Immunity Index by Sue Burke
Aug. 29th, 2021 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsImmunity Index
2/5. In a near-ish future America, a Corona Virus outbreak sweeps the nation at the same time as a semi-organized revolt against authoritarianism.
Written in 2018-2019, apparently, which just goes to show that all the experts are right when they say a lot of things about Covid were entirely likely and predictable. Also, you can really tell when this book was written because it is incredibly responding to the Trump Era, if you know what I mean. I didn't actually like it. It throws a lot of stuff at the wall – pandemic, rebellion, clones, genetic engineering, a resurrected woolly mammoth, family stuff . . . I literally thought why is this plotline even here? twice.
I will say that my meh reaction cooled more when I saw an essay where Burke says it was depressing to do final edits on this book in March and April of 2020 (yeah, fair) because her fiction was less bad than reality. Wait . . . what? I hope she meant that the fictional Corona Virus in this book is less virulent than Covid, though that's not actually clear in the text. Let's go with that. Because if she means that her fictional universe, where government drones armed with blades break up protests by murdering people, and there are multiple prison blacksites in a single Midwest city, and 4+ young people with full-time jobs (at least one of them managerial) have to share a studio to afford living in the Midwest, and citizenship is regularly stripped from a whole class of Americans, and I could go on and on. If she's saying that's better than Trump's America of March 2020, man, I don't even know what to do with something that blinkered. That's some deep down the twitter sinkhole shit right there. I'm kind of hair trigger on this -- I have literally defriended people on social media over saying similar things, because I don't have time for that sort of attitude. It's an embrace of the melodrama at the expense of, oh I don't know, retaining enough clarity and discernment to actually be able to do something about the world in front of you and the actual real injustices therein. So let's just assume she meant her lightly fictionalized disease is slightly less bad than Covid, eh.
2/5. In a near-ish future America, a Corona Virus outbreak sweeps the nation at the same time as a semi-organized revolt against authoritarianism.
Written in 2018-2019, apparently, which just goes to show that all the experts are right when they say a lot of things about Covid were entirely likely and predictable. Also, you can really tell when this book was written because it is incredibly responding to the Trump Era, if you know what I mean. I didn't actually like it. It throws a lot of stuff at the wall – pandemic, rebellion, clones, genetic engineering, a resurrected woolly mammoth, family stuff . . . I literally thought why is this plotline even here? twice.
I will say that my meh reaction cooled more when I saw an essay where Burke says it was depressing to do final edits on this book in March and April of 2020 (yeah, fair) because her fiction was less bad than reality. Wait . . . what? I hope she meant that the fictional Corona Virus in this book is less virulent than Covid, though that's not actually clear in the text. Let's go with that. Because if she means that her fictional universe, where government drones armed with blades break up protests by murdering people, and there are multiple prison blacksites in a single Midwest city, and 4+ young people with full-time jobs (at least one of them managerial) have to share a studio to afford living in the Midwest, and citizenship is regularly stripped from a whole class of Americans, and I could go on and on. If she's saying that's better than Trump's America of March 2020, man, I don't even know what to do with something that blinkered. That's some deep down the twitter sinkhole shit right there. I'm kind of hair trigger on this -- I have literally defriended people on social media over saying similar things, because I don't have time for that sort of attitude. It's an embrace of the melodrama at the expense of, oh I don't know, retaining enough clarity and discernment to actually be able to do something about the world in front of you and the actual real injustices therein. So let's just assume she meant her lightly fictionalized disease is slightly less bad than Covid, eh.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-30 05:43 am (UTC)Screwed up the formatting for that part.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-01 10:45 am (UTC)I COULD NOT AGREE MORE.