SIGMET ACTIVE by Thomas Page

"Croft combed his fingers through his white scraggly beard. He knows, he thought. He knows we brought him here to kill him."

Croft's reflecting on Lancelot the lab monkey, one of the doomed voyagers on board the decommissioned Knoxville, chosen as a floating test site for some super science shenanigans. The plan? Punch a hole through the ozone layer with some super lasers, and see what happens. The planners? Croft, Tregaskis, Malone and more, a disparate group of desperate losers handpicked by the military because they have no where else to go and no one who would miss them if something goes wrong. They've gathered on Itrek Island, a miserable patch of hell in the South Pacific, and we're at X minus 45 hours until they sound the trumps of doom. Suddenly, the weather goes haywire ... maybe not the most finessed tag line, but you get where this is going ...

Author Thomas Page is perhaps best known for his 1973 novel The Hephaestus Plague, a disaster epic with the deliciously twisted threat of flaming beetles from beneath the earth! This work was adapted toot sweet by exploitation legend William Castle under the shameless, moronically Hollywood-ized title Bug. Sigmet Active was perhaps a tougher candidate for a low budget quickie adaptation, dealing as it does with the entirety of "the weather" striking back at man, instead of gimmicked beetles. Before any thunderbolts and lightning crash, however, Page has us backed into a corner with dread, the creeping fear that something is going wrong and it's beyond any of us to stop. This opening third is the strongest part of the novel, covering the buildup, execution, and immediate aftermath of "Operation Windowpane," an almost-real life attempt at creating a death beam. Once those super duper lasers fire things get weird. The men have succeeded in a way they could never imagine. It's as if they're being ... stalked by the storm they've zapped.

"Hef-festus? What the hell is this, Ancient Greece? Just call it 'Bug!'"

Of course they are, and we know it, that's the whole point! An intelligent weather system that kills with lightning! Like a terrestrial downsize of Fred Hoyle's classic SF novel The Black Cloud, and excellent thriller grist. Unfortunately once the "thriller" part of the plot kicks into gear, Page settles back into some rote developments. Nothing can match the opening fear and the immediate ensuing horror: witness Croft's reunion with Lancelot, who tries to bite him but instead literally falls apart from his massive dose of unfiltered cosmic radiation. It's a shame that the following chapters shift down to standard technothriller maneuvering and a predictable denouement. Near the beginning Page name drops WWII era foo fighters and the apocryphal death ship The Ourang Medan, and more of this atmosphere carried through the story would have helped. As it stands, this is a white hot flash in the pan trailed by a hazy, insubstantial afterimage.

For a strong start and long, low finish, Sigmet Active earns two widening gyres out of four:

Charter Books, 1978