I’m trying something different this week. Tell me how you feel about it.

As we collectively cope with the impacts of the novel coronavirus, I notice a number of folks doubling down on apocalyptic tales of contagion, which I suppose makes sense as entertainment comfort food, from an emotional “hair of the dog that bit you” perspective.

While it’s mildly amusing to see 1971’s “The Omega Man” trending on YouTube, we can be more creative in our choices than warmed-over takes on the zombie genre.

I’ve said before that Frank Herbert, who maintained a home in Port Townsend, remains one of my favorite science fiction authors, but while he’s well-known for the “Dune” saga, far fewer fans are aware that he wrote a much briefer sci-fi novel in 1982, called “The White Plague.”

Herbert started the “Dune” series roughly 20,000 years in the future, but “The White Plague” kicks off in 1996, only a dozen years into the future from when he wrote it. While it shares with “Dune” an exploration of some of the complex ways in which culture, politics and warfare intersect, the machinations in “The White Plague” are not only entirely earthbound, but also arguably dated.

John Roe O’Neill, an American molecular biologist of Irish descent, is visiting Ireland with his wife and children when a bomb planted by a faction of the Irish Republican Army reduces his family to collateral damage, even as his own life is spared.

O’Neill is driven insane by his grief over his loss and his guilt over the monstrous course of action he now feels compelled to undertake, because he has the scientific skills to even the score. Just as the IRA took his wife and children from him, so too will O’Neill create a disease that’s carried by men, but is only fatal to women, thereby taking the women and the ability to produce children from those whom he holds responsible.

Those responsible parties, in O’Neill’s eyes, are the countries of Ireland, for its act of terrorism; England, for oppressing Ireland to the point that it’s resorted to such terrorism; and Libya, for training the terrorists. As such, O’Neill releases his virus in all three countries and sends anonymous messages to the rest of the world’s leaders, warning them not to lend aid or open their borders to any of those three countries, lest they suffer the same fate.

O’Neill had only intended his plague to punish those three countries, but because Frank Herbert is writing this story, the narrative itself practically laughs at O’Neill’s goals and says, “Containment? You created a pandemic, you idiot. There’s no such thing as ‘containment.’”

Frank Herbert was a veritable Renaissance man, an autodidactic polymath whose broad spectrum of professions ranged from newspaper reporter to environmental scientist, who was too busy becoming an expert in various fields of study to complete college degrees in any of them. And yet, for me, it’s tempting to sum up the core of Herbert through his relatively brief stint in the U.S. Navy’s Seabees during World War II.

My dad worked in electrical engineering as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. I served on board USS Theodore Roosevelt for two overseas wartime deployments. Add those together, and it approaches the ruthlessly pragmatic outlook that defined the worldview expressed in Herbert’s sci-fi novels, all the way back to “The Dragon in the Sea” in 1956, his debut novel about near-future submarine warfare.

Herbert had a star-spanning imagination, and yet, most of his story prompts could be summed up as the necessary realities caused by the removal of one or more otherwise essential elements to humanity’s survival. Just as the planet Arrakis in “Dune” was created to answer the question, “What if water was the rarest resource on a given world?” so too does “The White Plague” ask, “How does humanity respond when the lives of every woman on Earth are threatened?”

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go so great.

As O’Neill experiences a dissociative break, burying himself in an alternate identity and traveling to Ireland to secretly sabotage whatever progress its scientists might be making toward a cure, we see Ireland’s reversion to pagan tribalization, with IRA gang leaders proclaiming themselves “kings of old,” while outbreaks in other countries result in drastic actions against Boston and Rome, as well as hate crimes against those of Irish, English and Libyan descent, plus the total devastation of North Africa.

Honestly, even speaking as an avowed fan of Herbert, there are parts of this novel that drag a bit, since his obsessive world-building attention to detail compels him to create rich character studies even for characters who die a relatively short while later. Especially after reading “Dune,” the near-contemporary portrayal of “the world outside our windows” in “The White Plague” can’t help but feel limited in its leaps of imagination by comparison.

But what’s genuinely novel is how Herbert continually returns to the splintered perspective of O’Neill, even after he’s committed his terrible deed, because there’s still enough of a good man inside him that his mind cannot witness what he’s wrought and remain a whole, cohesive consciousness.

In both “The White Plague” and “Dune,” Herbert recognized the majority of what we take for granted in civilization is dependent upon our continued access to a panoply of resources and the steady maintenance of more societal conditions than most of us can keep track of at once. He also understood that vengeance is as likely to steal from us as it is to take things away from those whom we would revenge ourselves against.

The IRA might no longer be an enemy of choice in modern pop culture, but the aforementioned lessons of “The White Plague” are arguably as relevant as ever.