by AHWA
The spaceward-flown horizon infinite ...
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The Last Oblivion, also by Smith from the same publisher (2003), predates the complete poems as a handy travel edition.
Another landmark collection, The Atlantis Fragments of Donald Sidney-Fryer (2008), brings the entire Atlantean poems, sonnets and chronicles of the master poet to bear. The gorgeous intricacy and verve of delectation and poetic voice from this reincarnate master salty from waves of the great sunken city is a treasure-chest of joy!
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P’rea Press (www.preapress.com)
Australian publisher P’rea Press publishes weird and fantastic poetry and non-fiction. P’rea published Spores from Sharnoth and Other Madnesses by Leigh Blackmore (2008, 2010); Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry by international Lovecraftian scholar and author S.T. Joshi (2008); Savage Menace and Other Poems by vintage Lovecraftian poet Richard L. Tierney (2010); and The Land of Bad Dreams by Kyla Lee Ward (2011), the latter containing fifteen of her own illustrations to go with the spooky performance-oriented fare.
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PS Publishing/Stanza Press
(http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/)
Still in Australia, Helen Patrice found her publishing way to England with A Woman of Mars (2011), a thrilling pioneer poetry throwback to the old science fiction days of Mars. Time replenishes loss. The great science fiction poet and Martian chronicler, the late Ray Bradbury, commented:
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Helen Patrice’s poems are little love letters not only to the Red Planet but also to the sense of alien wonder that is so often missing from imaginative fiction and poetry. Bravo to her! And Bravo to Stanza Press for providing a platform for her work!
Facts, Fiction & Fevers
Gary Kemble
Captain Trips. Rage. Trixie. Motaba. MEV-1. T-Virus. Writers love wiping out humanity with their evil diseases. But what’s the truth behind the fiction?
A virus that turns people bat-shit crazy is a popular horror trope. George A. Romero gave us ‘Trixie’ in The Crazies (1973), and Danny Boyle put a Gen X spin on it with the Rage virus in 28 Days Later (2002). In both cases, the virus makes people want to rip the living shit out of each other. Well, we’ve already got road rage, shopping rage, phone rage—shouldn’t take much of a bug to push us over the edge, right?
Virologist Ian York says encephalitis that affects the limbic system can cause aggressive behaviour. Citing medical journals he says symptoms can include “persistent personality alterations, characterised by sexually dissolute behaviour”, “progressive changes in behaviour … including marked aggression”, “violent behaviour and confusion”, and “language difficulties, marked memory deficits, and propensity for physical aggression”. Sounds pretty good so far.
But York goes on to say he’s not aware of any disease that can consistently cause violent behaviour in humans. Rabies is a nice fit—in fact, the behaviour of the infected in 28 Days Later was modelled on some cases of advanced rabies. But depression and drowsiness are more common symptoms of the disease.
Indeed, like many infectious diseases, the effects of rabies are often overshadowed by the fear an outbreak can cause in the community. Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik, writing for Wired magazine, say that in 19th century London and Paris, even though people were more likely to die of cholera or murder, fear of rabies sparked “great dog massacres”. According to Kathleen Kete (The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 1994), people were so terrified of rabies that some, bitten by a healthy dog, came down with ‘hysterical rabies’.
Another take on large-scale crazy comes from Australian author ‘Edwina Grey’ (David Carroll, Kyla Ward and Evan Paliatseas), in the 2006 horror novel Prismatic. They based their Prism outbreak on Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease).
Carroll says it was also based on another prion-based illness—kuru—which was spread among members of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea by cannibalism. Kuru was also known as the ‘laughing sickness’ because of the pathological bursts of laughter it would cause in the infected.
“The religious mania, strange colours and slime mould that accompanied Prism were all our own, however,” Carroll says.
“We also tried to convey a sense of how such a disease might affect society, especially with regard to all the real-life organisations and ordinary people sharing information so fast—unlike in, say, The Stand, with its monolithic government cover-up.”
The Stand? Government cover-ups? Hold that thought.
Zombies. George A Romero spawned a whole sub-genre with Night of the Living Dead (1968). In ‘Night’ it’s never clear what causes the dead to rise, but the fact that it spreads like an epidemic, through biting, points to some sort of disease. Victims rise from the dead, and crave the flesh of the living. There have been countless iterations of this premise—one of the more notable is the Resident Evil series, with its infamous T-virus.
Any truth in it? In an article in Psychology Today, Jeff Wise (author of Extreme Fear: the Science of Your Mind in Danger) talks about the brain parasite toxoplasmosa gondii. This little beastie infects rats but can only breed in the intestinal tract of cats. So how does it get from one to the other?
“When it infects rats, it selectively attacks the animals’ amygdala so that it no longer fears one of its main predators, the cat,” Wise writes. “In fact, it is actually attracted to the scent of cat urine. Fascinatingly, its fear system seems to be otherwise unaffected: it still dreads open spaces, and it can learn to avoid electric shocks. The only fear that is cancelled out is the one that’s most likely to cause the rat to be eaten by the parasite’s favourite host. And so the life cycle continues.”
