Book: Gravity by Tess Gerritsen, plaguey things, Pied Piper of Hamelin
I'm definitely making the most of my day off. I'm supposed to meet up with ZSS tomorrow as well as with Singapore Girl and a friend from out of town so today is dedicated to being Vegie Reading/Watching Day. A while back I mentioned that I bought Gravity by Tess Gerritsen. I just finished reading it and thought it was very good.
Blurb:
A young NASA doctor must combat a lethal microbe that is multiplying in the deadliest of environments -- space -- in this acclaimed blockbuster of medical suspense from Tess Gerritsen, bestselling author of Harvest, Life Support, and Bloodstream.
Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime: to study living beings in space. But her mission aboard the International Space Station turns into a nightmare beyond imagining when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control -- and infects the space station crew with agonizing and deadly results. Emma struggles to contain the outbreak while back on Earth her estranged husband, Jack McCallum, works frantically with NASA to bring her home. But there will be no rescue. The contagion now threatens Earth's population, and the astronauts are stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station -- where they are dying one by one...
This is Publisher's Weekly about the book:
Much of this scary thriller is set aboard the International Space Station, where a team of six astronauts suddenly find themselves threatened by a virulent biohazard. Victims first register a headache, followed by stomach pains; then their eyes turn blood red. Finally, they convulse so violently they literally bash themselves apart. Most frightening is what spills out of their bodies: green, egg-filled globules. As astronaut Emma Watson, the station's onboard doctor, struggles to fight the outbreak, her colleagues are dying one by one.
A Japanese astronaut, the first to get sick, is sent down to earth via the space shuttle, but he's dead on arrival. Panic spreads when military physicians discover a deadly mutated creature that's part human, part frog and part mouse in the eggs that spill from his body. The military, fearing bioterrorism or even an extraterrestrial invasion, quickly traces the contaminant to an experiment on the space station that was funded by a company researching tiny organisms in the ocean off South America, where an asteroid hit thousands of years ago.
Meanwhile, back on the station, Watson is the only one left alive. The military says she's already infected and must be left to die in space, but Watson's husband, fellow astronaut/physician Jack McCallum, won't tolerate that decision, and scrambles to find a way to get her home. It's a tribute to Gerritsen, herself a medical doctor, that such an outlandish tale can be told so compellingly and convincingly. Thanks to her impressive research, the novel's detailed descriptions of life in space consistently ring true, and the progress of the breakout is satisfyingly horrific.
I gave up on the Crichton novel I was reading because I found it a bit snorey and the Gerritsen is a sharp contrast. It was very suspenseful and completely terrifying. When a friend phoned to ask me out for a meal tomorrow, I could almost feel myself trying to cut him off so that I could go back to reading my book! :)
The book has a brave and indomitable heroine, a heroic hero, conspiracy theories, cover ups and Dark Secrets from the Deep. There is one coincidence which is a little annoying - the death of someone who Knows All and could probably help cure the terrifyingly unstoppable disease, but I forgave that little plot devise simply because everything else was so well-written. Some of the descriptions of people being affected with the disease were kind of overly graphic but these just added to the drama.
I hadn't realised that Tess Gerritsen was Chinese origin. The surname definitely didn't give that away :)
It occurs to me that I have a rather morbid fascination with epidemics, pandemics, Evil Diseases and stories about bioterrorism :P The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is one of the most fascinating, gripping and heart-breaking books ever. Connie Willis is one of my favourite authors ever and she is able to write a mixture of romance and satire, but in The Doomsday Book she broke my heart. It's absolutely brilliant.
I have a book called Flu : The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata. There are fascinating accounts of exhuming bodies of previous victims and having samples of lung tissue preserved in wax. Ick!
Then there's another book I found interesting called The Black Death: A chronicle of the plague compiled from contemporary sources which was all about the Bubonic Plague based on contemporary accounts and is absolutely fascinating.
Then there's the gorgeous movie (based on the novel) The Horseman on the Roof starring Oliver Martinez and and Juliette Binoche which is set during a cholera epidemic. Now there's a movie for which I wish I could find fan fiction. Angst, forbidden love, pretty people and gorgeous French countryside (Aix-en-Provence). This is a beautiful movie - if you haven't seen it yet you should!!
Then there was Outbreak with Rene Russo, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey and Cuba Gooding Jr (oh and tiny cameo from Patrick Dempsey as Jimbo one of the first victims)......
