Quarantine Zone by Daniel H. Wilson (review)

Cherokee writer Daniel Wilson has written fiction set in the Osage Nation (Robopocalypse and its sequel, Robogenesis) and in the Cherokee Nation (Amped) and at sundry other points around the globe. In some, Native characters are central. In others, they are totally absent. His latest graphic novel, Quarantine Zone, falls into the last category. It has no identifiable Native American characters, and it is set far from Indian Country, in and around Washington, dc. Yet even in Wilson’s work without identifiable Indian characters, Native issues and an indigenous sensibility are still very much in evidence.

All of Wilson’s long fiction deals with profound ideas, drawing upon his study of robotics (He has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon). Among the issues with which he repeatedly grapples the most frequent revolve around the ethics and ethical implications of scientific technological advances and the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

In his best-selling novels Robopocalypse and its sequel, Robogenesis, Wilson envisions world-changing events. In the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligence has been perfected and the singularity achieved. Technology revolts against its human masters, controlled by a powerful, artificial-intelligence computer known as Archos and determined to exterminate human beings. Achieving rapid and early success, the machines almost succeed, but a tattered humanity (centered in Osage County) manages to rally and fight back. Amped is Wilson’s anti–“Harrison Bergeron” (Vonnegut is a clear influence). About a decade from now, science has perfected technology that enables all disabilities to be corrected. This creates a protofascist backlash, which claims that the differently abled have been given unfair advantages over “normal” humans.

Quarantine Zone opens forty years after science has discovered the cause of evil is a virus known as Malnoro. Those who are uninfected are incapable of committing intentionally evil acts. In most people, the virus is easily cured. For a small percentage of the infected population, however, Malnoro is incurable. Those with the disease are still capable of choosing to do good, but there is no guarantee.

In what comes to be known as “the Purge,” the incurable are rounded up and imprisoned behind a high wall in the zone of the title. Think John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, in which Manhattan Island is turned into a giant, lawless penal colony. But the trope also recalls the confinement of American Indians on reservations during the nineteenth century. Natives were assembled and confined to these areas to clear land for white settlement and to protect those settlers from Indian attack. Yet it was also seen paternalistically as a way to protect the indigenes from depredations by whites.

In the novel, following the Purge, the cured world (now devoid of Malnoro) continues on. It is crime-free, if somewhat banal and sterile. As in Amped, however, a kind of paranoid oppression rears its head, fearing another outbreak. As the promotional materials for the novel states, Quarantine Zone “raises hard questions about free will and the nature of good and evil. If we could ‘cure’ ourselves of the capability to do evil—should we? And could a person truly be good without the choice to do evil?”

Containment of the incurables is maintained by a force known as Quarantine Zone Enforcement, just as the U.S. Army prevented outbreaks of “Hostiles” from reservations (terminology echoed in the novel). Most of this is simple perimeter policing. Occasionally, however, a spy from the qz escapes and attempts to mix with the general population. When detected, they flee back across the wall. When that happens, a qze squad must be inserted inside the zone to capture or kill the runner. The leader of one such multiethnic unit is Captain Matthew Huxley. Unbeknownst to his fellow soldiers, Matt contracted Malnoro as a child, but, sheltered by his parents, he makes the choice to do good and hides his infection.

To say much more would be to spoil a pulse-pounding, nonstop actioner. Wilson’s work always has a cinematic...