Robert Johnson (21)

The Momentum of Folly

(Full disclosure: I received a free ARC of this book for review through Library Thing's Early Reviewer program.)

Young upstart Dr. Carl Sims is moving on up the food chain at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta - though not as quickly as he'd like. While visions of Level 4 Ebola research dance in his head, Carl is dispatched to Guangdong, China, in order to track down an emerging flu virus. What was to be a rather mundane and tedious assignment quickly morphs show more into a battle for the future of humanity, as Carl is thrust into a conspiracy orchestrated by his senior colleagues. Led by his own superior on the assignment, Dr. Jenna Williams, the scientists hope to release the 1918 "Eskimo" flu strain, thus "culling" two thirds of the earth's population and saving the rest from impending environment collapse. It's up to Carl to stop them - that is, if he doesn't decide to join them.

Robert Johnson has an interesting idea in The Culling - but, for whatever reason (or combination of reasons), the finished product just didn't do it for me. Johnson is an adept enough writer, and mostly keeps a quick pace, but it takes some time for the conspiracy angle to get off the ground. The book - or at least the ARC I received - isn't divided into chapters, which makes the story feel as though it's unfolding more slowly than it is. Johnson fills the book with facts and figures that are supposed to drive home the urgency of the situation, but which mostly made my eyes glaze over. (To be fair, I'm already convinced that humanity is headed swiftly off a cliff. A member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement - emphasis on "voluntary" - I can do Johnson's "just two children" credo two better: I have none. So I didn't really need any convincing, is my point.)

A significant problem lies with the characters, most of whom are simply unlikable. Carl's actions often come off as stupid or selfish (often simultaneously), which makes his heroic sacrifice at the end that much less plausible. He knowingly boards a cross-Atlantic plane when ill - thus exposing hundreds of his fellow passengers to the bird flu - and then slips the quarantine once the plane lands. That this little gambit actually pays off is nothing but dumb luck. After he intentionally infects himself with the big one, he once again floats the idea of flying back to America on a commercial liner, only to be talked out of it by his roommate Stuart.

Stuart, by the by, is so juvenile that I have trouble believing he could hold down a job as a sandwich board dude, let alone a research scientist at the CDC. And love interest Angela? I can't even with her. That she and Carl end up together after she knocks him out cold and steals his blood is the stuff of absurdist comedy. They seem to have little in common, and yet I can't help but think that maybe the two deserve each other after all. Mass murderer Jenna is the easily the most likable of the main cast of characters, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

Also problematic is Johnson's emphasis on overpopulation to the near-total exclusion of overconsumption. A child born in the United States simply isn't equivalent, resource-wise, to a child born in Zanzibar City; and yet the emphasis remains on "irresponsible breeding," placing the lion's share of blame squarely and undeservedly on the backs of developing nations. China, for example, is held up as an example of rampant pollution - all while ignoring that those smog-burping factories are in fact churning out cheap, unethically produced consumer goods for use in other countries, including the United States.

Rather than lecture those primitive third worlders on family planning (something Carl's father made a career out of), why not focus your efforts on convincing consumers in developed nations to scale back their comparatively luxurious lifestyles? Or, better yet: clear the path for women in developing nations to decide how and when they become mothers by making birth control (including but not limited to abortion) both readily available and socially acceptable? (Developed nations, too: contraception remains a point of controversy even in the "enlightened" West.) Additionally, women's rights are integral in this fight. When given the means and opportunity, women more often than not choose to have fewer children. Ending misogyny is a must. Yet Johnson mentions contraception just twice in 325 pages; the oppression of women, not at all.

On the contrary: several of the characters express agreement with China's one-child policy - a state intrusion on women's bodily autonomy. While they decry its lack of effectiveness, the idea of combating misogyny so that female children aren't considered a "waste" remains unspoken. Women need to be lifted up, not talked down to.

As for our protagonists, Carl does pick a fight with Angela on her choice of car, but this is the only nod Johnson makes to limiting our impact on the environment through the three R's (reduce, reuse, recycle - in that order). For all his self-righteousness, Dr. Carl - a highly educated man with ready access to multiple means of birth control - still manages to accidentally impregnate his girlfriend (and engages in presumably unprotected sex with Jenna, in a scene that's weird, out of place, and not a little discomfiting. While not his boss in an official capacity, Dr. Williams is still Carl's superior on this assignment - thus making the scene feel quite a lot like sexual harassment.) Angela considers getting an abortion...and then doesn't. Presumably because Carl's just so damn dreamy.

As a vegan, I'm disappointed (but not at all surprised) that our dietary choices and treatment of nonhuman animals (individuals, not species) receives absolutely zero attention, even as humans' domestication of various species in animal agriculture is blamed for creating conditions conducive to the spread of lethal zoonotic diseases. Likewise, the irony of using billions of chicken eggs to grow flu vaccines passes unnoticed. (The very eggs used to fight the bird flu are produced in unsanitary factory farms - which themselves help to create the need for these very vaccines.) The Culling did introduce me to the happy (but as of yet small-scale) development of using (human) cell strains to develop vaccines, so there's that.

Also, that bit about a frog boiling to death in a bot of slowly heated water, presumably because he's too stupid to notice the gradual change in temperature? It's a myth.

On the positive side, The Culling does feature a rather diverse cast of characters: Dr. Williams is a woman of color; Stuart is paraplegic; Angela is Latina; and the nefarious scientists hail from a variety of countries. Particularly amusing are Tian and Wen, the Chinese interns aiding Carl and Jenna in Asia, who take great pleasure in mocking and subverting Western stereotypes.

