Larissa Lai

I decided to live dangerously by reading a novel about a pandemic during a pandemic. I just could not resist the beautiful cover of 'The Tiger Flu' once my copy arrived from the Lighthouse. It's a strange and hallucinatory tale set in apocalyptic was-once-North America during the year 2145. The story follows two women, both genetically engineered somehow, through vividly imagined chaos and disaster. Although the world-building elements came together in an original and fascinating way, some of them reminded me of other fairly esoteric sci-fi such as [b:The Child Garden|258096|The Child Garden|Geoff Ryman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348604189l/258096._SY75_.jpg|200019] and [b:The Book of Joan|30653706|The Book of Joan|Lidia Yuknavitch|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1469810728l/30653706._SY75_.jpg|51198707]. The Tiger Flu itself has just one feature that eerily parallels COVID-19: it is much deadlier to men than women. The novel's strangeness is such that it did not recall me to reality, though. If it had, I would have struggled to submerge myself in it. As it was, I got lost in the dangerous collapsing world of Quarantine Rings, pervasive genetic modification, and satellites with decaying orbits.

'The Tiger Flu' has a very visceral narrative, sometimes to the point of being revolting. The main characters are nearly always hungry, wounded, drugged, or otherwise suffering. Nonetheless they retain an admirable determination to establish what the hell is going on and attain their goals. I particularly liked Kirilow, the older and more focused of the two protagonists. More than the characterisation or madcap plot, it is the distinctive details of world-building that made the novel stand out, most of them concerning embodied technologies. Starfish women who can donate then regrow organs. Others who give birth to puppies, who sew living invisibility cloaks out of cats, and who transform people into fish. Lai's writing makes all this weirdness vivid. There is a poetic quality to it, with much use of assonance and quite lyrical descriptions. An example:

Its structure looks like a stack of vertebrae from some prehistoric gargantua, spine diving deep into the ground. The visible part of the spine leans into the wall of the quarry and seems to merge with it, as though the stone and earth of the wall are all that remains of that gargantua's flesh, older by far than the Caspian Tiger brought back from extinction to make tiger-bone wine.

When it comes to visions of the future, I value atmosphere and texture over plotting and characterisation. 'The Tiger Flu' does all four well, but what it does best is evoke a strong sense of place. That makes it escapist, even though Saltwater City isn't a place anyone would want to escape to.… (more)

I read this as a part of a readathon, so I was able to read the entire thing all the way through in basically one sitting, which is a lovely way to read a book-length poem, especially one like this. These sentences build a propulsive momentum that makes it difficult to pause or stop. They carry an energy that makes it hard to walk away from, but also to simply step back into.

I loved the meld of Greek Gods & Asian cultures -- Asian here as an umbrella rather than a catch-all -- Hong Kong as a collision site for Western/Chinese/Japanese/world influences. I loved Lai's use of the sound of words -- there are haikus between sections but most of the work is more free form -- but peppered with internal rhyme and alliteration, etc.

I bought this basically on impulse because Arsenal Pulp was have a sale and I am so glad I did.… (more)

Lai's world-building and her deployment of magic realism are for the most part effective and engaging; we are left to puzzle out how the future world works, exercising our imaginations in the way that the best SF demands of us. The ways in which the overlords of the future have built out a gamified reality to exploit people was a particularly effective, and disturbing, touch (Elon Musk and Peter Thiel should not read this book in case it gives them ideas they don't already have). Myths of past and present collide in intriguing ways. However, on the narrative level this piece doesn't hang together and in fact is constantly frustrating. I am definitely not someone that has the juvenile expectation that I should like characters in a book. That rarely makes for truth-telling fiction. What I did find frustrating however was watching most of the characters, but particularly the protagonist, making stupid decision after stupid decision after stupid decision. . .for no apparent reason, and in ways that were often at odds with the nature of the character that Lai painstakingly developed. The ending was annoyingly predictable, although I hoped until the last minute that it wasn't where the novel was heading. It is the kind of ending where an author has boxed her characters into a corner, can't figure out how to get them out, so throws in a quasi-mystical conclusion. The only way I was able to rescue a sense of getting something out of the book was to conclude that it is in fact a parable about human stupidity. That in fact we aren't meant to care about anyone here or what they do. Instead, what Lai seems to be doing is writing a novel where the central character is genetics, the power of evolution, and the stubborness of life. People are tangential to life's persistence and its inbuilt need to change and adapt. Seen in that light, Lai's point is depressing, but probably accurate.… (more)