1999 thriller. On board the International Space Station, a
microbiological experiment has gone wrong. Dr Emma Watson tries to
keep the rest of the crew, and herself, alive in an increasingly
challenging environment. (Nothing to do with the 2013 film of the same
name.)
Most people who know Gerritsen's work these days have probably
seen her credit for the books which inspired the Rizzoli & Isles
police procedural TV series; the books themselves are rather darker
and more serious. Before that, in the late 1990s, Gerritsen was known
for medical thrillers; before that she wrote romantic suspense.
And right in the middle of her medical thriller streak she came up
with this. This is the only vaguely science-fictional work that
Gerritsen has written, but she was wise enough to treat it as a
thriller that happened to be set in space; it's firmly rooted in the
real world, with only one significant piece of technology that didn't
exist at the time of writing (and there were people trying to build
it, or something very like it).
There's still the touch of personal tension that Gerritsen usually
brought in from her romantic suspense days: Emma is in the process of
divorcing her husband, Jack McCallum, another doctor and astronaut,
who's banned from flight on medical grounds. When it becomes clear
just how dangerous the outbreak is, Jack's the one who stands up for
saving Emma rather than taking more absolute steps to contain the
pathogen. Apart from that characterisation is frankly pretty minimal:
enough to get by and keep track of who people are, but not so much
that one regrets the loss of a unique and individual person when
they're killed by the menace.
This reminds me in places of Elizabeth Moon's 1986 short story ABCs
in Zero-G, which similarly considers the technical difficulties of
even basic first-aid procedures when anything not fastened down will
drift away and body weight isn't available to apply pressure. There's
a lot of the surgical equivalent of rivets, and some frankly
disgusting deaths.
The ending is perhaps a little rushed, but there's a lot to resolve
(including just what's going on with that microorganism, and some
borderline conspiracy stuff too). There's a little too much
coincidence in the setup (two separate car crashes). But these are
minor flaws in what has become my favourite of Gerritsen's books.
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