Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Ling ma - severance
While sharing no relation with the hit Apple+ series, Severance does relate to everyone everywhere working in corporate America.
It's beautiful literary fiction spliced with apocalyptic satire and a Chinese immigrant coming of age semi-memoir from debut novelist Ling Ma. Millennials grew up in a time of super organisms, capitalism run amok where organizations are so big that they can't see you, and unseen, they have no problem crushing you.
The world can fall apart due to an eerily similar epidemic to covid - written 2 years pre-covid - and yet the survivors will keep moving, heads in the sand, going through the same motions until they physically can't anymore.
Shen Fever spreads via fungal spores, is wholly irreversible, and is suspected to be triggered by nostalgia. The less violent walking dead dystopia created in the fallout of those affected is more concerning for how much it resembles the world pre-fever.
People immediately create cult like hierarchies that create the worshipped and worshiper dynamic.
The protagonist Candace Chen thinks that maybe the un-fevered have made it through because they lack strong ties to family. There's less of the past pulling them into the fevered nostalgic state the infected can be seen doing, going through the motions of the most rote and familiar tasks they did before succumbing to the virus.
In the spliced chapters that oscillate between past and present, the dispassionate Candace works her way through an office job overseeing the publication of bibles, mostly produced in her native China. The labor is outsourced from Mexico to China in passages waxing poetic about the dour history of overseas and ever-cheaper labor. Her clients, members of one diocese or another, match her dispassion about production hiccups due to worker health concerns related to what materials are being used to produce their proselytizing bibles.
Less allegory than bleak outlook on how it doesn't take a pandemic to be alienated from life, Ling Ma cuts us deep, severing us from trite ideals about what it means to feel useful and connected to the world.