Apocalypse Sacramento

By the time my recent case of the flu reached day No. 4, the cranky had supersized. My increasingly desperate wife headed for a local bookstore’s science-fiction section and bought the first series with the word plague in the title, hoping that turning on my apocalypse would stop the whining.

The trilogy she brought home—Plague Year, Plague War and Plague Zone, by East Bay writer Jeff Carlson—included a nanotech Armageddon featuring Sacramento as its ground zero. There’s nothing more satisfying, as every apocalyptic lit and film fan knows, than watching familiar landmarks explode and fall apart and, here, Carlson killed everyone between the East Bay and the Sierras. When, midpoint in the first novel, the heroes have to get to a nanotech lab near Sacramento State University while wearing containment suits, I was more than happy to read a detailed description of a devastated Interstate 80 from East Sac to Rocklin.

In fact, Sacramento’s Armageddon actually made me feel better about my own little sneezy, snuffly, now-it’s-a-sinus-infection apoca-fluenza.

Since I’m the book wrangler at SN&R, I decided to call Carlson up and see how he felt about torching our town. Seriously, what makes a person want to kill the planet—starting with poor little misunderstood Sactown?

He was quick to point out that his interest in the end of the world isn’t unique.

“There’s this wide-ranging fascination with what happens when everything breaks down,” Carlson said. “You’ve got helicopters exploding and space shuttles crash-landing on mountain highways, but there’s also the question: What would you do? How far would you go to survive?”

I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that the heroes—and the villains—in the Plague books will go pretty freaking far to survive, considering that the opening line in the first book, Plague Year, is “They ate Jorgensen first.”

Of course, that part happened high in the Sierra, in the winter, a place and time when such things have been known to happen. But seriously, what was it like to destroy Sacramento, and how well did he know it before he killed it?

A sixth-generation Californian (which is a bit of an oddity itself), Carlson spent his youth driving from the East Bay to Tahoe for fun on the slopes.

“As I became a young man, we wouldn’t want to go back down again,” he said. “Sometimes we’d call in ‘snowed-in’ and tell people that it really wasn’t safe to try to drive back.

“And of course we’d drive through Donner Pass, and I was darkly fascinated with that.”

So as he was plotting his book, Carlson started asking, “What if we really couldn’t go home again? What if nobody—nobody all over the world—could go home again?”

Very quickly, he had a nanotech plague designed by a couple of Sacramento scientists with a hyperbaric fuse—it dies above 10,000 feet—and before you know it, his characters are chomping on Jorgensen while trying to survive.

What fun. I can’t wait for the movie.