I wasn't a huge fan of 'The Plague' by Albert Camus and it took me a few reads to get through it. Perhaps my fascination started when I was a wee koala and saw a movie version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, saw the rats, the plague victims, saw the scary crosses on doors and the poor little crippled boy left behind as all the other children followed the piper ..... For anyone who forgets, this is one of the versions of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The movie I saw though dealt with the plague as well:
Once upon a time ... on the banks of a great river in the north of Germany lay a town called Hamelin. The citizens of Hamelin were honest folk who lived contentedly in their grey stone houses. The years went by, and the town grew very rich. Then one day, an extraordinary thing happened to disturb the peace. Hamelin had always had rats, and a lot too. But they had never been a danger, for the cats had always solved the rat problem in the usual way - by killing them. All at once, however, the rats began to multiply.
In the end, a black sea of rats swarmed over the whole town. First, they attacked the barns and storehouses, then, for lack of anything better, they gnawed the wood, cloth or anything at all. The one thing they didn't eat was metal. The terrified citizens flocked to plead with the town councillors to free them from the plague of rats. But the council had, for a long time, been sitting in the Mayor's room, trying to think of a plan.
"What we need is an army of cats!"
But all the cats were dead.
"We'll put down poisoned food then ..."
But most of the food was already gone and even poison did not stop the rats. "It just can't be done without help!" said the Mayor sadly.
Just then, while the citizens milled around outside, there was a loud knock at the door. "Who can that be?" the city fathers wondered uneasily, mindful of the angry crowds. They gingerly opened the door. And to their surprise, there stood a tall thin man dressed in brightly coloured clothes, with a long feather in his hat, and waving a gold pipe at them.
"I've freed other towns of beetles and bats," the stranger announced, "and for a thousand florins, I'll rid you of your rats!"
"A thousand florins!" exclaimed the Mayor. "We'll give you fifty thousand if you succeed!" At once the stranger hurried away, saying: "It's late now, but at dawn tomorrow, there won't be a rat left in Hamelin!"
The sun was still below the horizon, when the sound of a pipe wafted through the streets of Hamelin. The pied piper slowly made his way through the houses and behind him flocked the rats. Out they scampered from doors, windows and gutters, rats of every size, all after the piper. And as he played, the stranger marched down to the river and straight into the water, up to his middle. Behind him swarmed the rats and every one was drowned and swept away by the current.
By the time the sun was high in the sky, there was not a single rat in the town. There was even greater delight at the town hall, until the piper tried to claim his payment.
"Fifty thousand florins?" exclaimed the councillors, "Never ..."
"A thousand florins at least!" cried the pied piper angrily. But the Mayor broke in. "The rats are all dead now and they can never come back. So be grateful for fifty florins, or you'll not get even that ..."
His eyes flashing with rage, the pied piper pointed a threatening finger at the Mayor.
"You'll bitterly regret ever breaking your promise," he said, and vanished.
A shiver of fear ran through the councillors, but the Mayor shrugged and said excitedly: "We've saved fifty thousand florins!"
That night, freed from the nightmare of the rats, the citizens of Hamelin slept more soundly than ever. And when the strange sound of piping wafted through the streets at dawn, only the children heard it. Drawn as by magic, they hurried out of their homes. Again, the pied piper paced through the town, this time, it was children of all sizes that flocked at his heels to the sound of his strange piping. The long procession soon left the town and made its way through the wood and across the forest till it reached the foot of a huge mountain. When the piper came to the dark rock, he played his pipe even louder still and a great door creaked open. Beyond lay a cave. In trooped the children behind the pied piper, and when the last child had gone into the darkness, the door reaked shut. A great landslide came down the mountain blocking the entrance to the cave forever.
Only one little lame boy escaped this fate. It was he who told the anxious citizens, searching for their children, what had happened. And no matter what people did, the mountain never gave up its victims. Many years were to pass before the merry voices of other children would ring through the streets of Hamelin but the memory of the harsh lesson lingered in everyone's heart and was passed down from father to son through the centuries.
I'm not quite sure why I find the subject so interesting. Possibly because in plague tales the villain is non-human and also non-alien. In order to survive, the heroes must work together against an invisible, terrifying, swift and deadly Evil. Secondly, there's always the suspense - the time element as they race to find a cure or race to stop the disease before one of the heroes dies. Thirdly, there's always a fascinating study of the responses that everyone has to it. The government, the people themselves, quarantine issues, some turning to religion, some turning to science, some people turning against one another and but ultimately there's Triumph of the Human Spirit.
