Ill Wind

Ill Wind is a 1995 disaster novel by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, one of nine collaborations between the two and one of the more successful of them. The Anderson credit is the one that sells the book; the Beason credit, less well known to the average reader, is the one that explains why the science is taken seriously. Beason is a working research physicist. Anderson is the Star Wars and Dune man. The combination has produced, over the years, a small shelf of well-researched near-future SF that takes ostensibly outlandish premises and walks them through the consequences with the calm methodicalness of people who know the underlying science is not actually impossible.

The premise of Ill Wind is one of the simpler ones in their catalogue, and one of the more effective. A supertanker, the Zoroaster, breaks up after hitting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay. The resulting spill is the largest in history and, in pure PR terms, a catastrophe for the operating oil company, Oilstar. They have, fortunately for them and unfortunately for everybody else, an experimental designer microbe in development at one of their research labs, an engineered bug called Prometheus that was meant to digest long-chain hydrocarbons under tightly controlled conditions and never to leave the lab. Faced with a tide of crude killing the bay, Oilstar makes the kind of decision corporations make when the cameras are pointed at them: they helicopter Prometheus out over the spill and release it, untested.

Prometheus works. Prometheus also mutates. Within days the bug has gone airborne, has stopped distinguishing between crude oil and any other petrocarbon, and is beginning to eat the world. Cars in the Bay Area wake up with empty fuel tanks. Plastic begins to soften, then sag, then dissolve. Synthetic fabrics rot off the bodies wearing them. Rubber seals fail. Aircraft, full of plastic and rubber, fall out of the sky. The cleverest of the book's many small horrors is the slow realisation, made by the reader well before the characters, of how much of modern civilisation is held together by petrochemicals and what happens when none of that holds together any more.

The twist that lifts the book above the standard cosy-catastrophe template is that the microbe's behaviour is not entirely accidental. Its inventor, the Oilstar research scientist Alex Kramer, has been quietly nursing a vendetta against the oil industry for reasons he keeps to himself for the first part of the book, and the airborne strain that is unleashed over the Bay is not quite the same Prometheus the project was running. The hubris is therefore doubled. Oilstar deploys a barely tested microbe to clean up its own mess; the man who built it has rigged it to do considerably more than the brief required. The Titan whose name the bug carries stole fire and was punished for the gift. Kramer has worked out how to make the punishment recursive.

The book uses the standard multiple-viewpoint disaster-novel structure, with the story splitting across half a dozen plot lines that gradually converge. Spencer Lockwood is running a solar-power microwave-satellite project out at White Sands, which is suddenly the most important piece of infrastructure on the continent because it is one of the few sources of clean energy that does not need petrocarbons to keep working. Todd Severyn, a pilot, was on the Oilstar flight that originally dropped Prometheus over the Bay and spends the book working out what he did and how to atone for it. His girlfriend Iris Shikozu becomes the unlikely organiser of a post-apocalyptic concert at Altamont, partly out of conviction that people will need something to come together around, partly because the rest of the cast is busy. General Bayclock, in command of martial-law operations as the country comes apart, becomes the antagonist almost by accident, in the way commanders enforcing order tend to become antagonists in disaster fiction. The chapters are headed with titles lifted from old pop songs, books and films, which is a flourish that works better in some chapters than others.

What the book gets right is its central commitment, which is to take a single scientifically plausible disruption and follow it through to its logical and very uncomfortable conclusions. Anderson and Beason have done the research. The collapse, when it comes, is not magical; it is just the application of a tightly defined biological process to a world that did not realise how thoroughly it had grown to depend on the things that process eats. The book also has the discipline, rare in disaster fiction, to actually kill the people it has spent chapters making the reader care about. There is no major-character force-field. People who deserve to live die, and people who deserve to die occasionally don't, and the resulting tension is considerably higher than the genre tends to manage.

What the book gets less right is its opening. The first hundred pages, in which the spill happens and the various viewpoint characters are introduced and Prometheus is shipped off to the bay, are slower than they need to be, and the structure of moving between cast members in their respective starting positions takes a while to find its rhythm. Once Prometheus is loose, the pace picks up considerably and does not slow down again, but the entry barrier is real, and a reader who gives up at page eighty will not have seen the book at its best.

Set against its weaknesses, though, is the thing Ill Wind does that the better disaster novels always do, which is leave the reader looking at their own kitchen differently. The plastic kettle. The synthetic carpets. The polyester clothes. The trim around the windows. The cable insulation. The keys on the keyboard. None of it would survive a Prometheus event. The book makes you do the audit of your own house, and you cannot do that audit without thinking, at some point, that modern life is held together by quite specific chemistry and that we are very rarely required to remember it. That is the disaster novel doing its proper work, and Ill Wind is one of the better ones of its decade for doing it.