Somewhere in California, a bunch of rogue nanotech manipulators got loose from their containment facility. These invisible artificial bugs seek out any warm-blooded creature as their habitation, and then promptly proceed to disassemble the host. No impact at all on inorganic material. Five billion humans and almost every other animal dies before a partial escape is discovered: The bugs die out above 10,000 feet elevation (although they can lie dormant in the lowland environment even without a host). The world's mountaintops and high plateaus become the last huddling place of mankind—Leadville, Colo., is the capital of the United States, with a population of 650,000—while all below is swamped in an invisible sea of death.

Our initial focus is on one such community of survivors, a handful of people in the California mountains outside Sacramento. Cameron Najarro was a happy-go-lucky ski bum when disaster struck, and he managed to move on up his resort mountain to safety. But now he and his few comrades have been reduced to cannibalism, among other desperate measures, as they sustain gruesome but less-than-mortal wounds in their brief scavenging forays below. Learning of another community some distance away, Cam and his friends decide to essay the dangerous trek—down, then up again while racing the clock—to join forces with the others.

Meanwhile, orbiting in the international space station, we find Ruth Goldman and her fellow astronauts. Ruth thinks she has a good scheme to manufacture an anti-nano nano, or ANN, to combat the plague. But she first has to convince her fellows to leave the safety of space. Once down in Leadville, however, she discovers that any solution to the plague will lead to a global dictatorship.

When Cam's path crosses Ruth's in the quest for a cure, the two of them must battle to save humanity from both plague and tyranny.

Action, but little reflection or color

Jeff Carlson debuts boldly and strongly, providing a thrilling, fast-paced novel that's sure to be gulped down in a single sitting by avid readers. He does a lot right. And yet—

You just knew there was going to be an "and yet," didn't you?

But let's look at the positive side of the ledger first.

Carlson's premise is fairly sound in an SF sense. He doesn't make his nanotech out to be intelligent, all-consuming gray goo capable of anything. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, as per Greg Bear.) He's not anti-science like the egregious Mister Crichton (and, in fact, the ending of the book is full of utopian promise). And he extrapolates the consequences of his premise in a clear-sighted manner. I am a little dubious about the cavalier way his characters recover from random organ and structural failure, but even here he shows some suitably nasty consequences. I just wonder if these wounds are as survivable as he maintains.

His people are welcoming and identifiably human, ranging across the moral spectrum. There's little room for romance in this shattered world, but certain tender touches between Cam and Ruth are deft. The politics of this desperate global landscape are realistically tense.

Carlson's prose is workmanlike. It's never going to compete with, say, Calder's or Delany's, but that's fine. There are occasional awkward moments, such as in Chapter 8, when the sentence "But there wasn't anything to do but start hiking" is repeated almost back to back with itself. But generally he succeeds in pulling the reader along in his busy jetstream.

And there comes the rub. This novel is so concerned with surface effects—cinematic effects, if you will, and I think this judgment about the book's movie models is sound—that the poetry, the emotions, the whole affect of the post-apocalypse novel goes missing. There's no true sense of desuetude or loss here, no Ozymandias Effect. Just compare this book to Wyndham's classic The Day of the Triffids (1951) to see what I mean. Or even to a more recent entry such as Mitchell Smith's Snowfall (2002). There's simply no sense here of the magnitude of the loss or the lyrical strangeness of the desolated landscape or even the paradoxical sense of Earth being well-shed of humanity.

Perhaps this lack is due to the ultra-compressed timeframe of the main narrative: Just a few days. In any case, it makes for "a world not well lost."