Work of the Negative: A Marxist-Humanist blog

Terminal Warfare: Lady, Scientist, Lover, Spy by J.D. Everhard. Bastille Press, 2024. 335 pages.

Terminal Warfare is a book by J.D. Everhard, a veteran of the radical movement, who has recently participated in the Liberated Zone, the student-community encampment at UC Santa Barbara in solidarity with the people of Gaza under attack from Israel, and has been involved in radical Left U.S. solidarity with the Ukrainian people under attack from Russia.

The book is immensely enjoyable. It drew me in immediately, and the gripping story keeps up a fast pace to the end, except for a couple of chapters with exposition. Set a few years in the future, it revolves around a new iteration of the Black Plague that killed one third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages. Global warming apparently uncovered the bacterium in the thawing Arctic, and it mysteriously spreads in places such as West Africa and among protesters in Russia. The fight against the epidemic is complicated by spy agencies, mercenaries, anti-vax crusaders, televangelists, fanatical Christian and Muslim sects, politicians, and disinformation.

Everhard evocatively describes settings, moods, and characters. In the process, it is not only the suspenseful story, ranging from California to West Africa to Greenland to Russia, that he lays out. Aspects of reality—which are true but often skipped over in the media and mainstream culture—are key parts of the story’s foundation. In this respect, it resembles Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, whose author says all the elements of her novel have actually happened somewhere on the globe. Everhard writes in the afterword:

“This book of fiction presents a truer vision of reality, however, than many supposedly factual accounts springing from various talking heads who, as often as not, have financial entanglements with the Kremlin.”

Above all, as the afterword tells us, the book is about “human resilience and determination” in the face of brutal realities.

In reality as in Terminal Warfare, resistance is smoldering in Russia despite vicious, sometimes lethal, repression—although in the book the resistance has grown more prominent and powerful than it is today. Another example: Russian mercenaries like the Wagner Group are indeed helping some repressive African governments kill and silence their own citizens. And, of course, the thawing Arctic is indeed releasing ancient pathogens due to global warming. Also, some of the distrust of international vaccine drives in Africa and Asia is explained by the real fact that the CIA used a fake polio vaccination program to locate and assassinate Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Key elements in the story—as well as in the prequel, Ghosts of the Forgotten Snows—include the real plague germ, Yersinia pestis, and a fictional bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) that kills Y. pestis. Most of the book’s characters, like most people including me, had never heard of bacteriophages, although scientists say they outnumber all other forms of life (aside from the fact that some scientists do not consider viruses to be a form of life).

The techno-thriller genre was initiated by Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, which I devoured as a teenager. What I did not realize then was the politics implicit in Crichton’s books—patriarchal, hierarchical, capitalist—which became somewhat clearer with his later novels that attacked both climate science and women’s organizing against sexual harassment.

Terminal Warfare moves the techno-thriller to an altogether different terrain. Its central hero, Dr. Anja Thorsdottir, is an academic who adheres to the fictional “Peacemakers Protocol, which commits faculty to strictly non-lethal applications in all research.” However, in her work, she collaborates with military researchers. When she finds out about their stockpile of the plague bacterium, she wonders, “What were the military people planning to do with all that excess Yersinia?” She later encounters a general who gushes, “Just think of the possibilities if we can deploy neurological programming and beliefs with a bug!” “God help us if he has access to the nuclear button. Or the biowar equivalent,” she thinks. Meanwhile, in Terminal Warfare’s Russia, biological warfare is actually put into practice as police spray Y. pestis on protesters in Moscow and other cities, and regime-connected mercenaries conduct biowarfare experiments on unsuspecting civilians in Africa.

The book is not didactic, never lecturing or stating a political analysis. It just happens to reflect a political understanding of reality by not leaving out facts like the real threat posed by right-wing domestic terrorism in the U.S., despite efforts by politicians to downplay it and even defund federal investigations of it. The terrorists in the book explain their own delusional motivations. The author does not make a point that some of them are veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the reader can infer it.

The biggest target they choose, Southern California’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, is vulnerable in exactly the way these terrorists plan to exploit it to cause a catastrophe that they believe will help their cause. This vulnerability is one that has been pointed out by anti-nuke activists for years. While the book does not take it up, this opposition has not stopped Big Tech robber barons from trying to restart shuttered nuclear reactors and build new ones to power their data centers, rapidly expanding in their global competition to exploit Artificial Intelligence, regardless of its potential consequences for disinformation, psychological manipulation, job deskilling, and wars filled with autonomous killer robots.

Just as unobtrusive as the underlying politics is the sly wit, such as the Russian bureaucrat denouncing Thorsdottir as “an architect of genocide” and whipping up a crowd to chant, Trump-style, “Shut Her Up!” although “Not one of them had the slightest idea who she was. All they knew was that they hated her. Hatred on command is like any other belief on command.…Such is the emptiness of the craven believer: believing nothing, they believe anything.”

Thorsdottir is also denounced by a U.S. televangelist, who preaches: “Those who are pushing vaccines are shaking their fist at the Lord….I call upon the Church of Jesus Christ to shun this witch, shun her vaccines, trust only God to protect your children from the plague.” His sermon naturally ends with a call for watchers to send in their “prayer request” with a donation.

This book is part of a series that Everhard calls The Anthropocene Sagas. He has also written nonfiction books about service dogs and buskers and edited a series called Ukraine Resistance Support Archives, which stands in solidarity with the Ukrainian and Palestinian peoples under genocidal attack, as well as targets of Russian repression and violence from Syria to Chechnya to Georgia.