Childhood’s End?

Plunging into the Apocalypse

John Strawn’s Amazon review, September 17, 2024

The crisis propelling Pierre Ouellette’s dystopian novel, Baby Zero, evokes the zeitgeist so well it’s sometimes hard to remember that you’re reading fiction. Ouellette has crafted an entertaining yarn that is just plausible enough to terrify us, too.

A mysterious plague has made human reproduction impossible. Instead of fertilizing egg cells, all the eager spermatozoa looking for a home are bumping into impervious shields. No one can explain what’s causing this disaster, but its effect – no more babies – has turned the raw materials of IVF into nearly priceless substances. It’s a version of our world coming to an end just as the poet T. S. Elliot imagined in The Hollow Men, which Ouellette sensibly quotes halfway through the novel. As a species, we’re about to go out with a whimper… or at best a slow fade. But there are battles to fight along the way.

Ouellette imagines a MAGA-like pseudo-political movement, fueled in part by a cult calling itself the Order of Atonement whose improbably charismatic prophet, who calls himself Terminus, sees the reproduction crisis as an omen of Armageddon. His teenaged lieutenant uses A I to craft the cult’s message. The calamity which has come to be known as the Plunge stimulates global agony, with no solutions in sight, and Terminus rallies an enormous following.

Meanwhile, a loathsome capitalist is trying to corner the market in cryogenically preserved eggs and embryos, the precious storehouse of human DNA. He’s willing to kill, of course, to achieve his goal of preserving life. The Feds want to seize the frozen goods, too, but the anti-government mobs see the reproductive drought as just another example of the Feds’ malevolent meddling. Conflict is inevitable. Ouellette appropriates real scientific findings – the fact that 97% of us already have PFAS, a huge class of compounds known as “forever chemicals,” in our bloodstreams – as plausible explanations for the infertility crisis. We’ve made our own bed, but we’ve short-sheeted ourselves.

Ouellette sends his large cast of characters galloping along a propulsive narrative path toward an apocalyptic denouement in Montana. Counterfactual fiction needs to be hung from a convincing scaffolding, and Ouellette has the knowledge and descriptive chops to carry that off. As he has one of his characters observe, “whatever the tale, you can’t end it shy of where it wants to go.”

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More five-star Amazon reviews

End of the world as we know it?

Pierre Ouellette’s sharp eye on the distorted functioning of bureaucracies leads to exposing fringe political groups, extreme religious organizations, out of control local militia’s and the dark workings of private equity in the recently released Baby Zero.
The intricate plot lends to a suspenseful read assisted by the sharp writing style of Ouellette. And right when the reader is ready to conclude that the end of civilization is at our doorstep, we are presented with a sliver of hope that humanity might survive, although the lasting sense is that society’s current challenges might be too severe to overcome. Very thought-provoking.
Can a Hollywood screen play be far behind??

A tense and gripping read

I couldn’t put this book down. It’s a tense story of how things can spiral out of control quickly, and though it’s a work of fiction, its broader themes are very specific to the fraught times we’re living in today. If you love edgy thrillers that make you think, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Great Read by the Reigning Master of True-Science Thrillers

Pierre Ouellette is the Tom Clancy of science-based thrillers. Only Ouellette’s prose is more compassionate, more grounded in the fears and hopes of ordinary (and not so ordinary) human beings. In Baby Zero the author takes his subject straight off today’s front pages – the reckless proliferation of toxic contaminants – and turns it into a page-turner that shocks with its twists, pacing and in-your-face scientific reality. But the true power of the story lies in the riveting portrayal of everyday men and women racing against impossible odds to save humanity from looming extermination. Don’t get me wrong: this is not a “message” book. It’s a masterfully constructed thriller that builds tension with each paragraph while sweeping the reader – and the book’s all-too-imperfect heroes – to a stunning conclusion. Buy it, take a deep breath and plunge in. You won’t be disappointed.

Baby Zero is a must read for anyone who cares about where this planet is headed.

Prolific biotech thriller novelist Pierre Ouellette scores again with his latest release, Baby Zero. Believable characters are developed with plausible perspectives in their roles with diverse stakeholders. An embryologist is surprised by a sudden failure of fertilization at a leading clinic. A military man turned journalist appears. A young woman splits her time between her health statistics job at the Center for Disease Control and bar hopping with her 20 something Manhattan trust fund kids, who don’t know she has lost her benefactor. Principals of a high-flying private equity firm own fertility clinics and crash up a way to cash in on a rare opportunity. The White House comes up with a secret plan. A rather common guy lives a different identity online as Terminus, who believes the human race should cease. Betrayal, conniving and greed
Abound amid a furious race for control. The plot will grab you and the finale is fabulous. 6 stars!

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