I've got quite a soft spot for a good post-apocalypse novel, and while hte pickings are generally slim, and the legions of crappy post-apoc. books far outnumber the genuinely great stories, I keep trying.
Over the last few days, I burned through both Plague Year and its sequel, Plague War.
The long and the short of it is that these two both fall into the category of "crappy but good." They're short on details, short on plot, in the sense that a broad-stroked, wide-ranging plot is underwhelmed by niggling little things like details, and short on character depths.
They're sparse, but they're fast, they're fun, and they're surprisingly addictive little stories. The fact that the plague is nanotech makes them notable, and Carlson's best moments were those when he had to work out characterization around the nanotech itself. The further he got from the plague, the safer the stories became, but when the characters were closest to the danger, they were also much better written.
These are very easy books to one-shot, and if you have a similar soft spot for post-apocalyptic novels, you could do far worse than these. Definitely worth reading -- maybe post-apocalyptic beach lit?
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