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Jun. 14th, 2018 09:37 amThe Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl by Arthur Allen
I've been reccing this book all over the place. I picked it up from the history of disease section of my library, but it was just as good as a book about the Holocaust and the ethics of collaboration and resistance.
Dr. Rudolf Weigl was a Polish typhus researcher who developed the first useful vaccine against typhus; his student Ludwik Flick, a Polish Jew, is the book's secondary protagonist.
Weigl's vaccine was extraordinarily complicated and labor intensive to produce because of the nature of typhus as a disease. Weigl had to cultivate massive farms of body lice to grow the bacteria used to produce the vaccine, and those lice needed to be fed on human blood from people who already had immunity against the bacteria. And after initial successes with the vaccine in the interwar period, Weigl's vaccine took on increasing importance with the start of World War II, as wars and POW camps are highly efficient creators of typhus epidemics. The Nazis saw Weigl's vaccine as an important strategic resource, and seized control of his laboratory upon their conquest of Poland. Fleck, after some time treating typhus in the Lvov ghetto, was deported to Auschwitz and later transferred to Buchenwald, where he worked in an SS typhus research lab.
The book's story, then, hinges on the effort to carry out meaningful real science in the middle of the farcical, monstrous cruelty of the Nazi occupation. Weigl hired much of Lvov's Polish intelligentsia to serve as louse feeders in his vaccine lab, helping to save dozens or hundreds of important thinkers. The most famous to me was the mathematician Stefan Banach, of Banach-Tarski paradox fame. He also was involved in smuggling some limited amounts of his vaccine to the Lvov ghetto, the Polish partisans, and to other sources of need. And some of his workers may have secretly weakened some of the vaccine sent to Nazi soldiers, though how much of an impact this would have is hard to measure- the vaccine was never perfect, anyway, and was often administered wrong in the confusion of war. At the same time, his vaccine helped the Wehrmacht stay stronger and resist infection as they indiscriminately killed vast numbers of people. After the war, Weigl faced criticism as a collaborator who helped prop up the Nazi war machine. The reality, the multilayered matrix of moral choices balanced between survival and the Hippocratic oath, is a lot harder to judge.
And meanwhile, Fleck spent the war trapped in a variety of hellish fantasylands where the rules of the real world didn't apply. In Buchenwald, he got caught up in an elaborate conspiracy to pretend to make a workable vaccine while actually shipping inert liquid to the Nazi troops, and smuggling the real vaccine to needful populations in the camp. In some senses it was easy, as the cruel Nazi doctors ruling over the whole shitshow were scientific incompetents seeking to use their enslaved Jews for their own personal aggrandizement. In other ways, it was an unimaginably tenuous existence where any day could bring your death for offending the wrong person or simply existing caught between a Nazi and his petty desires.
Provenance by Ann Leckie
This book, set in a different part of the same universe as the Ancillary series, is so much fun, while also being thoughtful and interested in all sorts of questions and culture and society.
It's a bonkers political caper novel with mistaken identities and lies built on top of lies built on top of lies, and the plotting is as carefully crafted and brilliant as we've come to expect from Leckie. There is so much book for your buck here, it's just a profuse amount of stuff crammed into every page. Every single character has provenance issues, as if Leckie was determined to make maximum use of her title.
Like The Orville, and like the Ancillary series, one of the central world-building tricks of Provenance is to imagine some doctrine of liberal idealism becoming a cultural orthodoxy and exploring the consequences. In Provenance, prison has been rejected by Hwae society as cruel and unusual, but stuck with the problem of still needing to remove antisocial elements from society, they develop Compassionate Removal. This involves criminals being declared legally dead and deported to a different planet where they are free to do whatever they want with no prison guards or anything of that sort. Shockingly, this system turns out to have flaws, too. Controls on who gets sent to Compassionate Removal are inadequate to overcome politics and bias, and in spite of the supposed freedom, life in Compassionate Removal is miserably brutal, a constant war for food and water, Lord of the Flies come to life. Leckie ends Provenance with its protagonists committed to waging a political fight to overthrow the system, but... replace it with what? A return to normal prisons, where top down control ensures that at least the prisoners actually get fed? That idea seems unthinkable to the Hwaeans. Rejecting punishment for crime altogether? That seems equally untenable. I like that Ann Leckie offers hard questions and doesn't let you settle for simple answers.
She does a similar game with gender- the Hwaeans have bought into a version of trans* identity as socially normative, with the Hwaeans allowing their children to choose an adult name and gender identity when they attain majority, from three choices: man, woman, or neman, with nemen using Spivak pronouns. And yet this is clearly inadequate: In Taucris we meet a character who delays declaring her gender because she seems to wish to be able to move more fluidly between gender identities than Hwaean society allows, vocally expressing her jealousy upon learning that the Geck can inhabit more than one gender identity in life. I liked, too, that Leckie's worldbuilding accommodated people for whom gender identity mattered more or less, and setting all of these ideas against the complicated denial of gender identity that is the Radchaii way also works really well.
But at its heart, it's a story about the difficulty of becoming an adult. Of struggling to live up to our parents. Of trying to create something of your own that matters. Of staying out of debt and not embarrassing yourself and finding friends you can rely on. Of renegotiating your relationship with your siblings now that you're no longer children. Of trying to make the world a better place, without any blueprint. I need more stories like this one.