I have a similar thing for war stories I suppose. I'm always fascinated about what makes people turn good, turn evil, fall in love, hate and that sort of thing.
Blurb:
A young NASA doctor must combat a lethal microbe that is multiplying in the deadliest of environments -- space -- in this acclaimed blockbuster of medical suspense from Tess Gerritsen, bestselling author of Harvest, Life Support, and Bloodstream.
Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime: to study living beings in space. But her mission aboard the International Space Station turns into a nightmare beyond imagining when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control -- and infects the space station crew with agonizing and deadly results. Emma struggles to contain the outbreak while back on Earth her estranged husband, Jack McCallum, works frantically with NASA to bring her home. But there will be no rescue. The contagion now threatens Earth's population, and the astronauts are stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station -- where they are dying one by one...
This is Publisher's Weekly about the book:
Much of this scary thriller is set aboard the International Space Station, where a team of six astronauts suddenly find themselves threatened by a virulent biohazard. Victims first register a headache, followed by stomach pains; then their eyes turn blood red. Finally, they convulse so violently they literally bash themselves apart. Most frightening is what spills out of their bodies: green, egg-filled globules. As astronaut Emma Watson, the station's onboard doctor, struggles to fight the outbreak, her colleagues are dying one by one.
A Japanese astronaut, the first to get sick, is sent down to earth via the space shuttle, but he's dead on arrival. Panic spreads when military physicians discover a deadly mutated creature that's part human, part frog and part mouse in the eggs that spill from his body. The military, fearing bioterrorism or even an extraterrestrial invasion, quickly traces the contaminant to an experiment on the space station that was funded by a company researching tiny organisms in the ocean off South America, where an asteroid hit thousands of years ago.
Meanwhile, back on the station, Watson is the only one left alive. The military says she's already infected and must be left to die in space, but Watson's husband, fellow astronaut/physician Jack McCallum, won't tolerate that decision, and scrambles to find a way to get her home. It's a tribute to Gerritsen, herself a medical doctor, that such an outlandish tale can be told so compellingly and convincingly. Thanks to her impressive research, the novel's detailed descriptions of life in space consistently ring true, and the progress of the breakout is satisfyingly horrific.
I gave up on the Crichton novel I was reading because I found it a bit snorey and the Gerritsen is a sharp contrast. It was very suspenseful and completely terrifying. When a friend phoned to ask me out for a meal tomorrow, I could almost feel myself trying to cut him off so that I could go back to reading my book! :)
The book has a brave and indomitable heroine, a heroic hero, conspiracy theories, cover ups and Dark Secrets from the Deep. There is one coincidence which is a little annoying - the death of someone who Knows All and could probably help cure the terrifyingly unstoppable disease, but I forgave that little plot devise simply because everything else was so well-written. Some of the descriptions of people being affected with the disease were kind of overly graphic but these just added to the drama.
I hadn't realised that Tess Gerritsen was Chinese origin. The surname definitely didn't give that away :)
It occurs to me that I have a rather morbid fascination with epidemics, pandemics, Evil Diseases and stories about bioterrorism :P The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is one of the most fascinating, gripping and heart-breaking books ever. Connie Willis is one of my favourite authors ever and she is able to write a mixture of romance and satire, but in The Doomsday Book she broke my heart. It's absolutely brilliant.
I have a book called Flu : The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata. There are fascinating accounts of exhuming bodies of previous victims and having samples of lung tissue preserved in wax. Ick!
Then there's another book I found interesting called The Black Death: A chronicle of the plague compiled from contemporary sources which was all about the Bubonic Plague based on contemporary accounts and is absolutely fascinating.
Then there's the gorgeous movie (based on the novel) The Horseman on the Roof starring Oliver Martinez and and Juliette Binoche which is set during a cholera epidemic. Now there's a movie for which I wish I could find fan fiction. Angst, forbidden love, pretty people and gorgeous French countryside (Aix-en-Provence). This is a beautiful movie - if you haven't seen it yet you should!!
Then there was Outbreak with Rene Russo, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey and Cuba Gooding Jr (oh and tiny cameo from Patrick Dempsey as Jimbo one of the first victims)......
