Pandora — Peter Shepherd

A doctor working in a garage laboratory in Sierra Leone and, miles away, a Soviet scientist in his government ministry, both envisage the same thing: a world without mosquitos, flies, and locusts. The first hopes for an end to malaria, sleeping sickness, and yellow fever, whilst the latter imagines bounteous fields of crops, unblemished by blight. Between them they seek to bring about an ideal world, free from epidemic and starvation, but neither is fully prepared for the consequences of their actions. Into this supposed utopia is dropped a global cast of characters, from presidents and business leaders to people-smugglers and farmers, all taking what they can from the new world order. Amongst them is James McKay, a Scottish farmer and doctor, whose only desire is to look after those he loves. To do so, he has to ask one difficult question: what happens if the insects come back? Written in the early Eighties, Pandora is a novel that still rings true in its anxieties of man’s manipulation of nature, and, furthermore, the very nature of man when disaster strikes. Suspenseful and cerebral, Peter Shepherd presents a world unnervingly close to our own, pushed to the brink and beyond.