Dust

Rating:
Summary: TOO SCARY TO PUT DOWN!
Review: What a terrific book. Pellgrinoo is a scientist, and, like Jurassic Park, there's a lot of scientific fact mixed in with thiis excellent fiction. It COULD happen, and it was very frightening! From all insects dying to vsampire bats and swarms of killer dust mites behaving llike piranha, this book is a chilling and easily pictured view of the future. Jakob-Creutzfeld Disease (Mad Cow in humans) plays a big part. People just can't win. Humbling and inspiring I can't recommend this enough! Think Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, with Darwin thrown in for good measure. Extraordinary!

Rating:
Summary: Don't Let Him Stop Now!
Review: 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 still fresh lessons of Auschwitz, that America simply had to wake up, and change its ways. That's just the two cents I have to add, but I'm just an aerospace engineer. What do I know?

Rating:
Summary: Stop him before he writes again
Review: Let me tell you, kids, Dust just may be the [awfullest] SF disaster book I have ever read. I get this shooting pain right behind my eye every time I see the name Pellegrino. That's how bad this book is.

And so the rant begins.

Dust tells the story of an ecological disaster that strikes the planet--namely, the sudden and unexplained disappearance of every insect on the planet. Insects are key to that whole ecosystem/biosphere thingy, so all kinds of problems erupt, chief among them the fact that dust mites have stepped in to theabandoned ecological niche and have become carnivorous. Roiling swarms of dust mites crawl through the countryside devouring every living thing in their path, while crops worldwide begin to fail. Okay, it sounded intriguing on the cover. Then I opened the book and startedreading.

Are you looking for interesting characters? Realistic dialogue? Tense situations that reveal the inner workings of a character's psyche? Well, look elsewhere, 'cuz you ain't gonna find'em in Dust. Sure, I'll give Pellegrino extra points because he's a Star Trek fan--Jackson Roykirk, the creator of the NOMAD space probefrom the original series, makes a cameo appearance--but sorry, it'sj ust not enough. After a while, I couldn't even tell the characters apart. And soon, I stopped caring.

And the science? Please. He never explains what happens to the insects. It's the freaking key to the whole book, and the scientist-types never figure out what happened to them. It's basically, "Hey, wow, all them bugs is gone! I wonder what happened to 'em. Oh well, guess we'll never know!" Way to tie up loose ends, Chuck.

Oh, and one more rant. Pellegrino repeats the urban legend about the guy who perfected blood plasma preservation--a black man--bleeding to death after a car accident because he couldn't be admitted to a white hospital. He even footnotes the story, saying something along the lines of "Believe it or not, this is actually true."...And you know what makes it all the worse? I paid money for this book, for God's sake, so intrigued was I by its premise. And what does Pellegrino do? He spits it back in my face with 450 [awfull] pages that I couldn't wait to finish--not because it was an exciting page-turner, no, but because I just wanted it to be over. Just to say I survived it. I endured. I took the worst Charles Pellegrino had to offer, and I lived to tell the tale.

But at what cost? It's shaken my faith in the inherent goodness of man, and I will probably never be able to express physical love again in any meaningful way. That's what Dust did to me. I only hope that in spreading the word, I can save just one person from ever picking upthis book.

Rating:
Summary: Nature of the Flow
Review: This is yet another example of the great cornucopia of books featuring cataclysmic upheavals and how a great cast of characters react to the Forces of Nature. The reason this book stands above most of the cosy catastrophes is the fact that Pellegrino writes passionately and with great knowledge. There is humour found in unexpected places and he manages to alleviate the tragic with the comic to some very moving passages.

More importantly the whole novel reminds us of nature and how alien it is to all of us and how little in the end we really know about it. We guess a lot and we build schools of knowledge based on these guesses. But all you have to do is to pull one small piece out of the pile and the dominoes fall. Not unlike the Windows operating system.

Rating:
Summary: Science Bores the Ignorant
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: So realistic, its scary
Review: We as humans live in a comfy little world, using the resources on this planet without a second thought we always thought that we were the most important species in the world. Then when as something as simple as the insects becoming extinct, the whole wbecome man-eating, swarms of mites devour whole town, all because of the death of the insects, but what nature is doing to us, is nothing compared to what human will do to themselves. Dust ia a provocative and at times bone chilling novel, making us contemplate about our lives and how quickly and esily it could come crashing down.

Rating:
Summary: Don't let the kids read this...
Review: ...it might give them nightmares. Well thought out "we're not as important to the planet as we think we are" premise, but a judicious helping of red pencil editing would have tightened it up considerably. I have met Charlie a number of times. His thoughts about science, scientists, and the unexplained are interesting and exciting to listen to in person; everyone in the room hangs on his every word and wants to hear more. Unfortunately his verbal story telling skills don't translate well into print and his scientific treatises tend to get in the way of the story and do not allow the plot to advance as fast as it should. Eliminate about 50 pages and this would be a prize winner. As it is, it's only interesting and spellbinding. Buy it, you'll like it!

Rating:
Summary: I gave up about 100 pages in...
Review: ...and you shouldn't pick this one up. I don't mind the political bias of the text (as some reviewers apparently did), I just hate being told I'm being told a story. I lost count of the number of times the narrative ground to a halt to say that more plagues were going to strike; it would have been a much better work if the author had merely described the striking of said plagues. If you're set on reading an ecological disaster story, "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner are infinitely superior to this, and also out of print. Good luck finding them.

Rating:
Summary: DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY
Review: This man cannot write. I only finished the book because I paid good money for it, which I regret having done. I expected a thrilling, fast-paced, realistic view of an ecological disaster and instead found a novel by a man in dire need of talent, some writing classes, and a decent editor.

Rating:
Summary: Come on, it wasn't THAT bad
Review: I've just read some of the less charitable reader reviews for Dust. All of them point to the book's didactism and woden characterizations as its ultimate failing. Yes, the science is over-wrought, and yes, the characters are as flat as my shadow. BUT, no one reads Pellegrino for those things. We read him for the unique way in which he makes real and unusual science relevant to everday life. Dust certainly does that. This ain't Hemmingway, people, but more like Scientific American packaged more readably as a novel.