With The Line Between Tosca Lee takes apocalyptic fiction and kicks it up several notches by basing it on climate change reality. In Lee’s novel and in the real world, melting permafrost releases ancient microbes into the atmosphere. Some of these microbes cause illnesses the planet has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years; in some cases, millions of years.
In the novel, Lee injects a dose of irony with heroine Wynter Roth, a member of an apocalyptic cult who is banished for failing to be sufficiently deferential to egomaniacal leader Magnus Theisen. Magnus, a.k.a. former biotech CEO Jeff Gregory, extracts free labor from the cult while he buys and sells ancient seed varieties, many of them illegally obtained.
When Magnus gets his hands on an ancient prion disease mutated onto a flu virus, he plans to sell it to a hostile foreign power that is already in the midst of an infrastructure attack on the U.S.
With the electrical grid shut down and whole cities quarantined due to the rapid spread of the mysterious illness that causes dementia-like symptoms and death, 22-year-old Wynter steals the prion samples and embarks on a dangerous journey to get them to the CDC in time to develop a vaccine.
Lee’s novel is a quick and suspenseful read in its own right, but what is especially valuable is that it doles out real environmental science in a way that illustrates present dangers.
Prion-based illness have already shown up in the general population in the form of Mad Cow Disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy(BCE), or Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease when passed to humans.
The possibility of a virulent mutation of the flu virus causing a global pandemic has been faced multiple times in the past twenty years, and many epidemiologists have said that it is only a matter of time before a pandemic occurs. Flu mutates quickly and easily. After World War I, the Spanish Flu epidemic killed between 50 an 100 million people worldwide when the unknown virus mutated and jumped from chickens to humans.
In 2015, controversial Russian scientist Anatoli Brouchkov injected himself with a 3.5 million year old bacteria taken from the melting Siberian permafrost. Brouchkov, head of the Geocryology Department of Moscow University believes the bacteria helped ancient people to live longer and claims he has not had the flu since injected himself. That really happened. Lee uses the incident as fiction in the novel.
The title of Lee’s novel, The Line Between, refers to the thin line between heaven and hell. The title devilishly invites us to wonder just where that line might be in a world where global climate change begins to cause untold chaos, suffering, and death, and right wing religious zealots push for autocracy in a corrupt move to force order on our disintegrating civilization.
For more information on the science behind this post, check out:
The Zombie Disease of Climate Change: What lurks in the Arctic Permafrost? by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, November 6, 2017
Lights Out!: A Cyber Attack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, by Ted Koppel, 2015, Crown Publishers.
Life at the End of the World 