According to Wise, toxoplasmosa gondii can also affect human behaviour.
“Those infected are more likely to suffer from schizophrenia and neuroticism and to engage in dangerous risk-taking.”
He cites a study of Czech army conscripts that found those infected by toxoplasma are six times more likely to be involved in a car crash.
Talk of the zombie apocalypse has become so rife that the US Center for Disease Control had to come out on the record to allay fears that a spate of cannibalistic attacks in the US were not the result of undead activity.
“CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” CDC spokesman David Daigle told the Huffington Post.
Riffing off SARS and bird flu, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) tells the story of humanity’s race for survival against the fictional MEV-1. The reason it’s so scary? It pushes home the point that in this world of frequent flyer points, exotic diseases from the world’s ‘hot zones’ are never far away.
Screenwriter Scott Z Burns told io9.com he spent a lot of time at the CDC in Atlanta, and came away with much respect for scientists and epidemiologists who worked there, as well as a well-placed fear of the ‘Ro’ –the equation that works out the rate of transmission.
“It doesn’t take much, if you think about a certain disease that may have an incubation period of three or four days with people that are transmissible even if they’re not symptomatic,” he says.
“Then you get from Patient Zero to a billion in 30 steps. That whole math equation of squaring things.
“That, to me, is so terrifying: that in 120 days, you could go from zero people to a billion people on the planet [who are] sick.”
Again, while MEV-1 was certainly a deadly and terrifying disease, the effects of the disease were compounded by fear. Garbage was left on the streets to rot, supermarkets were torn apart by panic-buyers, pharmacies were looted by people looking for a ‘miracle cure’ touted on the internet, troops were deployed.
Stephen King’s The Stand (1978, republished 1990) ups the ante, with his Captain
Trips/Superflu killing off 99.4 per cent of the world’s population, and throwing in some religious mania to boot. The survivors are drawn together into two groups: the goodies to Mother Abagail in Boulder, Colorado, the baddies to Randall Flagg (aka the Walkin’ Dude) in Las Vegas. Of course, they end up fighting.
The inspiration for The Stand came from George R Stewarts’s post-apocalyptic Earth Abides (1949) and a 60 Minutes episode about the Dugway sheep incident, in which 6,000 sheep died after an apparent chemical or biological weapons release from a nearby US testing ground.
And so in The Stand, Captain Trips isn’t the result of nature throwing a wobbly, it is the result of a secret military project—Project Blue. The genie escapes from its bottle.
Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone tells the true story of an outbreak of Ebola among monkeys in a research facility at Reston, just outside of Washington DC in 1998. One of the most deadly forms of the virus, Ebola Zaire, has one of the highest case-fatality rates of any human pathogenic virus—up to 90 per cent.
The threadlike filovirus is named after the Ebola River in Zaire, where it was first discovered in 1976. Since then, it has struck 17 times. Mostly in Africa, but once in the Porton Down research facility in the UK, and twice in Russian labs. The most recent outbreak was in Uganda, killing 13 people. It jumps into human populations via contact with infected animals, and is then spread by infected bodily fluids and the use of contaminated medical equipment.
According to Preston, Zaire is so deadly—and terrifying—because it attacks just about every organ and tissue in the human body. Blood clots build up all over the body, causing dead spots in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue and skin. Every opening in the body, no matter how small, bleeds. The surface of the tongue sloughs off. The heart decomposes, pumping blood into the chest cavity. Eyeballs can fill with blood. The liver bulges, turns yellow and cracks in two. Kidneys fill with junk and stop working. Intestines fill with infected blood. Testicles bloat and turn black and blue. The brain is attacked too, leading to epileptic fits and convulsions, often resulting in the room where the patient is being treated becoming soaked in contaminated blood. When the victim finally dies, their body, packed with virus ‘bricks’, rapidly decomposes.
While the strain of Ebola in the Reston outbreak was only fatal to monkeys, and was eventually contained, it displayed a disturbing trait not found in other variants—it could be spread through the air.
Preston quotes Major General Philip Russell MD, Commander of the US Army Medical Research and Development Command, on the implications.
“Imagine a virus with the infectiousness of influenza and the mortality rate of the black plague in the Middle Ages—that’s what we’re talking about.”
Reviewing The Hot Zone in 2008, Amy Jost points out that Preston fails to note that since Ebola was officially identified in 1976, it has claimed the lives of fewer than 800 people, compared to 627,000 for rabies and 1.25 million for AIDS in the same time period.
But the ability of viruses to mutate is something that Preston touches on, and is the basis for Contagion and Outbreak (1995), in which a US town falls prey to an airborne version of Ebola.
Bird flu (Influenza A virus subtype H5N1) is another real-world disease brewing in animals, just waiting for its chance to mutate into something capable of human-to-human transmission. The World Health Organisation says that since 2003 there have been a total of 566 confirmed human cases, resulting in 332 deaths.
