The Invaders : VIRUS X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues--Out of the Present, and Into the Future.<i> By Frank Ryan</i> .<i> Little, Brown: 448 pp., $24.95</i>

This is not reading for a hard-core postmodernist. The story of hantaviruses, Ebola filovirus, HIV or even Vibrio cholerae, is a modern thriller, based on the axiom that men and women from Zaire and Gujarat to Stroud, Reston and New Mexico are not supposed to die like vermin, that a polymerase chain reaction is much more important than any poetic mythology and that one has to kill (sacrifice) a lot of nice, slender deer mice and even cynomolgus monkeys to save a lot of nice, slender people from Sudan to York, from Azande tribesmen to Navajos and even to the white readers of the Los Angeles Times.

The universe is surely not benign, says the author in the last paragraph of the book. Definitely not, despite our pious, inborn and educated belief in benevolent superhuman strategies from above.

This is a book on human survival in our unyielding universe, where microbial strategies must be counteracted by human immune systems and human cognitive systems. Unlike official or traditional poetry, the poetry of survival is not made up of consolations but of solutions. Unlike our belles-lettres, this book is fact-dependent, not word-dependent.

The author of such a literary endeavor does not need his own inner life as reference, he needs instead the experience and learning of other lives. Learning and experience are usually called science. In the realm of literature labeled nonfiction, the proportion of hard facts to guesses matters most, as well as the proportion of innovative thoughts to old-fashioned beliefs. The bulk of this book is hard facts and new ideas.

I am happy to say that out of the 19 chapters, three are original essays with personal and well-considered ideas and the rest are reporting based on direct observations, interviews on the spot or on assiduous reading of the pertinent new scientific literature. The result is intriguing to any reader, professional or nonprofessional, at times even thrilling and surprising. This is a tremendous score, compared to a standard postmodern discourse in the humanities.

What are the core ideas? First, infectious diseases, these permanent interactions of the host and the microbe, are not eradicated and never will be; there is just a permanent turnover of invaders and host defenses. Second, there is a broader kind of intelligence, the intelligence of the genome, “the ability to receive important information about its surroundings and then to be able to change its behavior, perhaps its very heredity, so as to respond to that information.” This is, of course, the intelligence of every DNA or RNA virus, a “primal form of intelligence . . . that governs the innate behavior of all life on earth.”

Third, everything living here just wants to go on, to survive. Killing off the host is not an intention but a suicidal mishap. Fourth, consequently, a quiet symbiosis and co-evolution is the aim; the aggression and decimation of the host is an accident resulting from the transfer of a microbial agent between different host species. Fifth, there may be an “aggressive symbiont” that would attack the enemies or competitors of its host, and microbes may be such a case.

Sixth, the transfers of microbial invaders between host species occur during a special proliferation of the first host or during the basic change of behavioral patterns of the new host, as when humans changed from hunting to farming or from monogamy to promiscuity. Seventh, there is such a thing as a tolerant host; a naive, unprotected host of the traveling microbe.

In biological terms, it is unlikely that our species will succumb to a lethal virus. We may, however, be reduced to an uncivilized minimum--a sci-fi scenario that always lags behind the real surprises and misses the real monsters, which are more like a filovirus than like muscular warriors or 11th century dragons. The lethal virus, the Virus X of this book, would have to be almost 100% lethal and almost 100% contagious, qualities that demand a special kind of genomic intelligence and a special kind of spreading--like aerosol respiratory transfers. “The human extinction is therefore unlikely as a result of viral pandemic, but a near miss. . . .”

I was impressed and inspired by reading all the thoughts and data Frank Ryan has gathered from his direct experience, his encounters with scientists and scientific magazines. I was a little disturbed by minor inconsistencies in the overall structure of the book, like his insertion, among the concrete stories of hantavirus Sin Nombre, Ebola viruses or HIV, of fleeting descriptions of other important pathogens.

Also, I object to the journalistic habit of presenting--almost monotonously--each scientist with a physical characteristic (5-foot-8, blue-eyed, stocky, Gitane-smoking) and to some descriptions of technical lab procedures that pretend to be exact. There are a few repetitions that could have been avoided (in the Australian myxomatosis story, for example) and a few not very elegant sentences, for example: “All of his working life had been spent working with dangerous viruses,” as well as the overly liberal usage of some technical expressions (“translation” between DNA and TUNA, “fluorescence” microscope).

Our Global Whining prevents us from hearing enough about global solutions. Each of the plagues--epidemic, pandemic, potential, real--demanded and will demand a specific global solution. This is what Frank Ryan’s book is about: the ability to change perspective, from a retrovirus to the planet and back. Not many books--fiction or nonfiction--have this cosmic ability.