Book Review: Blackout

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)
2012
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

BEWARE… SPOILER ALERT FOR FEED, DEADLINE, AND BLACKOUT.

And at last we arrive at Blackout, the third and final novel in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy.

Blackout has most of the same pluses and minuses as Deadline. It has the same engaging post-zombie-apocalypse setting and the same appealing cynicism and irreverence in its main characters. It’s got the same witty writing style, which is mostly still fun to read but at times, in this third book, seems to be getting a bit sloppy.

It has the same annoying conversational techniques for attempting to draw out the suspense. It has the same crazy Shaun hearing Georgia’s ghost in his head, and the same unnecessarily disruptive commentary about it. And the plot seems similarly haphazard and forced, especially when it comes to Shaun’s story line and the motivations of the evil CDC.

But at least Georgia is back, in the flesh, which makes a huge difference for the good. Georgia is by far the best character and narrator Grant has got, and it’s great to have her again.

Blackout picks up where Deadline ended, with Georgia waking up in a cell in a CDC facility. She quickly figures out that she is a recently-awakened clone of her original self with all her memories intact, right up to the moment Shaun shot her in the back of the head when she was about to turn into a zombie.

Aside from confirming that she is a clone, the CDC staff won’t tell her anything; they won’t tell her where she is or what’s going on or even let her go to the bathroom without an escort. But through secret messages passed to her she finds out that the EIS—the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a subdivision of the CDC—has undercover agents inside the CDC and that they are working on a plan to break her out.                

The EIS agents show her other Georgia clones being grown in the lab and explain that she’s just one of many. The CDC is trying to build a malleable, docile version of her that will do what they say, and then they will use that clone to lure Shaun in and imprison him. She herself is too much like the original Georgia, inquisitive and rebellious, so she is on a time limit. Once they are able to build a more brainwashable clone, she will be “decommissioned.”

She is also able to find out one key thing on her own. Her CDC doctors let her walk for exercise in an agricultural biodome attached to the facility, which, because of her knowledge of CDC installations, lets her know that she’s in Seattle.                                                                              

Meanwhile, her brother Shaun and the rest of the After the End Times blog staff are hiding out from CDC security at Dr. Abbey’s CDC-blacklisted lab in Oregon. Their main goal is the same as it was in Deadline, which is to find out why the CDC wants to kill people who have Kellis-Amberlee reservoir conditions when they are the best hope for adaptive immunity, and to publish the answer online for the entire world to know.

And Dr. Abbey also wants to know more about the Cuban mosquitoes that are now spreading Kellis-Amberlee through Florida. The virus is too large for a normal mosquito to carry, which suggests that the Cuban species was deliberately bred.                                                           

What follows is a series of contrived misadventures designed to get Shaun and Georgia back together so they can pursue the truth as a team again. It starts with Dr. Abbey sending Shaun and Becks on a mission to Florida to try to get a sample of the mosquitoes, so she can do genetic testing to find out where they came from. Shaun and Becks make the mistake of stopping first at his adoptive parents’ house in Berkeley to get a map—a questionable plan in the first place—only to find that the Masons have told the CDC they were coming. They escape from the CDC police and flee from Berkeley, not to Florida, but instead to…

…Seattle, of course, where they meet up with Mahir and Maggie, who have gone up there to get fake IDs from a shady character called “The Monkey.” The Monkey agrees to give them IDs if, conveniently enough, they first break into the Seattle CDC and plant bugs for him.

At this point, the EIS determines it is time to enact Georgia’s escape. They have just surgically removed all her tracking chips and self-destructing bio-bombs when Shaun’s invading team causes the CDC to go into lockdown. The EIS doctors think that the lockdown is because of them, and stay to distract security while sending Georgia off in the direction of the exit, where she runs smack into Shaun without either of them running into any CDC staff first.

After fighting off a horde of zombies and at least two more CDC security detachments, they make their way back to Dr. Abbey’s lab, where it is determined that they really need to go all the way to Washington, DC, to ask the president the truth about Kellis-Amberlee and the mosquitoes and all that.

When they finally make it in to see the president, he is, of course, there with an evil CDC doctor who tells them the truth about Kellis-Amberlee and the mosquitoes and all that, and then tries to enlist them into his evil PR machine to keep it secret. And, of course, when it turns out they won’t keep it secret, he tries to kill them, and they, the president, vice president, and a bunch of Secret Service agents have to escape by shooting their way out of the White House through another horde of zombies.

A bad guy whose motivation
I can understand

The main issue I had with Blackout, as with Deadline, is that I just do not buy the bad guys’ motivation. Usually bad guys are motivated by money, revenge, religious fervor, or a desire for world domination, all of which I can completely understand. But these CDC guys seem to really be doing what they’re doing because of an always vaguely and often incomprehensively articulated societal benefit argument that doesn’t have much convincing pull. I don’t understand how they could have been willing to spend millions of dollars and kill people, much less die, for their cause.

I’ve read and re-read the sections of Deadline and Blackout where the bad guys explain themselves. From what I can piece together, their thinking seems to go like this:

• In a very, very small minority of cases, some people with reservoir conditions can either develop immunity themselves, or convey immunity to people who are close to them.
• The CDC doesn’t want to tell people that there is a tiny possibility that some people with reservoir conditions could recover or that some people might be immune, because then people will hesitate to pull the trigger when somebody amplifies, and then more people will die. Most of the time the person will turn into a zombie and then will turn around and eat the person who should have pulled the trigger.
• So, for the time being, they are killing people who have reservoir conditions.
• They think they will eventually find a strain of Kellis-Amberlee that doesn’t cause reservoir conditions. When they do, they want to infect the entire world with it.
• The genetically-engineered mosquitoes were supposed to be their distribution method, once they came up with a strain they liked. But they got out too early. So, oops—they killed millions of people on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Killing people who have reservoir conditions seems like way too much of a leap, even for crazed evil CDC doctors. I cannot believe they would really do that just based on the fear that knowing that people have the potential to be immune would lead to a few more deaths by recently-turned zombies. How about developing a test for immunity instead? Maybe that would be easier than having a secret cloning program and a secret mosquito genetic modification program and finding subtle ways to kill thousands of innocent U.S. citizens?

Early on in Blackout, Georgia observed, almost in passing, that the CDC was keeping people controlled “through unnecessary security and exaggerated fear.” We see this in real life all the time when we are required to go through blood tests or loyalty tests or other security checks to go about our normal business, security checks that are more stringent and intrusive than the real odds of danger would warrant, as a way to keep us as a population cowed and obedient. There would be plenty of potential for realistic governmental evil and oppression by means of security theater; it seems like maybe that would have been a ripe area to explore further, instead of the medical mumbo-jumbo.