by Guy Stewart
Some months ago, I promised Bruce I’d write an article if he gave me a book. Rather than the usual “review” thing, I challenged myself and told him I’d not only write an article, I’d generate one hundred science fiction or fantasy ideas from said book. Then I’d throw them into the ether (speaking of which, I have a short story coming out this fall in a Hadley Rille/M-Brane SF anthology called AETHER AGE: HELIOS – great fun! You can find out more here: http://aetherage.blogspot.com/) and see if anything came of them.
Ahem…just so you know, I failed my challenge.
The book Bruce sent me was an uncorrected proof of Jonathan Engel’s THE EPIDEMIC: A Global History of AIDS. Among other reasons for my interest was the fact that my brother-in-law Dan had AIDS for over a decade, and yes, I wrote what I meant. He had AIDS. Dan has been a hemophiliac since conception and he got it through a blood transfusion because of some accident or another in the mid-1980s. He is not HIV positive; he had AIDS, full blown, with all the symptoms and various and sundry opportunistic infections that come with an AIDS compromised immune system. Because he was part of a massive research program through the University of Minnesota, and because he never gave up and was determined to beat the demon, Dan survived his AIDS infection.
The book intrigued me and though I tried for an even 100 ideas, all I have to offer you is an odd 75 that were sparked by reading this book. Because I don’t want to overwhelm you (or bore you) with all 75 at once, I’ll give it to you in three parts. (This also serves to take some pressure off the Executive Cat Herder in Chief, the Chief Feline Officer, She Who Must Be Obeyed and the other Associate Tabby Wranglers so they can insert the three articles wherever or whenever they want to.)
I’d give a bit of history, but if you don’t know anything about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, then go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS (No matter what you think of Wikipedia, I contend that it’s a good place to START.)
All right then, to work.
Idea # 1 is obvious, so we’ll get rid of it right away: Imagine a world in which AIDS had not spontaneously mutated from a primate virus somewhere in central Africa. (For a not-so-obvious corollary, see # 23.)
Doesn’t do much for you?
How about: #2 – What if humans had not been the primary vector, but the virus jumped to canines instead? (Oops, Connie Willis pretty much did that when she wrote “The Last of the Winnebagos”). How about this – what if it jumped to water buffalo and thence to domesticated dairy cattle – and thence to human handlers)? Mad Cow Disease it ain’t…
#3 – In its current mutation, AIDS is weak and unable to survive in air. But what if it wasn’t? Imagine pneumonic AIDS. Pneumonic plague is aggressive and if untreated, mortality approaches 100%.
#4 – Prior to its appearance as one of the major opportunistic infections an AIDS patient can pick up, Pneumocystis carinii, a rare form of pneumonia was known almost exclusively among elderly men of Mediterranean or Ashkenazic Jewish extraction. What was the connection between these three populations? What if it had been common among early-adolescent children of Haitian French-African extraction instead?
#5 – In 1982, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta had categorized a group of people suffering from similar symptoms as a “GRID” – gay-related immunodeficiency. In this group was what you’d expect by the acronym. But six percent of those in this group were non-gay, non-intravenous drug using Haitians. What if that number had been 25%?
#6 – By early 1983, researchers had some candidates for the “source” virus. One of them was FeLV, the virus that causes feline leukemia. What might have happened to the feline population if they had been the real source? What would its impact be on the familiars typically associated with black witches?
#7 – On June 27, 1969, police harassment of gay men in New York’s Greenwich Village sparked the Stonewall riots. What if one of the men had been a wizard, who was badly injured while delivering a love potion for a few gay friends. The potion was vaporized in an explosion and wafted over the attacking police force and those who were rioting for fun – after which those dosed stayed in the closet and eventually caught and spread the AIDS virus in New York?
#8 – After banning sexual activity in 14 of San Francisco’s bathhouses (and being ignored), a New York publisher quipped at the CDC AIDS director: “Now that you’ve succeeded in closing down the baths, are you preparing the box cars for relocation?” What if this HAD happened, and gay men were rounded up and moved to an abandoned Japanese internment camp in Montana?
#9 – In 1983, Larry Kramer wrote in New York: “After almost two years of an epidemic, there is no cure,” (obviously not having any idea that 27 MORE years would make virtually no difference at all…). What if a voodoo priest, under cover of an orphanage worker seeking adoptive families, arrived in Atlanta, asked to see the CDC AIDS director, James Curran and offered to lift the AIDS curse?
#10 – “In 1984, gay men felt abandoned and frightened, and in desperation they attacked any institution or agency that they felt they could possibly help them.” What if a secret society resembling the Priory of Sion formed and swore to act straight and spread AIDS among the general population?
#11 – “…sanitary engineering…had historically been the most effective approach in thwarting the numerous infectious maladies that had afflicted societies…that by 1985 infectious disease had ceased to be a threat to most of the industrialized world.” India had sewer systems circa 2500 BC, as did Egypt and China – Scotland had them around 3000 BC as did Rome, London, and Paris – and Philadelphia in the New World. Agents from a timeline given over to an alternate intelligent descendant of cockroaches have traveled back in time to make sure their kind evolve EARLIER and more aggressively. Alternately, what if AIDS jumped the species barrier in 1250 AD and spread through Europe prior to the Black Death?
