James Nicoll Reviews

Janet Kagan’s 1985 Uhura’s Song is a Star Trek: Original Series tie-in novel. 

The starship Enterprise has been dispatched to Eeiauo, whose inhabitants have very reluctantly asked for help dealing with a virulent and quite deadly pandemic. This is not the first time ADF Syndrome has washed across this world — the last outbreak killed twenty thousand people — but it is the first outbreak that has forced the Eeiauoians to swallow their pride and ask for Federation aid.

A medical crisis would seem to be Doctor McCoy’s bailiwick. As it turns out, it is actually communications officer Lieutenant Uhura’s.

SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD NOVEL

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O. T. Nelson’s 1975 (revised 1995) The Girl Who Owned a City is a standalone juvenile post-apocalyptic pandemic novel.

Weeks ago, ten-year-old Lisa was just another kid, dependent on her parents, her responsibilities those of a child. Then a terrible disease killed every person over the age of twelve. Now Lisa is the adult of her house, the sole guardian of her younger brother Todd. It’s a big responsibility.

Lisa not only accepts it. She sets out to rebuild the world she remembers.

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Michael Crichton’s 1969 The Andromeda Strain is a medical thriller about preventing a pandemic — FROM SPACE!

Dispatched to retrieve the SCOOP satellite from the isolated Nevada hinterland where it landed, government agents enter the small town of Piedmont. They report that the sidewalks are littered with dead bodies, then abruptly succumb themselves.

SCOOP was intended to retrieve lifeforms from the near-Earth space environment with an eye to weaponizing them. It seems that the mission has succeeded beyond its creators’ wildest dreams. 

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