DEADLINE open thread. Have a party.

I think most of my thoughts on the book were distracted when you killed New Orleans. And like eight other states that I don't care about as much, but mostly New Orleans. (I believe Nola deserves to survive any zombie uprising for a variety of reasons, including the above-average level of zombie awareness and easy access to water-based evacuation routes. But once deadly storms and mosquitoes get involved, I officially give up on trying to find survival scenarios for anywhere in the Gulf Coast.)

Er, anyway. I actually thought the George/Shaun thing didn't significantly change anything, since they were pretty much a couple on an emotional level already. If their relationship was unhealthy, it isn't because they were or weren't having sex.

Everyone with the End Times team was kind of painfully awesome. The painful part is because they are dedicated and intelligent and brave, they are going to go be heroes, and that means at least some of them are going to die. I almost wished they could be less awesome and hand the story over to someone I liked less, but that would not make a good book.

And I was as shocked by anyone as the coda, but I think the main reasons it fell into "acceptable plot twist" territory for me instead of being unbelievable were that first, I had been wondering about the clones already because I didn't think that whole bundle of ethics and scientific issues would have been brought in just as an explanation for someone faking a death and then ignored, and second, the CDC - home of people willing to manipulate humanity and commit medical atrocities for the good of mankind - admitted they did a significant amount of testing on George's body/genetic material after her death. So we should probably just be happy they haven't been making a Resident Evil style George clone army.

. . . I really hope they haven't been making a Resident Evil style George clone army.

I can't argue against killer bugs from Cuba as a plausible way to kill everyone. You can still tell when the really bad yellow fever years were, in New Orleans, by walking around the older cemeteries. When you get entire families who died in the same summer, that's usually the cause.

Mosquito-borne diseases in general seem like nature's way of reminding us we aren't really on top of the food chain.