#12 – “Record keeping…was the foundation of all modern public health…all record-keeping was vociferously opposed by a consortium of gay community leaders, patient advocates, and civil libertarians.” What if they opposition was successful in preventing AIDS testing, the keeping of records, and notification of partners?
#13 – What if those records were held in one place (at the CDC in Atlanta) and those records were accidentally destroyed?
#14 – What if voluntary AIDS colonies, like the leper colonies of antiquity, were opened in Utah, Montana, South Dakota and Oklahoma?
#15 – “Informational pamphlets…showed cartoon characters washing their works before injecting themselves with heroin and enjoying the camaraderie of a clean, hygienic shooting gallery…the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic…using funds from various health services, published ‘Shooting Up and Your Health”. In the world where this continued and everyone could enjoy a clean high, heroin users are enabled to slip through gaps in a ‘fence’ separating this world from faerie. What do they do there?
#16 – The US Army vigorously tested its soldiers for AIDS in our timeline, using the rationale that battlefield conditions (blood, fast surgeries, cuts, close contact) could vector the AIDS virus into the healthy population – this despite protests both ethical and legal. What if the Army had lost and AIDS testing in 1981 was banned (note: the US was involved in armed conflicts with a possibility of soldiers being injured followed FORTY-FIVE different times after this date)?
#17 – “Conservative psychologist, Patrick Fagan…suggested making the spreading of AIDS a litigable tort.” Of course, this never happened. But what if it did? What the heck is a litigable tort? “litigable = action: institute legal proceedings against, file a suit against; tort = law that addresses, and provides remedies for, civil wrongs not arising out of contractual obligations”.
#18 – “A team of epidemiologists at Imperial College, London, produced a computer model that suggested that the disease could actually die out naturally, or decline to a stable low incidence among the population.” What if a radical sect of Jain – along with Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and far left evolutionists – combined to block the “killing” of viruses and advocate the support of letting it run its course?
#19 – “Early theories of [the Haitian] outbreak included...strange speculations of co-infection with African swine fever infection in pigs.” What if this was true, the pigs were slaughtered and the meat sent via Miami, to central Kansas?
#20 – “The disease had probably been brought to [Haiti] by Haitians who had lived in the Belgian Congo as guest workers in the 1960s and 1970s who had returned to spread the disease among Haitian prostitutes.” What if this had NOT happened and the Haitian population dropped, sugar exports increased dramatically, a stable government evolved and Haiti became a Mecca for stem-cell research? Oh, and voodoo priests removed the curse of AIDS.
#21 – “[The AIDS virus] had clearly originated in…the region of central Africa…” This is the same place Ebola originated. What ELSE might be cooking in this lethal breeding ground?
#22 – “As in the United States, the infected were more promiscuous than the population as a whole…” What if an African Billy Graham had arisen at this time as well and preached abstinence as part of a Christian lifestyle – and as obtuse as gay’s refusing to change behavior patterns these African converts DID change theirs and the number of sex partners in all populations dropped dramatically?
#23 – “In 1985…the population most vulnerable [to AIDS] was made up of exactly those individuals who were needed for continental economic development, educational and technical progress and political leadership…an entire generation of leaders might already have become infected.” While the AIDS epidemic in the US is (obviously!) the most important event on the planet and stopping it here is more important than stopping it elsewhere; what if it had never happened? What would the continent look like in 2025?
#24 – “What was causing AIDS?...alien interferon.” What if AIDS is an alien invasion?
#25 – “One horrible possibility of fighting HIV was that new antibodies…would it to infect macrophages MORE aggressively and effectively than they could without the antibodies being present…” I know this is a sort of I AM LEGEND scenario, but what if this had happened unwittingly? What if the antibody attack induced an ethereal transparency and AIDS victims were neither entirely in this world, nor entirely in the next. NOT undead, but literally had a foot in both worlds but couldn’t live entirely in either? (Feel free to interpret “this world” and “the next” in any way you wish!
So there you have it, 25 ideas – I’m not taking votes on whether they are good, bad, or indifferent they are simply here for your delectation. If they spark a different idea, cool! If a viable story comes from any of these ideas, I ask that you include my name in some form (forward, backward, first name, middle name, curse of power, name of a cow or pet rat, whatever) – oh, and let me know about it, too; I’d sort of like to keep track of what grows from these seeds.
*(Quoted from http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-87128337.html)
All quotes above are from THE EPIDEMIC: A Global History of AIDS © 2006 Jonathan Engle. The following pages of the Uncorrected Proof are referenced:
#1, #2 – p 1; #3, #4 – p 2; #5 – p 6; #6 – p 9; #7 – p 11; #8 – p 18; #9 – p 20; #10 – p 23; #11 – p 35; #12, #13 – p 36; #14 – p 39; #15 – p 40; #16 – p 45; #17 – p 47; #18 – p 48; #19 – p 49; #20 – p 50; #21 – p 51; #22, #23 – p 52; #24 – p 55; #25 – p 63
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