Author Topic: EP112: The Giving Plague  (Read 51529 times)

eytanz

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Reply #75 on: July 18, 2007, 05:08:51 AM
Really? I must be misremembering, or maybe the New York Blood Center has stricter policies or something - I'm pretty sure they always ask me if I ever had a transfusion. Of course, since I haven't, I always answer no, so it might be that if you answer yes then they ask further questions about how long ago and where which determine whether you actually get to donate.



pralala

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Reply #76 on: July 18, 2007, 02:46:44 PM
I came late to the game and listened to the Giving Plague only last night. I, too, am a fan of Brin, and was totally excited to see a story by him on Escape Pod - of course, I've also loved all the new authors EP has brought me, so keep up the mixing!

I enjoyed Giving Plague on a story level - Sullivan's narration really helped the story along for me, because he made the lead character even more unlikeable (in a good way, if that's possible) than he would have appeared on paper. There's something about hearing a murder being planned out loud that is just more sinister than if you simply read about it.

However, at the end of the story, I did have some problems with the blood to blood thing - basically, how would a mere virus "know" that the blood letting would induce the transfer of the virus from one person to another? In addition, I'm with someome upthread (I'm sorry I forgot your name already - I've only had one cup of coffee today) who mentioned that the story would have made more sense if the virus would have encouraged altruism as a whole with blood donation as a side effect. However, I'm no scientist and dont' claim to be, but my common sense antenae twitched a little at that bit.

Overlooking that, and suspending that small portion of my brain holding up the disbelief sign, I very much enjoyed it.



slic

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Reply #77 on: July 18, 2007, 08:04:12 PM
Quote from: pralala
basically, how would a mere virus "know" that the blood letting would induce the transfer of the virus from one person to another? In addition, I'm with someome upthread (I'm sorry I forgot your name already - I've only had one cup of coffee today) who mentioned that the story would have made more sense if the virus would have encouraged altruism as a whole with blood donation as a side effect. However, I'm no scientist and dont' claim to be, but my common sense antenae twitched a little at that bit.
This is the thing about evolution.  The virus doesn't "know" anything and never will.  It's not sentient, it doesn't really work through any trial and error plan.  It's a simple matter of luck, really.

Every day lots and lots of viruses mutate, those that change something and fail (use ear wax as a vector, for example) die out, ones that luck into something that causes them to propagate better or survive longer spread out more - that's it.

The ALAS virus mutated from some other one and it made people want to donate blood (whatever trigger in the brain that is) and because it mutated and infected someone who lived in a country where that happens and that person was able to donate (e.g wasn't too old or sick, etc). it got passed along - was able to reproduce and so on and so on.

This mutation may have occurred 2000 years ago, but since people didn't exchange blood then, it would have died out.



ajames

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Reply #78 on: July 19, 2007, 12:54:39 PM
I loved the narration and thought the story was great.  But this thread is unbelievable.  I love it.  More threads like this please!

To chime in on one of the points discussed here, I think it is interesting to consider that we don't really know how the virus works.  All we know is what the narrator told us, and what he told us was the supposition of another character formed when there was very little known about the virus.  Initial hypotheses are usually incomplete at best, and sometimes downright wrong.  Perhaps the virus does directly compel most infected people to act altruistically.  Most people, thinking themselves basically good, easily rationalize this change in themselves.  Our narrator, if he was indeed infected, rebels against this compulsion, and only gives in when he can convince himself that it was his idea, and also not because he was a good person.  Here the virus comes into its own, controlling us like puppets on a string. 

I also like the thought that perhaps the altruistic scientist [not nearly as naive as our narrator portrays him to be] purposefully infected our narrator without his knowledge, although that is going very far out on a limb on my part.

I also like that it is equally plausible that the narrator was not infected, as there are certainly many other ways to explain his apparantly altruistic behavior at the end of the story that don't rely upon him being infected.

Lots to think about in this story, and I loved reading everyone's views.



pralala

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Reply #79 on: July 20, 2007, 09:46:37 PM
This is the thing about evolution.  The virus doesn't "know" anything and never will.  It's not sentient, it doesn't really work through any trial and error plan.  It's a simple matter of luck, really.

Every day lots and lots of viruses mutate, those that change something and fail (use ear wax as a vector, for example) die out, ones that luck into something that causes them to propagate better or survive longer spread out more - that's it.

That makes much more sense (also: I don't ever want to know how ear wax would transmit anything. Yik!). I think that since the narrator was talking about ALAS as almost having sentient qualities, it got me thinking as the virus in the mode of having sentient qualities.



Russell Nash

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Reply #80 on: July 21, 2007, 08:54:21 AM
This is the thing about evolution.  The virus doesn't "know" anything and never will.  It's not sentient, it doesn't really work through any trial and error plan.  It's a simple matter of luck, really.

Every day lots and lots of viruses mutate, those that change something and fail (use ear wax as a vector, for example) die out, ones that luck into something that causes them to propagate better or survive longer spread out more - that's it.

That makes much more sense (also: I don't ever want to know how ear wax would transmit anything. Yik!). I think that since the narrator was talking about ALAS as almost having sentient qualities, it got me thinking as the virus in the mode of having sentient qualities.

The narrator gave it sentient qualities the same way you give sentient qualities to plumbing when you're having trouble fixing a pipe.  "Come on you bastard fit.  You just don't want to help me…"  You just can't think of your adversary as unsentient(sp?).



chornbe

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Reply #81 on: July 24, 2007, 02:30:20 AM
That was a good one, but the ending... the last few seconds... kinda let me down. Otherwise, very good.

