It's been solicited for October 2023. The gender-segregation angle is new information. TR (talk) 17:00, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
- Yes, it certainly sends the mind to some interesting, if incredibly disturbing, places. Turtle Fan (talk) 17:16, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
- I waited till I got home before writing this, because I didn't want to search for the information I would need on my work computer. But reading the blurb on Amazon got me wondering about any real-world analogs HT might have drawn inspiration from, and one presented itself right away: syphilis, whose first recorded outbreak in Europe dates to 1495. (The conventional wisdom is that it was endemic in North America when Columbus landed and his sailors brought it with them on their return voyage, to which I say, Turnabout is fair play.) While not as terrifying as AIDS, it's sufficiently gruesome that I would expect it to have a chilling effect on people unfamiliar with STDs, if any disease could. And the most liberal estimates of its fatality rate in a society without antibiotics come close to 60%. I wonder how it changed European sexual behavior, if at all. Turtle Fan (talk) 06:38, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
- Harry said in one his comments about this book is that syphilis is also happening on its OTL schedule. I think that provides an indirect answer to your question-the history of syphilis OTL probably provided at least a partial model for this fictional HIV outbreak.
- Hmm, given the state of the art of medical knowledge at the time, two awful STDs emerging simultaneously would surely overwhelm what passed for medical research. I'd think it would be many years before they even realized it was two different diseases. Though of course by the time the story starts, the POD will be centuries in the past. Turtle Fan (talk) 19:53, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
- The thing about STDs is, the human sex drive is pretty irrepressible across any decently large population, so the idea of enforced celibacy to eliminate disease, even one that's certain death, is never going to work.
- While untreated syphillis has a high fatality rate, death is neither as dramatic as it is with AIDS, nor as quick and direct. I'd imagine lots of hot-to-trot youngsters had contempt for the danger because they assumed the lethal consequences would be much delayed, and at that age you really can't wrap your head around more than a few years' worth of future. Like kids who start smoking in their teens because the prospect of a cancer diagnosis in their 60s doesn't seem real to them (and just as ignorant of shorter-term consequences). They might also have felt, not unreasonably, that before they finished the latent phase of the infection their chances of dying from the plague or a famine or a fire or a religious persecution or freezing to death after their homes were torn down in the Thirty Years' War were depressingly high. Turtle Fan (talk) 19:53, 3 March 2023 (UTC)