Pandemic dystopias: Afterland by Lauren Beukes
Afterland was published in 2020 but the book was planned and written before any of us had heard of Covid and it's interesting to read a novel about a pandemic during a pandemic, although the pandemic in Afterland is of a much worse kind, it kills most of the men in the world.
Many feminists like to tell us about how much better the world would be without any men in it but the world depicted in Afterland is a very dark place. There are a few surviving men and they are mostly rounded up and kept in compounds "for their own safety" while the virus is studied. Women fill all the roles previously assigned to men and are forbidden from falling pregnant so there is a huge black market in sperm. The plot of Afterland revolves around a woman and her son that are interned in an isolation centre in the USA to be studied after he's found to be immune to the virus that killed most other men and boys.
The woman is desperate to get back to South Africa and then her sister turns up at the centre with a plan to get them all out. What she doesn't know is that her sister has a plan to sell her son to some human trafficking female gangsters. She escapes from the internment centre with her son, who is dressed as a girl, after she beats her sister unconscious with a tyre iron after her sister drugs them and attempts to steal her son.
A very frightening road trip through a dystopian world follows, on the run from everyone with some comical and bizarre encounters while mother and son both try to make their way through a very dangerous world.
The verdict: Highly recommended
I read almost half of the book at a Department of Home Affairs office where we had to wait outside in the blistering sun for 6 hours because of covid regulations and the office operating at half speed because not fully staffed, again, due to covid regulations, to get fingerprinted for a new ID card, so that I can continue trading cryptos as a major source of income in a post-covid world. I really could relate to the ugly dystopia depicted in the book.
While you make it sound interesting, it's not my kind of book. I'm glad you liked it though. Sorry you had such a lousy day. You needed to get this ID to trade crypto?
Yes, when I first started trading crypto four years ago, Binance did not have any KYC for small traders and they recently asked me to do identity verification. I complied but the verification failed because I don't have the new ID card, which is the only one that they will accept. In the past, our ID documents did not include fingerprinting but now it does
wow! I thought Binance operated a bit outside of ties to governmental dictates. I'm wrong apparently.
Fascinating premise. Men appear to be disproportionately affected by Covid, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. We were lucky that this pandemic wasn't just a tad more deadly, or things would have been much worse socially, politically, and economically.
A year before the pandemic struck, I went on a trip to Asia and took a book called the Dog Stars. It's a bittersweet tale about a man at the end of a flu pandemic that has devastated most of the world. Only a few people are left, and this story deals with their struggle to survive in this world. A sweet sad tale but very poetic. It was the last fiction book I read befor the pandemic struck. So, it appears that the Gods were trying to send me a message, or they have a strange sense of humor :)
I think they have a strange sense of humour
You had to give fingerprints to get an ID card just to be able to trade crypto? Where is this please?
South Africa. The fingerprint issue isn't just related to crypto trading, my country is filled with people who are either have fake IDs or are completely undocumented. They are phasing out the older style of ID in favour of cards and in fact I have been getting a lot of flak from ordinary banks because my fingerprints were not in the system. Then I was told to verify myself by Binance or be suspended. It turns out that they only accept the new ID cards as verification. I don't know whether that was a stipulation by my government for them to allow us to use the exchange but its possible, my country is a fairly large hub of money laundering and similar activity because regulations were previously extremely lax. So as usual, ordinary citizens bear the brunt of higher level corruption
It's amazing that you are required to have an identification card in order to trade cryptocurrency. It's like asking for a permit to be able to use ordinary money.
I think the events in the book are very real.
Fanatics can easily create any virus in the laboratory and send it around the world.
What actually happened now.
Life seems unnecessarily complicated these days, I agree
Wow that perfect book for you ❤️
Have a great weekend to you 🙏
God bless you my dear sweet friend @nikv
I laughed so hard at that part that talked about the Sperm Black market, haha, this is a joy read. I like the storyline. Even George RR Martin endorses this, so its a must read.
Hahaha it's a weird idea, for sure
Do you know about the series called "Y the Last Man"? It's also a comic, with the same dystopian future, men are gone. It's not that far from what's going on today...
This is totally my type of book! I hope it went well at Home Affairs, which office did you go to? The one in town or in Randburg?
I went to Edenvale although I should have used the one in town, it would have been faster, I think. Now I just have to wait to be able to collect it but that should not take so long.
I'll look out for that series
One of my favorite writers
Mine too
Very interesting post!
Good to have a tire iron handy. 🤣
When in doubt, use a hammer 😉
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu is another good one though of a different topic. I was surprised to pick it up. I haven't been able to stop reading it.
Thanks for the recommendation, I will look out for it
Man seems to live in constant fear of his own extinction. The fascination as well as fear seems to me to be a primal fear phenomenon, mixed with a deep negative attitude towards oneself as humanity and the ambivalence towards what one perceives as a friendly, perfect planet, predestined to create life, and what one perceives as destructive and imperfect, without bringing the two into harmony with each other.
According to which death and birth, creation and decay belong to each other, to my world view. I do not feel motivated to find anything threatening in it, nor anything exaggeratedly glorious. Both the romantic and the dystopian are stylistic exaggerations of those who write books and make films; it is better not to take it literally, but as an expression of an imaginative capacity that merely expresses the imaginative richness of the human being.
The power of storytelling is a cultural and evolutionary heritage, it would be a great pity to misunderstand this imaginative capacity to the extent that it is about prophetically grim punishment scenarios, either by nature as the evil avenger of human wrongdoing or as a cold and random event force of un-intelligent matter. Superstition seems to be lurking around not far away.
The trauma of the fear of death, where it is integrated into a human community that manages to frame hard and frightening trials of its young people and thus to integrate the experienced traumas into the living and the confident, there man does not need to think of himself as helpless in the face of the forces, but to see his existence as fulfilling and healthy until he meets his end, the last of all challenges.
I don't think much of gender-conflicts "resolved" by giving preference to one or the other. It's the differences which are of interest to me, which hold the successes in human kinds history, not only between genders but between each and every single human being.
Thanks for the recommendation, it gave me the chance to give my view on the matter.
Thanks for taking the time to comment
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