"Norman Spinrad - Journals of the Plague Years 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS
By Norman Spinrad
Copyright 1988

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In many ways Norman Spinrad's "Journals of the Plague Years" is the most
frightening story in this collection-thanks to our public health officials'
neglect of the most dangerous disease since the Bubonic Plague. At least the
medieval city fathers faced with the Black Death had the excuse of ignorance of
disease and germ theory. What excuse do our public safety officials have? No
excuses really, just fear of offending political voting blocs, which keep them
from exercising even the most trivial duties of their office such as tracking
secondary contacts. God forbid they carry out their office; the possibility of
quarantine sets them quivering under their desks.
Thus, here we stand with our collective heads in the sand while this
terrible pestilence has time to incubate and mutate into perhaps more virulent
forms-ones that could possibly be carried by mosquitoes or other insects, or
even contaminate the air we breathe. That's unlikely, but it's not impossible;
no more unlikely than other disasters we do prepare for.
Herewith the new Journals of the Plague Years . . .

________________________________

Introduction

It was the worst of times, and it was the saddest of times, so what we
must remember if we are to keep our perspective as we read these journals of the
Plague Years is that the people who wrote them, indeed the entire population of
what was then the United States of America and most of the world, were, by our
standards, all quite mad.
The Plague virus, apparently originating somewhere in Africa, had spread
first to male homosexuals and intravenous drug users. Inevitably it moved via
bisexual contact into the population at large. A vaccine was developed and for
a moment the Plague seemed defeated. But the organism mutated under this
evolutionary pressure and a new strain swept the world. A new vaccine was
developed, but the virus mutated again. Eventually the succession of vaccines
selected for mutability itself, and the Plague virus proliferated into dozens of
sins.
Palliative treatments were developed--victims might survive for a decade
or more--but there was no cure, and no vaccine that offered protection for long.
For twenty years, sex and death were inextricably entwined. For twenty
years, men and women were constrained to deny themselves the ordinary pleasures
of straightforward, unencumbered sex, or to succumb to the natural desires of
the flesh and pay the awful price. For twenty years, the species faced its own
extinction. For twenty years, Africa and most of Asia and Latin America were
quarantined by the armed forces of America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet
Union. For twenty years, the people of the world stewed in their own frustrated
sexual juices.
Small wonder then that the Plague Years were years of madness. Small