Review: The Han Agent

The Han Agent by Amy Rogers
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I received a copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. Sadly, they're definitely getting one.

While most of you who have followed my reviews for a while know I love sci-fi, fantasy, Jane Austen, history, and architecture, most of you probably don't know that I'm a card carrying scientist with a PhD. While my area of expertise is now chemistry, my undergraduate degree was in Microbiology and Immunology. My parents are physician researchers. I've been a National Science Foundation fellow. And thus, my problems with this book begin.

Amika Nakamura is a post-doctoral research fellow who mysteriously finds a way to acquire highly infectious viral culture specimens of the 1918 influenza that caused the global pandemic that wiped out millions. She is working with them in her humble Berkeley virology lab clean room, unbeknownst to her post-doctoral advisor, and the university, until with much hubris she submits a paper for a conference about her research. Because if you're doing something illicit, by all means try to tell the entire research community. Yeah, it's amazing that she could keep that whole thing going, especially since highly contagious influenza viruses require at a minimum Bio-Safety Level 2 facilities and in the case of particularly virulent forms, BSL-3 facilities. There are only a handful of BSL-3 rated facilities in the US and Berkeley isn't one of them. Okay, you say, suspend a little belief. This is fiction. Well...

Imagine a protagonist who is filled with hubris, who gets fired for blatantly unsafe research you have no idea how she was doing in the first place, who has to destroy all her specimens because they are so unsafe, and who takes a job with a big Japanese pharma firm and then spends her time ogling the big director thinking to herself that Hiroshi Naito is good-looking and so of course she should try to seduce him because "job security and a little fun." Hey great idea, said no female scientist wanting to be taken seriously EVER. This character and her various machinations are like a parody. From trying to help her brother by going along with a trumped up rape scenario she denies to a reporter and then later tacitly confirms in public, this character lacks all credibility and logic for a trained scientist. Amika-san has to be one of the least likable lead characters I've read in a long time. She has nothing going for her. She is shallow, calculating, and risk-taking in a field where risk can easily kill people. All the characters appear to be equally vacuous, and self-consumed, btw.

And then there is the backdrop of the research scenario and its lack of understanding of public health research. For instance, if you have an outbreak of avian flu, do you 1) do sample collection and analysis through your governmental public health branch to research and track the flu or 2) give all your bird specimens to a big pharma company and tell them to start gain-of-function research on a vaccine? (By which, in the latter case, we mean lump together a whole bunch of terminology and try to make a plausible story out of them.) Why, 2, of course! The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in Japan wants no part of this scary bad research and is happy to have a post-doctoral fellow, who was FIRED from her previous gig for doing unsafe research, handling the research for a mega-corporation interested in helping viral genes GAIN function (by which we mean enhanced activation of various genes of interest). Of course they do.

Rogers has taken a bunch of facts about influenza and avian flu (including the very real fact that in Japan they have had a great interest in the risks of an influenza pandemic affecting a densely populated country, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9REA... for instance) and the dispute over the Shenkaku/Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai Islands and, like a test to see if it's cooked spaghetti, she has thrown them together to make a story stick against a dryase board.

On top of these overriding problems, I have the underlying issue of cultural appropriation, with which I can foresee others far more qualified than I am will have a boatload of fun. Yes, those clever revenge-seeking Japanese and those bad Chinese jackals! Add viruses! Shake, stir! Oh, such fun!

If you want to read a good fiction book about a pandemic, reread Richard Preston's The Cobra Event. If you want political intrigue added to a global viral mutation pandemic, read Mira Grant's Newsflesh series.

Special note added: Why do you have to heavily tranquilize a goat, when already you're "vaccinating" them with birth control in a dart? Hmmm. Search me.

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