I've been reccing this book all over the place. I picked it up from the history of disease section of my library, but it was just as good as a book about the Holocaust and the ethics of collaboration and resistance.
Dr. Rudolf Weigl was a Polish typhus researcher who developed the first useful vaccine against typhus; his student Ludwik Flick, a Polish Jew, is the book's secondary protagonist.
Weigl's vaccine was extraordinarily complicated and labor intensive to produce because of the nature of typhus as a disease. Weigl had to cultivate massive farms of body lice to grow the bacteria used to produce the vaccine, and those lice needed to be fed on human blood from people who already had immunity against the bacteria. And after initial successes with the vaccine in the interwar period, Weigl's vaccine took on increasing importance with the start of World War II, as wars and POW camps are highly efficient creators of typhus epidemics. The Nazis saw Weigl's vaccine as an important strategic resource, and seized control of his laboratory upon their conquest of Poland. Fleck, after some time treating typhus in the Lvov ghetto, was deported to Auschwitz and later transferred to Buchenwald, where he worked in an SS typhus research lab.
The book's story, then, hinges on the effort to carry out meaningful real science in the middle of the farcical, monstrous cruelty of the Nazi occupation. Weigl hired much of Lvov's Polish intelligentsia to serve as louse feeders in his vaccine lab, helping to save dozens or hundreds of important thinkers. The most famous to me was the mathematician Stefan Banach, of Banach-Tarski paradox fame. He also was involved in smuggling some limited amounts of his vaccine to the Lvov ghetto, the Polish partisans, and to other sources of need. And some of his workers may have secretly weakened some of the vaccine sent to Nazi soldiers, though how much of an impact this would have is hard to measure- the vaccine was never perfect, anyway, and was often administered wrong in the confusion of war. At the same time, his vaccine helped the Wehrmacht stay stronger and resist infection as they indiscriminately killed vast numbers of people. After the war, Weigl faced criticism as a collaborator who helped prop up the Nazi war machine. The reality, the multilayered matrix of moral choices balanced between survival and the Hippocratic oath, is a lot harder to judge.
And meanwhile, Fleck spent the war trapped in a variety of hellish fantasylands where the rules of the real world didn't apply. In Buchenwald, he got caught up in an elaborate conspiracy to pretend to make a workable vaccine while actually shipping inert liquid to the Nazi troops, and smuggling the real vaccine to needful populations in the camp. In some senses it was easy, as the cruel Nazi doctors ruling over the whole shitshow were scientific incompetents seeking to use their enslaved Jews for their own personal aggrandizement. In other ways, it was an unimaginably tenuous existence where any day could bring your death for offending the wrong person or simply existing caught between a Nazi and his petty desires.
Provenance by Ann Leckie
This book, set in a different part of the same universe as the Ancillary series, is so much fun, while also being thoughtful and interested in all sorts of questions and culture and society.
It's a bonkers political caper novel with mistaken identities and lies built on top of lies built on top of lies, and the plotting is as carefully crafted and brilliant as we've come to expect from Leckie. There is so much book for your buck here, it's just a profuse amount of stuff crammed into every page. Every single character has provenance issues, as if Leckie was determined to make maximum use of her title.
Like The Orville, and like the Ancillary series, one of the central world-building tricks of Provenance is to imagine some doctrine of liberal idealism becoming a cultural orthodoxy and exploring the consequences. In Provenance, prison has been rejected by Hwae society as cruel and unusual, but stuck with the problem of still needing to remove antisocial elements from society, they develop Compassionate Removal. This involves criminals being declared legally dead and deported to a different planet where they are free to do whatever they want with no prison guards or anything of that sort. Shockingly, this system turns out to have flaws, too. Controls on who gets sent to Compassionate Removal are inadequate to overcome politics and bias, and in spite of the supposed freedom, life in Compassionate Removal is miserably brutal, a constant war for food and water, Lord of the Flies come to life. Leckie ends Provenance with its protagonists committed to waging a political fight to overthrow the system, but... replace it with what? A return to normal prisons, where top down control ensures that at least the prisoners actually get fed? That idea seems unthinkable to the Hwaeans. Rejecting punishment for crime altogether? That seems equally untenable. I like that Ann Leckie offers hard questions and doesn't let you settle for simple answers.
She does a similar game with gender- the Hwaeans have bought into a version of trans* identity as socially normative, with the Hwaeans allowing their children to choose an adult name and gender identity when they attain majority, from three choices: man, woman, or neman, with nemen using Spivak pronouns. And yet this is clearly inadequate: In Taucris we meet a character who delays declaring her gender because she seems to wish to be able to move more fluidly between gender identities than Hwaean society allows, vocally expressing her jealousy upon learning that the Geck can inhabit more than one gender identity in life. I liked, too, that Leckie's worldbuilding accommodated people for whom gender identity mattered more or less, and setting all of these ideas against the complicated denial of gender identity that is the Radchaii way also works really well.
But at its heart, it's a story about the difficulty of becoming an adult. Of struggling to live up to our parents. Of trying to create something of your own that matters. Of staying out of debt and not embarrassing yourself and finding friends you can rely on. Of renegotiating your relationship with your siblings now that you're no longer children. Of trying to make the world a better place, without any blueprint. I need more stories like this one.