I wasn't a huge fan of 'The Plague' by Albert Camus and it took me a few reads to get through it. Perhaps my fascination started when I was a wee koala and saw a movie version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, saw the rats, the plague victims, saw the scary crosses on doors and the poor little crippled boy left behind as all the other children followed the piper ..... For anyone who forgets, this is one of the versions of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The movie I saw though dealt with the plague as well:
Once upon a time ... on the banks of a great river in the north of Germany lay a town called Hamelin. The citizens of Hamelin were honest folk who lived contentedly in their grey stone houses. The years went by, and the town grew very rich. Then one day, an extraordinary thing happened to disturb the peace. Hamelin had always had rats, and a lot too. But they had never been a danger, for the cats had always solved the rat problem in the usual way - by killing them. All at once, however, the rats began to multiply.
In the end, a black sea of rats swarmed over the whole town. First, they attacked the barns and storehouses, then, for lack of anything better, they gnawed the wood, cloth or anything at all. The one thing they didn't eat was metal. The terrified citizens flocked to plead with the town councillors to free them from the plague of rats. But the council had, for a long time, been sitting in the Mayor's room, trying to think of a plan.
"What we need is an army of cats!"
But all the cats were dead.
"We'll put down poisoned food then ..."
But most of the food was already gone and even poison did not stop the rats. "It just can't be done without help!" said the Mayor sadly.
Just then, while the citizens milled around outside, there was a loud knock at the door. "Who can that be?" the city fathers wondered uneasily, mindful of the angry crowds. They gingerly opened the door. And to their surprise, there stood a tall thin man dressed in brightly coloured clothes, with a long feather in his hat, and waving a gold pipe at them.
"I've freed other towns of beetles and bats," the stranger announced, "and for a thousand florins, I'll rid you of your rats!"
"A thousand florins!" exclaimed the Mayor. "We'll give you fifty thousand if you succeed!" At once the stranger hurried away, saying: "It's late now, but at dawn tomorrow, there won't be a rat left in Hamelin!"
The sun was still below the horizon, when the sound of a pipe wafted through the streets of Hamelin. The pied piper slowly made his way through the houses and behind him flocked the rats. Out they scampered from doors, windows and gutters, rats of every size, all after the piper. And as he played, the stranger marched down to the river and straight into the water, up to his middle. Behind him swarmed the rats and every one was drowned and swept away by the current.
By the time the sun was high in the sky, there was not a single rat in the town. There was even greater delight at the town hall, until the piper tried to claim his payment.
"Fifty thousand florins?" exclaimed the councillors, "Never ..."
"A thousand florins at least!" cried the pied piper angrily. But the Mayor broke in. "The rats are all dead now and they can never come back. So be grateful for fifty florins, or you'll not get even that ..."
His eyes flashing with rage, the pied piper pointed a threatening finger at the Mayor.
"You'll bitterly regret ever breaking your promise," he said, and vanished.
A shiver of fear ran through the councillors, but the Mayor shrugged and said excitedly: "We've saved fifty thousand florins!"
That night, freed from the nightmare of the rats, the citizens of Hamelin slept more soundly than ever. And when the strange sound of piping wafted through the streets at dawn, only the children heard it. Drawn as by magic, they hurried out of their homes. Again, the pied piper paced through the town, this time, it was children of all sizes that flocked at his heels to the sound of his strange piping. The long procession soon left the town and made its way through the wood and across the forest till it reached the foot of a huge mountain. When the piper came to the dark rock, he played his pipe even louder still and a great door creaked open. Beyond lay a cave. In trooped the children behind the pied piper, and when the last child had gone into the darkness, the door reaked shut. A great landslide came down the mountain blocking the entrance to the cave forever.
Only one little lame boy escaped this fate. It was he who told the anxious citizens, searching for their children, what had happened. And no matter what people did, the mountain never gave up its victims. Many years were to pass before the merry voices of other children would ring through the streets of Hamelin but the memory of the harsh lesson lingered in everyone's heart and was passed down from father to son through the centuries.
I'm not quite sure why I find the subject so interesting. Possibly because in plague tales the villain is non-human and also non-alien. In order to survive, the heroes must work together against an invisible, terrifying, swift and deadly Evil. Secondly, there's always the suspense - the time element as they race to find a cure or race to stop the disease before one of the heroes dies. Thirdly, there's always a fascinating study of the responses that everyone has to it. The government, the people themselves, quarantine issues, some turning to religion, some turning to science, some people turning against one another and but ultimately there's Triumph of the Human Spirit.
I have a similar thing for war stories I suppose. I'm always fascinated about what makes people turn good, turn evil, fall in love, hate and that sort of thing.