Review: The Genius Plague

The Genius Plague by David Walton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book from Edelweiss Plus in exchange for an honest review.

Veteran writer David Walton, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award for his first novel Terminal Mind, gives us a hybrid genre book that is part sci-fi and part spy thriller in this outing. I'm not sure that I find the spy angle satisfactory because it often requires the complete suspension of my belief in NSA policy. The sci-fi part is much more interesting, however. The Genius Plague tells the story of two brothers, older brother Paul, who is a mycologist and who at the start of the book is on an ill-fated research expedition in Brazil, and 21 year old Neil, something of a ne'er do well, who has managed to get himself expelled from MIT, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon and who is now interviewing at the National Security Agency because that makes so much sense to me. (Admittedly, even some of the secondary characters have concerns about his fitness for the job.) Neil is a likable character, portrayed as having a good heart, even though he has incredibly bad judgment and seems to break protocol left and right in often egregious ways. The sibling relationship is fairly well drawn but it will be a rapidly evolving relationship for much of the book. The brothers' parents are divorced but living together due to the father's rapidly deteriorating mental state from early onset Alzheimer's Disease that forced his early retirement from the NSA.

The sci-fi premise of the novel seems to have been drawn from the deeply creepy real-life parasitic fungi of the genus Ophiocordyceps, an ant pathogen first discovered in the 1800s by Alfred Russel Wallace. This fungus spreads throughout an ant's body over the course of several days, invading its brain and producing chemicals (specific to the type/species of ant infected) that influence the ant's behavior. You can read about resulting "zombie ants" here. The chemicals that are secreted effectively highjack the brain of the poor ant victims, dislodging them from their usual arboreal locations and causing them to climb back up and affix their mandibles onto the underside of a leaf until their very unpleasant death. (It's worth noting that O. unilateralis has a hyperparasite which has been dubbed the anti-zombie fungus fungus.)

The means by which the Genius fungus, aspiring architect of a new world order, "plots" to take over the world become increasingly muddled and the last few chapters of the book felt chaotic. I felt the ending could have been more tightly developed, in that it didn't live up to the clarity of some of the dynamic events in the early chapters. Still, a fun read for those in search of a new plague or pandemic book!

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