7/6/2023 0 Comments Dust by Charles Pellegrino![]() ![]() Even early on, the novel makes no secret of the fact that this is The End. Pellegrino neatly dissects Gaia’s ecosystem with his clear and incisive imagination. Sounds like a doubleplusgood thing to you? Not quite. But, as Pellegrino makes it very clear, this is only a symptom of a deeper problem the disappearance of insects. This time, the novel start with a deadly whimper as hundreds are eaten alive by swarming clouds of mites. ![]() At this point, it would seem unlikely to find a new and exciting way to end the world, but that’s exactly what Charles Pellegrino does with Dust. J.G.Ballard has even written four books dealing with end-of-the-world scenarios. From the oh-so-very-sixties retro nuclear apocalypse, we’ve moved on to plagues (King’s The Stand), celestial objects impact (Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer), Black Holes (Bear’s The Forge of God), Alien Invasions (Again, The Forge of God) and the like. ![]() Yet, destroying the world is easy, at least for the fertile imaginations of the latter twentieth century. Somehow, imagining that everything we hold dear -including our lives- could be snatched away at any time makes us appreciate what we have even more. Survivalists, civil safety officials, prophets and science-fiction writers all depend in large part on this fascination. There is a fascination about contemplating the unthinkable. ![]()
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