As it currently stands, the disease is mostly caught through direct contact with an infected bird. But in 2011 Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands demonstrated how a highly contagious strain of H5N1 could be created, by introducing five mutations into the H5N1 genome.
Fouchier described the result as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make”.
Paul Keim, chairman of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), agreed.
“I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one. I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”
There was a lot of debate about whether or not the research should be made public, based on fears it would fall into the wrong hands.
Writing in American Scientist in 2003, leading avian flu expert Robert G Webster published an article titled ‘The world is teetering on the edge of a pandemic that could kill a large fraction of the human population’. Since then billions of dollars have been invested in bird flu research, with limited success.
But while billions have been spent fighting disease, how much is being fed into efforts to create unstoppable bugs? David E Hoffman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dead Hand (2009) chronicles the final stages of the Cold War, as Reagan and Gorbachev walked the tightrope. Much has been said about the nuclear threat, but the Soviet Union was also heavily engaged in the production of biological and chemical weapons.
The US offensive germ warfare program, set up after World War II, was mothballed by then-President Richard Nixon in 1969. Three years later both the US and the Soviet Union signed a treaty forbidding the development and production of germs for warfare. But the Soviets didn’t stop work, they just took the effort underground.
A number of codenamed projects were set up, disguised as civilian work: Project Factor looked at taking existing germs and making them more deadly; Project Bonfire aimed to create antibiotic-resistant germs; Project Flute looked into mind-altering compounds; Project Ferment targeted genetic engineering; Project Foliant focussed on chemical weapons; Project Ecology aimed at creating germs that would wipe out crops and livestock.
At its peak, the clandestine program was spread over 52 sites and involved more than 50,000 people. The Soviet Union weaponised and stockpiled a number of agents, including anthrax, plague, Marburg (a relative to Ebola), botulism and smallpox. Smallpox, a hideous, highly infectious disease, which causes agonising pus-filled boils to pop up all over the body, was eradicated by the World Health Organisation in 1979. According to Weapons of Tomorrow (1983), at the height of the Cold War annualised production capacity for weaponised smallpox, rabies, and typhus was 90 to 100 tons.
Gorbachev, and later Boris Yeltsin, worked to improve relations with the West and lift the veil of secrecy. In the 1990s Yeltsin finally came clean on the 1979 Sverdlovsk biological weapons accident, in which weaponised anthrax killed at least 64 people. Until then, the party line was that the deaths were caused by a natural outbreak among the region’s livestock. But Hoffman says Russia’s desire to be more open about its chemical and biological weapons program died with the election in the late 1990s of Vladimir Putin, who shut down cooperation with the West.
“To this day, it is unknown how far the Soviet Union went in creating warheads and bombs from the bacteria and viruses that were developed at Obelensk and Vector. Did the Soviet scientists produce a super-plague resistant to antibiotics? Did they create a cruise missile capable of disseminating anthrax bacteria spores? Or warheads for an intercontinental ballistic missile to carry smallpox?”
Russia says it has no offensive biological weapons program, which is why it says it has shut down cooperation with the West. Hoffman asks, if Russia truly has nothing to hide, then what is behind the doors of the string of anti-plague institutes that remain closed to the West.
“And most importantly, what has become of the scientists with know-how to create pathogens that can be carried in a shirt pocket?” Hoffman writes. “What are they working on today?”
The US Department of Defence suspects more than 10 countries of continuing biological warfare programs, including Russia, Israel, China, Iran, Syria and North Korea.
Between rogue states and terrorists, the bugs crawling out of the jungle, and the ones scientists are cooking up in the lab, it looks as though writers have enough fodder for decades to come … provided we live that lon
g.
Further Reading/Viewing
The Stand by Stephen King
The Grinding House by Kaaron Warren
Walking the Tree by Kaaron Warren
Nothing But Flowers ed. Jodi Cleghorn
Grant’s Pass ed. Jennifer Brozek and Amanda Pillar
28 Days Later
The Crazies
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston
The Dead Hand by David E Hoffman
Prismatic by Edwina Grey
‘Seeds’, by Mark Farrugia (Midnight Echo Issue 6)
The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman
Y-The Last Man by Brian K Vaughan
Jar Baby
Michelle Jager
I don’t want to go but they make me, Dad and him. We all go together, the three of us: happy families. Dad drives and Jake sits in the front. Side by side. This is the only time they’ve ever agreed on something.
I sit in the back and stare out the window. I look at the sky and it’s weird but I expected on a day like today that it would either be a tumble of dark clouds, water flooding down and making everything miserable, or it would be clear and bright, like that song by Wendy Matthews. But it’s neither. It’s a nothing sky: muted colours and sad wisps of cloud.
I turn away and start picking at one of my cuticles. I pick and pick till it’s red and ugly and weeping.
There aren’t any people with signs and angry faces when we pull up, not like you see in the movies or on TV. I’m glad for that. I don’t really want someone screaming at me that I’m going to hell when it’s not really my choice. Instead it all seems very ordinary. A bit like pulling up to a library: quiet, a few cars in the car park, people coming in and out of the building not making a fuss, just keeping to themselves.
