Hardly an American 'Stand' in...

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Originally Posted by Lalwendë

Aren't they all dead though? As The Sun gleefully reported the other day....

It's being spun both ways. One side is saying that the CIA is behind it as it's a low tech yet effective way of combating terrorists, as they don't have access to antibiotics, as we do. The other side is saying that this is more like bio-warfare gone awry, just like in The Stand.

Note that 'plague' is treatable. Check out the CDC for more plague information. For anyone getting nervous (sorry!), there's a *whole* lot more to worry about than just the plague...unless you have it, of course.

Didn't the Gondorians experience plague as well?

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Actually, I have.

Sorry for my playful retort. If you've read the book...well, I shouldn't add to your suffering.

It's notable that the disease of the book was a "superflu", deliberately modified to be of the "shifting antigen" varity, which was the cause of its overwhelming mortality rate. This real event involves an apparently entirely natural disease caused by endemic environmental factors.

To use an argument from authority, I, as a former molecular biologist, find King's science not very deep. Why, for an example, does this ever-mutating flu still kill the entire world population in pretty much the same way? Why too does it maintain its ability to kill domestic creature and not their closely-related cousins? If the scientists were able to engineer the bacterium/virus with such specificity, then it's highly unlikely that they weren't able to have a means to combat it already on hand - if I can keep it from killing wolves and weasels, then I know how they differ from dogs, and so I also would know how I could prevent myself from being attacked by the same.

And I guess that King's monkeys are domestic (which, if you had a thousand of them... ), as I think that Larry Underwood watches one kick off. Now, how related are we to monkeys? Or did King mean apes? Or was the plague just a convenient way to quickly set up his primary or secondary world in under a few thousands pages?

Methinks it is the later.

Thanks for posting, and if you've read it, I'd like to read your thoughts on how it compares to LotR.