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Taji's Syndrome
A deadly plague caused by a laboratory accident spreads rapidly, and the only hope for a cure lies with the few who have survived the disease, but the survivors have mysteriously disappeared.
439 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
1 person is currently reading
35 people want to read
About the author
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
260 books477 followersA professional writer for more than forty years, Yarbro has sold over eighty books, more than seventy works of short fiction, and more than three dozen essays, introductions, and reviews. She also composes serious music. Her first professional writing - in 1961-1962 - was as a playwright for a now long-defunct children's theater company. By the mid-60s she had switched to writing stories and hasn't stopped yet.
After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other writers.
She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories.
In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.
She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can.
Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area - with two cats: the irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera.
Her Saint-Germain series is now the longest vampire series ever. The books range widely over time and place, and were not published in historical order. They are numbered in published order.
Known pseudonyms include Vanessa Pryor, Quinn Fawcett, T.C.F. Hopkins, Trystam Kith, Camille Gabor.
After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other writers.
She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories.
In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.
She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can.
Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area - with two cats: the irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera.
Her Saint-Germain series is now the longest vampire series ever. The books range widely over time and place, and were not published in historical order. They are numbered in published order.
Known pseudonyms include Vanessa Pryor, Quinn Fawcett, T.C.F. Hopkins, Trystam Kith, Camille Gabor.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 5, 2010
An Ok read...moved quickly in the beginning, but got bogged down about the time the military felt the need to help -- Hmmm, slowed down with government intervention, I guess that makes sense.
June 28, 2018
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is perhaps best known for her remarkable series of historical supernatural novels featuring the vampire Count Saint Germain, but she’s also written a wide range of other novels in a variety of genres. Taji’s Syndrome is a solid near-future medical thriller about a freak accident in a militarily funded genetic research lab that has cascading consequences that only appear years afterwards.
The reader has all the important clues up front - Yarbro begins with the incident, and the series of co-incidental events that lead to the fetuses carried by six pregnant woman at a particular point in the pregnancies being affected. But from that point, the reader, like the medical researchers across the country some 15 years later, is caught up in the history of a bewildering epidemic. At first, it’s only a few cases in clusters, and for the isolated doctors and researchers, looks like a classic case of toxic contamination. But the epidemic spreads out from those loci like an infectious disease, and by the time the Centers for Disease Control are called in, thousands are dying from a disease no one understands.
I happen to quite enjoy this kind of medical thriller, and so fir me this was a great read - suspenseful, conveying both the urgency and the frustration of medical detectives struggling to put the pieces together while people are dying all around them and each day without a solution to the puzzle and a step towards a viable cure is a day where their whole raison d’etre as doctors is chalkenged.
The reader has all the important clues up front - Yarbro begins with the incident, and the series of co-incidental events that lead to the fetuses carried by six pregnant woman at a particular point in the pregnancies being affected. But from that point, the reader, like the medical researchers across the country some 15 years later, is caught up in the history of a bewildering epidemic. At first, it’s only a few cases in clusters, and for the isolated doctors and researchers, looks like a classic case of toxic contamination. But the epidemic spreads out from those loci like an infectious disease, and by the time the Centers for Disease Control are called in, thousands are dying from a disease no one understands.
I happen to quite enjoy this kind of medical thriller, and so fir me this was a great read - suspenseful, conveying both the urgency and the frustration of medical detectives struggling to put the pieces together while people are dying all around them and each day without a solution to the puzzle and a step towards a viable cure is a day where their whole raison d’etre as doctors is chalkenged.
June 8, 2008
This book was quite good, though there was one section that had some really weird typos in it - I kind of wonder if it was the publisher. Anyway, the story was intriguing, and the characters compelling. I would have liked a little more detail at the end, but overall it was very good.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews