finished - The Black Death
Apr. 20th, 2008 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mokie_shifuI must confess to a guilty pleasure: the killer bee panic of the '70s.
"Oh no! Killer bees were released somewhere in South America, they're making their way north, they'll arrive in the '90s and when they do we're all gonna die!" It sounded silly back then, it proved to be silly in the '90s, but oh, the gloriously silly books and movies that it caused!
This book is a lot like that.
The authors propose that all it will take for a major outbreak of the plague--the same plague behind the infamous Black Death that wiped out roughly a third of the known world back in the 14th century--is one foolish American wandering into previously inaccessible wilderness areas, where rodent populations carry plague bacteria, contracting the pneumonic form of the illness and bringing it into a major metropolitan area like New York City. From there, it will sweep across the world and kill everybody!
The plague was brought to the U.S. from China during the Third Pandemic, and it did quite a bit of damage during that Pandemic, but not as much as one would assume, based on history, that it should have done. Its patterns of destruction did not match earlier pandemics, and that's led scientists to some doubts, especially compared with the odd plague case in the Southwestern USA.
The book's plague has victims dropping within a day and infecting others almost with a thought; that's how contagious the Black Death was, history says. But the pneumonic plague simply doesn't seem to be that contagious, it doesn't work that fast, and it's not that deadly, and many of the symptoms observed during the Third Pandemic and later cases do not match the symptoms given by chroniclers of the Black Death.
This has led some experts in epidemiology to suggest that the Black Death was caused by a form of hemorrhagic virus rather than the yersinia pestis bacteria, or that the plague might have struck concurrently with an outbreak of anthrax, which is that contagious and deadly. Others argue it's simply that the timing and conditions were right--European populations had swollen and were already weakened by the Great Famine, and had no previous exposure to the bacteria to soften the blow. (That itself is under debate, though...)
In any case, the book stretches itself to silliness with its plague's freakish morbidity/mortality rate. The attempt to bolster the plot by setting it during a garbage strike and waving the threat of rats around fails miserably given the emphasis on the plague's pnemonic form and its person-to-person spread. The political subplot is laughable in its paranoid rambling and takes up far too much space given that it eventually goes nowhere--the military intervention in the story would have been far more effective a horror had all mention of Cosgrove, the president, the Cubans (oh no, Castro!), etc., been completely eliminated from the book.
A big part of the book is dedicated to racial politics, and it has the odd interesting lead. The fears of Harlem residents about the plague mirrors the belief that the government invented AIDS and crack to kill black people, for instance. Even so, even given that the book was written and is set in the '70s, race is portrayed terribly in the book, with every character an exoticized caricature of their own side.
To add insult to, well, insult, our main character is given Insta-Trauma, that constant crutch of fanfiction writers and roleplayers. Instead of creating a character in the story, a character who will act on his own motivations and react in his own way, they give us someone with a traumatic past who will angst and mope, because they think it gives the character some sort of depth, and potential for redemption. It doesn't. It gives us a whiny puppet who moves where and when the author says with no sense of real personality behind them. The strings are showing! Quick, invoke the newly dead wife and the unrequited lust for the exotic hispanic chick!
Let us not even mention the anthropomorphized plague and the white blood cell battle scenes.
It is wonderfully silly.
On the upside, I did like the mention of rats 'dancing' in the streets as a reference to the symptom of restlessness. Given medieval references to rats dancing in the street and the references to this by 'Plague Doubters' as rats, and many other animals, would have been affected by the plague just as humans were, it's nice to see that offered up in an alternative explanation.
"Oh no! Killer bees were released somewhere in South America, they're making their way north, they'll arrive in the '90s and when they do we're all gonna die!" It sounded silly back then, it proved to be silly in the '90s, but oh, the gloriously silly books and movies that it caused!
This book is a lot like that.
The authors propose that all it will take for a major outbreak of the plague--the same plague behind the infamous Black Death that wiped out roughly a third of the known world back in the 14th century--is one foolish American wandering into previously inaccessible wilderness areas, where rodent populations carry plague bacteria, contracting the pneumonic form of the illness and bringing it into a major metropolitan area like New York City. From there, it will sweep across the world and kill everybody!
The plague was brought to the U.S. from China during the Third Pandemic, and it did quite a bit of damage during that Pandemic, but not as much as one would assume, based on history, that it should have done. Its patterns of destruction did not match earlier pandemics, and that's led scientists to some doubts, especially compared with the odd plague case in the Southwestern USA.
The book's plague has victims dropping within a day and infecting others almost with a thought; that's how contagious the Black Death was, history says. But the pneumonic plague simply doesn't seem to be that contagious, it doesn't work that fast, and it's not that deadly, and many of the symptoms observed during the Third Pandemic and later cases do not match the symptoms given by chroniclers of the Black Death.
This has led some experts in epidemiology to suggest that the Black Death was caused by a form of hemorrhagic virus rather than the yersinia pestis bacteria, or that the plague might have struck concurrently with an outbreak of anthrax, which is that contagious and deadly. Others argue it's simply that the timing and conditions were right--European populations had swollen and were already weakened by the Great Famine, and had no previous exposure to the bacteria to soften the blow. (That itself is under debate, though...)
In any case, the book stretches itself to silliness with its plague's freakish morbidity/mortality rate. The attempt to bolster the plot by setting it during a garbage strike and waving the threat of rats around fails miserably given the emphasis on the plague's pnemonic form and its person-to-person spread. The political subplot is laughable in its paranoid rambling and takes up far too much space given that it eventually goes nowhere--the military intervention in the story would have been far more effective a horror had all mention of Cosgrove, the president, the Cubans (oh no, Castro!), etc., been completely eliminated from the book.
A big part of the book is dedicated to racial politics, and it has the odd interesting lead. The fears of Harlem residents about the plague mirrors the belief that the government invented AIDS and crack to kill black people, for instance. Even so, even given that the book was written and is set in the '70s, race is portrayed terribly in the book, with every character an exoticized caricature of their own side.
To add insult to, well, insult, our main character is given Insta-Trauma, that constant crutch of fanfiction writers and roleplayers. Instead of creating a character in the story, a character who will act on his own motivations and react in his own way, they give us someone with a traumatic past who will angst and mope, because they think it gives the character some sort of depth, and potential for redemption. It doesn't. It gives us a whiny puppet who moves where and when the author says with no sense of real personality behind them. The strings are showing! Quick, invoke the newly dead wife and the unrequited lust for the exotic hispanic chick!
Let us not even mention the anthropomorphized plague and the white blood cell battle scenes.
It is wonderfully silly.
On the upside, I did like the mention of rats 'dancing' in the streets as a reference to the symptom of restlessness. Given medieval references to rats dancing in the street and the references to this by 'Plague Doubters' as rats, and many other animals, would have been affected by the plague just as humans were, it's nice to see that offered up in an alternative explanation.
