Pathological

On the surface, the life of young scientist Mei Yin seems perfect. She runs her own research institute in China, she’s getting married, and she founded an orphanage that helps hundreds of girls. But Mei Yin has a dark secret—three vials of “Satan’s gift,” a deadly smallpox virus left over from Russian scientific research conducted during the Cold War. She’s determined to find a vaccine, even if that means endangering those she holds dear.

Zia Baj, a terrorist educated in the West, has also obtained Satan’s gift. But he’s not looking for a cure—instead, he plans to exact revenge and start a war. So he unleashes the virus in an American classroom. At the same time, thousands of miles away, the children of Mei Yin’s orphanage fall ill. Soon authorities realize that this is no ordinary outbreak: it’s the start of an epidemic. How are the two cases linked? And can a worldwide pandemic be stopped?

From award-winning Chinese author Wang Jinkang comes a terrifying look at the future of war.

A master of science fiction, Wang Jinkang won the World Chinese Science Fiction Association’s Nebula Award for best novel in 1997 and the International Science Fiction Conference’s Milky Way Award in 2010. His books include Ant People, Seven-Layered Shell, Life-Death Balance, Time-Space Shift, Sowing Seeds on Mercury, and Human-Like.

Jeremy Tiang has translated more than ten books from Chinese, including novels by Zhang Yueran, Yan Geling, and Chan Ho-kei. He has been awarded an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship and People’s Literature Prize. He also writes and translates plays, and his own short story collection, It Never Rains on National Day, was short-listed for the Singapore Literature Prize.