Review by Cosmo

Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot...excellent book - must read. For those who read it a long time ago, let me refresh your memory. The book takes place in Victorian Europe, and involves a Dr. Gladstone, a virologist, who is drawn into the world of the vampires, ancient ones who have been keeping many lost sciences from humanity forever because they weren't ready to use them yet. Gladstone had just invented germ warfare, and so the vampires played a cruel and twisted game upon him to get him to destroy the virus. Why? SO humanity would be safe. However, the end of the book is the best part. In it, first, Gladstone must take away the virus from his daughter, and idiot savant, before she kills herself with it. Also shone here is the fact that basically all science is idiot savants, stumbling into new fields without much knowledge of what is really happening. BUt! The best part is yet to come. The fact that at the end, the vampire says that "The trump card has been played" and then refers to the woman, has a duel meaning. First it means that females have entered society at that point and have become equal members almost, which means many more scientists and scientists with a whole new way of looking at the world... but in addition, he is talking about Marie Curie, the woman they ran into in france, who had a hand in discovering the atom, radiation, and it's secrets. Now remember, the vampires could see the microscopic with great detail...but the atom was invisible to them. IN effect, humanity had entered into a world in which the vampire was powerless to enter and had no knowledge of yet...Marie Curie had beaten the vampires to the punch because she had hit on the inconceivable to them, something they wouldn't have seen and so might not have even known existed....