Review: “The Patron Saint of Plagues” by Barth Anderson

THE PATRON SAINT OF PLAGUES, by first-time novelist Barth Anderson, is a near-future cyberpunk medical thriller, a cross-genre success likely to find fans among readers of both science fiction and medical whodunits.

In the late 21st century, a crop blight hits the United States and ruins the economy and food supply. The country is weakened and divided, with most people living frugally on farming collectives. Fleeing progressive land reforms and a weakened econony, the country’s big corporations go south to Mexico, where a dangerous religious fascist has assumed the position of President for Life.

Mexico has become a theocratic dictatorship, with the nation’s most privileged living lives full of amazing technology (brain-implanted web access, flying cars, etc.) and the rest living in squalor. Mexico’s president declared war on the crippled and low-tech United States years ago, and is busy conquering Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.

Meanwhile, a horriffic plague has broken out in Mexico City (renamed Ascension), and is killing thousands a day. All signs point to bioterrorism. The Mexican government reaches out to American Centers for Disease Control And Prevention virologist Henry David Stark for help, smuggling him through the front lines. When he gets there, he finds himself in a war between dissidents, government troops and the followers of Sister Domenica, a mysterious nun who is guided by prophetic visions of the Virgin Mary.

Stark and his team find themselves forced to make shaky alliances with warring factions in an attempt to find the source of the mysterious plague devastating Mexico, learning that the source may be closer than they ever imagined.

Anderson keeps the tecnobabble and medical jargon to a respectable level, allowing it to support a well-developed plot rather than substitute for one, and the cyberpunk background is well-integrated into the novel. The CDC “wetcoders” use high tech technologies to hand-code virus fighting nanophages in their fight against the outbreak, and government operatives use the ubiquitous wetware brain implants to control and manipulate the citizens of Ascension, resulting in an environment where technology is both a tool of oppression and of liberation.

Placing the action between a futuristic Mexico and a depleted, impoverished United States is a neat trick, too. It’s been said that SF literature is always trying to say something about the present, and I found myself wondering if perhaps Stark’s experiences in a technologically advanced realm under the control of a power-mad oppressive regime were much different from those a third world immigrant might have upon coming to the United States. An exaggeration, to be sure, but perhaps some correlations could be found between the two.

For the most part, the novel is impressively realized, but there are a couple of loose ends that I felt could have been handled better. The biggest for me is that there really never is an explanation of where the Sister’s visions come from. Are we to assume they are indeed from a very real Virgin Mary, or are they in fact an artifact of her unstable mind? If the latter is true, then why are they so accurate? If the former is, then what is this occult element doing in a story of scientific sleuthing and fast action?

Still, these are minor quibbles, and over all I felt that THE PATRON SAINT OF PLAGUES was a very enjoyable, quick read, and an impressive new twist on the cyberpunk genre.