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A review by twilliamson
Journals of the Plague Years by Norman Spinrad
3.0
Originally published in 1988, Norman Spinrad's Journals of the Plague Years is a political satire examining the AIDS crisis that took the world by storm in the 1980s. Like most speculative fiction, Spinrad works to take a novel idea--in this case, the global threat of an unchecked sexually transmitted virus--to its most extreme cases, and thus tries to hold a mirror up to our own expectations and prejudices surrounding how we feel about the central issue.
For the most part, Spinrad's criticisms of the American response to AIDS are pretty straightforward. He takes special aim at the private industry of medicine, attacking its profit-seeking habits in disseminating information about treatment and its efforts to find a cure, but he also levels his attention pretty squarely at Christian radicalism as it pertains to its continuous attack on homosexual communities or on notions of "promiscuous" sex. Taken to its extreme, the novel often feels like a parody of the very idea of American life according to Christian conservatism: his novel is a wasteland of sexual fever, where everyone (and I mean everyone) seems almost entirely governed by their sexual impulses. The book is particularly sexually charged, no doubt aiming to transgress against conservative social decency as a means of heightening its attack on those radical ideas about human intimacy.
The whole of the novel definitely feels like it is born of a generation that inspired the New Wave of science fiction in the '60s and '70s. Prominent are the ideas of "free love" that persevered through the '60s and '70s, and Spinrad knowingly incorporates various symbols of these movements throughout the story. His language, too, is full of New Wave sci-fi slang, so much that the book almost feels out of place except for its subject matter.
Despite how daring Spinrad's book may have been in its time, its politics today seem a little more muddled than it likely did over thirty years ago. The sexual violence and its poor treatment of its female character has aged exceedingly poorly, and while his criticisms may be just as valuable now as before, it's hard to tell where the satire begins and ends for the novel. I would much prefer to give Spinrad the benefit of the doubt, considering that I was never part of his political movement at the time he was writing, and so may be ignorant of all that he was trying to criticize through his work. Certainly, his satire may be more sufficiently layered than I'm prepared to interpret.
Nevertheless, the book remains one I enjoyed but am not sure I would ever recommend to anyone not already interested in it. There's a very good conversation to be had surrounding it, but it may not be suitable for every taste.
For the most part, Spinrad's criticisms of the American response to AIDS are pretty straightforward. He takes special aim at the private industry of medicine, attacking its profit-seeking habits in disseminating information about treatment and its efforts to find a cure, but he also levels his attention pretty squarely at Christian radicalism as it pertains to its continuous attack on homosexual communities or on notions of "promiscuous" sex. Taken to its extreme, the novel often feels like a parody of the very idea of American life according to Christian conservatism: his novel is a wasteland of sexual fever, where everyone (and I mean everyone) seems almost entirely governed by their sexual impulses. The book is particularly sexually charged, no doubt aiming to transgress against conservative social decency as a means of heightening its attack on those radical ideas about human intimacy.
The whole of the novel definitely feels like it is born of a generation that inspired the New Wave of science fiction in the '60s and '70s. Prominent are the ideas of "free love" that persevered through the '60s and '70s, and Spinrad knowingly incorporates various symbols of these movements throughout the story. His language, too, is full of New Wave sci-fi slang, so much that the book almost feels out of place except for its subject matter.
Despite how daring Spinrad's book may have been in its time, its politics today seem a little more muddled than it likely did over thirty years ago. The sexual violence and its poor treatment of its female character has aged exceedingly poorly, and while his criticisms may be just as valuable now as before, it's hard to tell where the satire begins and ends for the novel. I would much prefer to give Spinrad the benefit of the doubt, considering that I was never part of his political movement at the time he was writing, and so may be ignorant of all that he was trying to criticize through his work. Certainly, his satire may be more sufficiently layered than I'm prepared to interpret.
Nevertheless, the book remains one I enjoyed but am not sure I would ever recommend to anyone not already interested in it. There's a very good conversation to be had surrounding it, but it may not be suitable for every taste.