Crossing the Midday Gate — Aliette de Bodard

You can read this at Lightspeed.

Looking at the BBC news before i wrote this, the current discussion concerning our real-world plague of Covid-19 is how we get out this quarantined, house-arrested mess that we’re currently stuck in: specifically, what is the UK government’s lock-down exit strategy.

Of course, in times like this, there are those who bang on and on about vaccines, like, if only we could have a vaccine tomorrow then we could all go out to play again and everyone would live happily ever after: yeah, right!

Crossing the Midday Gate is a story that looks back at the scientists who developed the vaccine for our in-story plague, Blue Lily, and what can go wrong if we aren’t careful.   I think this book should be essential reading for everyone at the moment.

So what we have is a scientist who develops a viable vaccine to Blue Lily, but the manufacturing process simply cannot be made to a scale that can produce enough vaccine, fast enough, without allowing billions to die.   Not to be outdone, another scientist comes up with a method that can scale up the production, albeit, reducing the efficacy of the vaccine.

It was decided that it was better to have a vaccine for everyone, albeit at a reduced efficacy, than it was to have a much more efficacious vaccine for the few.

This new method of producing the vaccine was then rushed through, without proper testing, and a vaccination program began: many subsequently died because the new method of production was fundamentally flawed.

And this is where we very much are with Covid-19 at the moment: too many people, including governments, screaming for a vaccine, or cure, will happily encourage Big Pharma to rush through yet another product that will destroy lives.

Remember, history is already littered with the failures of Big Pharma: the horrendous side effects that have ruined, and continue to ruin, so many people’s lives; not to mention the countless deaths caused by the addictive poisons that Big Pharma rushes to market with bogus, corrupt studies purely for the profits of its shareholders.

So yeah, Crossing the Midday Gate is about this very thing, and also how governments — who are more than happy to be the cheer leaders, stirring up the masses’ clamour for the scientists to take these short cuts — will soon wash their own hands of blame when it all goes wrong and will always find a suitable scape goat amongst the scientific community to throw to the wolves.

Coming soon to a world near you!

You’ve been warned!

Next up: A Salvaging of Ghosts.

Aliette’s Page

#scifi #aliettedebodard