For the past five years, Lauren Beukes has been working on a book set in the aftermath of a global epidemic. Its release couldn’t have been more timely
You know that thing that happens when you learn a new word? Suddenly it’s ubiquitous — you come across it in newspapers, online, in the novel you’re reading; you hear it on the radio, a character in a TV series uses it, a friend casually drops it into conversion. And you know that all these media and people have been using this word all the time; you must have heard it before, but somehow your mind glossed over it. .
The setting is a couple of years into the aftermath of the virus and although, in some ways, the world has been turned upside down; in others, the power structures are still in place, with a few tweaks. Under the Reprohibition Act, no one is allowed to get pregnant until a cure has been found for the virus, refracting the ongoing fight for reproductive rights .
She talks about a fancon session with a writer who says he is always very careful to make his female characters the smartest people in the room. “I’m like, why?” she says. “Where are the women bad guys? Where are the incompetents? Where are the evil bosses like behind it? That’s a different kind of sexism.”
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