Last month, a post by Brit Mandelo over at Tor.com about Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”, got me thinking about disease narratives in SF.

SF tends to use the Black Death as its disease paradigm: a catastrophic, indiscriminate pandemic that leaves an irrevocably altered society behind. One of SF’s master themes being transformation of humanity/society/the world. Therefore we get disease scenarios which, though they may range all the way from the apocalyptic to the evolutionary (sometimes mixing the two), have in common that society is destroyed or transformed and no individual can escape the effects.

Conversely, Philip Alcebe, in “Dread: How fear and fantasy have fueled epidemics from the black death to the avian flu” [book, author interview], writes about how narratives around disease can be constructed so as to reinforce the social order and extant power relations. Disease (especially infectious disease) feeds into fears and beliefs about socially disruptive elements, historically the poor, women, immigrants and strangers, and other “deviants”. Frequently those groups were blamed for carrying and spreading disease, and fear of infection was used to justify social control—everything from enclosure to expulsion to extermination—in the service of the threatened status quo. I’ve been trying to think of any works of SF where that interplay between disease and social control is explored, and haven’t come up with anything—and if half a dozen people leap up to hand me exceptions, I’ll be delighted.

“Angels in America” does indicate one advantage that gay men with AIDS had over other stigmatized groups (for instance, the nineteenth century urban poor dying of cholera, typhus, diphtheria, and all the other epidemic diseases): They did not endure the double silencing of illness and poverty/social deprivation/illiteracy. Despite the immense individual and collective suffering from the disease, some had the education and standing in the creative community to contest control of the narrative.