommend giving the literary fiction another chance some day. There's some really amazing stuff out there that doesn't happen in space.
- Everyone should read Frank Herbert’s White Plague.
The transmission vector can be anything.
- Check out The White Plague by Frank Herbert. And Jerry Pournelle wrote a lot of novels about the CoDominium, an alliance between the US & USSR to suppress scientific research due to the instability it could cause.
