By NORMAN SPINRAD (Bantam Spectra; 1988/95)
An admirably concentrated novella from Norman Spinrad, who usually writes vastly overlong books. The reason for the compactness of JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS is because, as Spinrad claims in a nonfiction afterward, it was apparently a treatment (written to interest publishers in the forthcoming novel) that was never fleshed out because “expanding it to twice its size would, at least in the author’s estimation, add little more than hot air.”
The setting is a dystopia in which a deadly plague has decimated the United States. The disease, of course, is HIV/AIDS, although it’s never referred to by name, as was requested by the author’s agent. Not that the concession mattered, as upon its late 1980s completion the book was roundly rejected by publishers as being too incendiary (with its initial publication in the 1988 SF anthology FULL SPECTRUM).
As of 1995, JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS has been available in a standalone edition, allowing us a full assessment of its qualities. It showcases Spinrad, one of the sci fi genre’s most irrepressible troublemakers, at his most outrageous, relating the debauched exploits of four people stuck in the “Plague Years,” each of whom relate their exploits in first person form.
Included are an infected punk who deliberately spreads his seed out of pure spite and a similarly afflicted young woman who takes to banging other infected people in the hope of creating a benign viral strain. There’s also an ultra-religious presidential candidate who just happens to be a repressed homosexual and a scientist who manages to find a cure for the plague; his efforts at distributing the antidote are stymied, so he decides to infect himself and embark on an all-out bang-a-thon, happily enlisting his own son in the debauchery.
These characters all come together in a rather hoary climax that ties everything up a bit too neatly. Furthermore, I’m not sure this book’s nightmarish vision is all that prophetic (as Spinrad, based on what he writes in his afterward, seems to believe), but much of it is disturbingly convincing. I can fully believe that a cure for HIV would be suppressed, as it is here, by greedy corporate interests, and that a senator would attempt to deny his gayness via a desperate flight into religious fanaticism.