Waiting for DUNE, the White Plague has arrived! May 20, 2021 – Posted in: Books – Tags: Dune, frank herbert, White Plague

While we wait for its film adaptation Dune, we dive into the pages of another book by Frank Herbert, Lefki Panoli, which has just been released in Greek by Oxy publications and reminds us of something from our lives lately.

*by Jonathan Price

For more than a year the world experienced and continues to experience a situation unreal and outside the normality of decades, compared to periods of history so old that we had only read from books and written testimonies. The Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on society and man were approached by film writers and producers, while the lines between dystopia and reality, fantasy and verisimilitude blurred their lines. If you ask employees of major bookstores to give you the account of the best-selling books in the midst of quarantine, then surely the Plague by Albert Camus will figure among them, half a century after its release. Another plague -or better plague-, the White Plague, specifically, one of his last works Frank Herbert, just released for the first time in Greek by Acid publications and "promises" to give another dimension to the terms pandemic, bioterrorism and bioethics, but also to "genocide".

In 1996, a molecular biologist loses his family in a terrorist attack by a faction of the IRA. Protagonist John Roe O'Neill is driven mad by her unjust loss and creates a virus that uses the male gender asymptomatically as a host, while fatally infecting women. And he decides to unleash the deadly virus on three countries: Ireland for obvious reasons, England whose government policy gave birth to the IRA and Libya, which trained the organization's terrorists.

Of course, the outbreak of the virus pandemic takes on global dimensions, when O'Neill, addressing the governments of the whole world, asks them to isolate these three countries with their citizens. The global response is a study in international diplomacy, organization and dealing with asymmetric threats, while the White Plague becomes a litmus test, raising questions of bioethics similar to those raised at the start of the rampant course of Covid-19, when hundreds of dead in several countries beckoned. their governments to take drastic measures to limit losses. 

But Frank Herbert's novel does not stop there. As he did with his magnum opus, dune, the American sets up with mastery a dystopian reality setting in which the new order of anarchy prevails through the havoc of bioterrorism. And using his favorite "manner", he prioritizes elements of our daily life that we took for granted; in Dune was the water, at White Plague is the female gender and childbearing.

Due to the risk of extinction, the female gender takes on a different meaning, becomes valuable and is protected at all costs, while the term polyandry, thousands of years after Ancient Greece and Sparta, where women worshiped and procreated with different men, returns as a necessary condition for the protection of the human species.

Of course and fatally, in the novel it is also trafficked the idea of national discrimination, in a pattern similar to that of original sin, recalling the corresponding discrimination against Germans for years due to the Nazis and the impact of their officers' atrocities in World War II. The world is divided into informal "camps", between the "evil" axis England-Ireland-Libya and the rest of the world, while the hatred and lust for revenge of a single individual is presented as capable of causing global anarchy and strife.

THE White Plague by Frank Herbert, the man who gave a new dimension to the term science fiction with his epic dune, is a book that seems at the same time plausible, but also so prophetic, even insightful. And it may be overshadowed by the legendary saga that won him Hugo and Nebula awards, but it comes across as timely. Until its long-awaited film remake Dune scheduled for release in October '21, nothing seems more uniquely ideal for further exploration of Frank Herbert's authorial outlook than an in-depth reading of White Plague. 
 

The White Plague by Frank Herbert published in Greek by Oxy publications, translated by Nikos Stratigakis.

Original publication of the text on Avopolis.gr