Two and a half stars, rounded down to two on Amazon.

Read with: Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, by Michael Greger (2006); Tami Noyes's American Vegan Kitchen (2010), or the vegan cookbook(s) of your choice.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2014/01/06/the-culling-by-robert-johnson/ show less

The Culling by Robert Johnson had all the earmarks of a great novel choice for me.
Deals with a plague/virus/outbreak - check
Main characters work for the CDC - check
Action packed and includes sound scientific facts - check
A team is exhuming the graves of flu victims in Alaska - check
Sadly, despite all it had going for it, The Culling needed culling for me - a so-so novel

In The Culling by Robert Johnson 27 year old Dr. Carl Sims is a buff doctor with the CDC who aspires to work with the lethal show more Biosafety Level 4 viruses (Ebola and Marburg) but is still in level 2. His lover and fellow CDC employee, Dr. Angela Varella (28) tries to tell him to tell him that this is because every other virologist at the CDC has more seniority than he does, but he resents this fact. Angela leaves the CDC for a job with an evil pharmaceutical company while Carl is called off to assist Dr. Jenna Williams in Guangdong Province, China, where there is a reported outbreak of influenza.

What Carl doesn't know is that his being requested by Jenna Williams to assist her is not a coincidence. Jenna knew Carl's father who headed the world wide campaign to encourage people to just have two children in order to stop global overpopulation. Soon Carl's an unwitting part of a global conspiracy. He must untangle the facts before he succumbs to what he is trying to stop.

My problem with The Culling by Robert Johnson is on two levels.

First all the characters are unsympathetic. Carl is annoying. His friend, Dr. Stuart Chew is even more annoying. Dr. Jenna Williams and Dr. Angela Varella are annoying. And they do very foolish things by "accident" that I simply can't accept. By the time we get to the culling conspiracy I'm sort of secretly leaning toward supporting it.

All the overpopulation information Johnson includes at the opening are well-known facts for me, known for many, many years. My lifetime also includes a period of time when lots of scientific facts for a new ice age were also being released (naturally this predates the current global warming facts). Maybe, just maybe, Johnson needs to look at a wider picture in order to have a better idea how complicated the overpopulation issues are, beyond simply only having two children. (For the record - 2 children.) It does not help the novel that we know early on that Carl accidentally impregnated Angela.

I can't help but feel that this novel has been written before in variety of different ways that were all more successful as novels. By the end the message I though Johnson was trying to convey felt muddled and incomplete. It's not that it is bad; it just isn't as good as it could be.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of The Permanent Press for review purposes. show less

In this book, a young virologist named Dr. Carl Sims is sent to China by the CDC to obtain samples of a flu virus. He is to assist a famous epidemiologist, Dr. Jenna Williams, and her two interns. Their search leads them to a small village in Laos where they encounter a particularly vicious virus that infects everyone who encounters it and kills two thirds of the afflicted. Carl discovers that the viral outbreak is part of a plan to cull the worldwide population.

Carl is the son of a man show more whose mission in life was to convince people that the only salvation for the human race was to limit families to two children. His mission obviously failed and a planet which can sustainably support 2 billion people is being asked to support 7 billion, with more to come. The future seems to hold ever-growing slums, poverty, climate change and eventual extinction of the human race. The scientists behind the culling see no other way to save the planet and preserve life for the remaining inhabitants. They could be right. While our eventual extinction is probably inevitable, the question is what, if anything, we are willing to do to postpone it.

This book has a very interesting and scary plot with a likable protagonist and some exciting sequences. I particularly liked the action in the village in Laos and in a CDC containment facility in Brazil. However, I would give this book only 3 stars for the writing. At times it seemed very over-written with bloated, run-on sentences. It became so annoying that I occasionally counted the words. I thought it was bad when I counted 53 words in one sentence. Then a few pages later a sentence had 84 words. There were also plot holes which I won't describe for fear of spoilers. The book also employed the tired convention of having the conspirators reveal their entire plot to Carl for no other reason than to let the reader know what was going on. They even introduced themselves to him. Also, at times there was too much detail about viruses and vaccine production. The behavior of Dr. Williams often made no sense and was inconsistent. This book could have used some more editing. In spite if it's flaws, this wasn't a bad read, but then I've always been a sucker for "escaped-killer-virus" books.

I received a free preview edition of this book from the publisher. show less

I signed up for this book on Early Reviewers because, being honest, I agree with the idea of culling humanity in principle. I think we're overpopulated and that overpopulation is the root cause of most of our current social and economic problems: basically, I think we can achieve better living through fewer people. I believe that the death rate is too low, there are about 200% more people in my country and the world than there ought to be, and increasing people's mortality and reducing our show more life expectancy is a more effective and moral solution than reducing birth rates. So, basically, I expected to be rooting for the conspirators the blurb promised me to succeed and for Carl to decide to aid them.

Instead, more than anything else I was rooting for the editor to cull Mr. Johnson's words. I felt like he was trying to show off his vocabulary and his ability to write baroque sentence structures, and I did not enjoy that one bit. Above all else, I turned against the narrator a few pages in after yet another conditional sentence (in the present tense, no less) too many. I can't remember reading any book before that I'd describe as having a "third person uncertain" narrator, but Johnson made so much use of "probably" and "seems" and "maybe" and "perhaps" in his narration that I'm very certain I don't ever want to read another. show less