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Listener

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Reply #82 on: July 25, 2007, 12:15:24 PM
My computer crashed the Sunday before this story was released, so I just now finished listening to it.

If this story falls down anywhere (to me, as a lay-reader with only lay knowledge of blood donation and pathology), it's toward the end.  I kept hearing good places where the story should stop, and it kept on going.  Of course, it kept going so we could get to the part where the narrator chooses to be altruistic (a great payoff to his general misanthropy toward altruistic people), but toward the end I kept thinking "oh, come on, MORE?"  (I've made similar mistakes in some of my short-stories.)

The fact that, at heart, the narrator wasn't a good person is what helped make this story work for me.  I find evil people more honest than good ones -- except when they're lying -- because if an evil person is giving you a deathbed confession, and the evil person has admitted to being evil, why lie now?  What would it serve?  I believed the narrator because he admitted, right out, that he was not a nice person and was really only in it for fame.

I had a feeling that ALAS would turn out to be a gateway plague.  Though Brin did not explicitly state it, I think ALAS was an alien lifeform or weapon of some kind, engineered to kill off humanity by bringing it closer together and then mutating.  TARP was from Mars -- but was it left there by the creators of ALAS?  I don't think ALAS was intelligent as we measure intelligence; I think it was programmed.

There's a line in a Star Trek TNG novel where Worf praises the inventor of the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves cities inhabitable.  I'm guessing the creators of ALAS are using it as some sort of similar device/weapon -- they'll send in a crew to get rid of the bodies and then take over our cities and such.  I know the narrator said 15% of the population might survive, but 15% of the population is easily subjugated by a more powerful alien race.

The choice of the narrator as a scientist from Texas is an amusing bit of mental culture clash (can't think of the perfect term here).  I'm not saying people with that particular accent can't be extremely intelligent scientists, but it's not something often addressed in writing.  I think that choice kept the narrator interesting as well, along with his misanthropy.

The reading was good.  I like how Sullivan kept it low-key, even when the narrator or other characters were getting worked up, like all this stuff can happen and he's still not going to lose his mind.  If it fell down anywhere, it was the end, where the narrator asks ALAS, point-blank, if it knew this was happening.  If I had been reading it, I might have interpreted the last sentence ("Did you?") as a simple, resigned statement, infusing it with disappointment and exhaustion.  The fact that the narrator got worked up at the very end, just for that last bit, broke it for me slightly.

Overall, I enjoyed the story.

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eytanz

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Reply #83 on: July 25, 2007, 01:20:03 PM
I had a feeling that ALAS would turn out to be a gateway plague.  Though Brin did not explicitly state it, I think ALAS was an alien lifeform or weapon of some kind, engineered to kill off humanity by bringing it closer together and then mutating.  TARP was from Mars -- but was it left there by the creators of ALAS?  I don't think ALAS was intelligent as we measure intelligence; I think it was programmed.

That's an interestin view, but not really one I think is justified by the story - as far as I can tell, ALAS led to TARP because without ALAS, humanity would still be too embroiled in wars and inefficient uses of resources to ever get to Mars. I can see TARP be a weapon left there in case humans manage to survive, but I can't see how ALAS could be part of it, at least not if the aliens aren't some really cheesy B-movie villians (Though this is by David Brin, who wrote Earth, which has exactly this as a plot, so who knows).

Mostly though, the story (through the mouth of Les) makes a big point of arguing how viruses like ALAS are part of the natural cycle of life on Earth. Having it be some sort of alien virus would undermine much of the narrative and since there's no evidence at all that that is what it is, I personally think it should be taken at face value.



TimWhite

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Reply #84 on: September 06, 2007, 03:44:22 PM
This is in my top 5 of escape pod stories.

Even though the story gets bogged down in typical Brin-esque "Here's some science you should know about" exposition in several spots, I am an absolute sucker for the twisty ending (O. Henry rocks), and this delivered in a very satisfying way.



Peter Tupper

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Reply #85 on: September 09, 2007, 05:03:43 AM
Brilliant.

Although I think there are easier ways to wealth and fame than molecular biology, this story is a profound exploration of the idea that, whatever our ideas about good and evil and how good or bad we want to be, biology trumps all of that. Even a self-conscious villain still believes in free will.



El Barto

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Reply #86 on: September 25, 2009, 10:06:29 PM
I just read this story and loved it.    The other commenters covered most of the reasons but I felt like I owed it to the author and to Steve to drop this quick note and say how much I enjoyed and appreciated the story.   Great concepts, well-executed, nicely unpredictable.   

It was a nice twist on the old literary saw about how if you bring out a gun in the first act of a play it had better go off by the third.   



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Reply #87 on: February 23, 2010, 06:27:01 PM
I find evil people more honest than good ones -- except when they're lying

This line made me LOL.  :)



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Reply #88 on: February 23, 2010, 06:29:46 PM
I didn't get all the way through this one--it was just so exposition heavy!  The blood-donation virus was an interesting concept, but it took forever to get to the point of that.  I listened about halfway through and it was still getting to the description of a blood-donation virus via a very roundabout way as if I hadn't already figured it out more than 10 minutes before that.  I kept waiting for some new information and kept not getting it and eventually just hit the Skip button.