SFnal Doings in May, 2021

 

Reading: Preoccupied as my Better Half and I were this month, I did less reading than usual, but did manage to complete The Burning God. This last book of Rebecca Kuang’s debut trilogy was inspired, like its predecessors, by the modern Sino-Japanese wars, and shared the other volumes' vividness and skillful plotting. Without giving away the denouement, I will say that General Rin’s titular ally, the Phoenix, has no plans ever to give Rin or her homeland peace, even if they desperately need it.

 

Video: My video watching has become sporadic in the last three years and almost non-existent since the start of the pandemic. That said, I watched my first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in mid-May. I know I’m two decades late to this party, but I was only inspired to try the series by a recently-published alt history blog post. The premiere featured a thin plot and mediocre acting, but I admired the writers’ attempt to build a new Star Trek continuity bridging the older series and the 21st-century milieu of First Contact. I may just give the rest of the series a try, and see how it holds up.

 

Gaming: Susan and I managed a fair amount of this in May, thanks to iOS or compact versions of some of our favorites. We enjoyed Duel, the excellent two-player version of 7 Wonders; Scythe, the cult board game based on Jakub Rozalski’s 1920+ dieselpunk art; and Innovation. Indeed, we were able to play all three while Susi was in early-stage labor with our son. I’d say this gave me an unfair advantage, but Miss S. still trounced me at Innovation, 6-2. Better luck next pregnancy. (Just kidding!)

Susi triumphs again.

The Apocalypse Came Early

Some years ago on this blog I speculated about the outcomes we might expect from a deadly global pandemic, a category of disaster popular with authors of post-apocalyptic fiction. Basing my conclusions upon reading in my own professional bailiwick (history), I suggested that a future post-Plague world would see:

 

1 - Advances in medical science

2 - New developments in superstition and racial scapegoating

3 - Possible improvement in the conditions of working people

4 - A probable increase in political and economic repression.

 

Nine years on, our pandemical future has at last arrived. It is too early to speak of a post-Covid world. The disease may be contained in the United States (maybe), but we are unlikely to see global death rates taper off this year. Still, with a year’s worth of social and epidemiological data at our disposal, we can make some tentative observations about the pandemic, and I can see if the generalizations I made in 2012 apply to the very specific 2020-21 disaster.

 

1 - The new mRNA vaccines that have been going into arms since late last year are a promising medical advance, and one unforeseen (AFAIK) a couple of years ago.

2 - In the United States, our own president spent a good part of 2020 flogging snake-oil solutions like chloroquine and bleach injections (these didn’t catch on), and trying, with more success, to scapegoat East Asians for the “China virus.”  

3 - This seems to have occurred in the United States, much to my surprise. An emergency expansion of unemployment insurance and child-welfare benefits last year gave breathing room to impoverished working-class people, and the label “essential worker” has begun to supplant “low-skilled laborer,” which may help to bring up people’s wages.

 4 - Political repression has increased in some parts of the world, like East Asia, but mostly as a consequence of coups or popular uprisings. Quarantine measures have made North Korea and Cambodia more repressive, but they were not previously democracies.

 

There is room for cautious optimism here, but no cause to say “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” Three million people have already died of COVID-19 and the disease is still making its death march through India and Brazil, on its way to who-knows-what levels of destruction in the global South. Optimism, in any case, is always difficult for those of us of a certain age. It’s a lot easier to imagine how ghastly the world could become than to realize that many, perhaps most people in the industrialized world already live in a crapsack future and want its social arrangements to die with the pandemic.