Y’all! How have you been? I’ve been off gallivanting. I meant to take a bunch of fabulous pictures to show you, dutifully packed my camera, then … never used it once. Um, how about we say I was busy doing top secret spy stuff? Sounds plausible, yes?
Anyway, while I was out being photographically negligent, I was also reading The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston in keeping with the spirit of Halloween. It’s about smallpox with a side of anthrax, not the supernatural kind of demons but I think perhaps infectious diseases get some bonus marks on the scary front on account of being indisputably real.
If I have occasion to think of smallpox, I generally think of it as an old-timey thing like slide rules or ladies’ evening gloves. I seem to recall a couple of conversations where I brought it up a a hazard of time travel since we have fuck all immunity nowadays. (Are time travellers ever quarantined? I can’t believe science fiction has overlooked this, but I can’t think of an example offhand.) I hadn’t really thought what a stellar accomplishment eradicating smallpox was but it absolutely is.
Then I had to answer Ebola screening questions to get back into the country. Scary stuff, indeed. (While I’m not personally worried about catching Ebola, it’s worrisome nevertheless.)
Whoa, ARE time travelers ever quarantined? That would be a cool sort of story, right? Does something like that happen in that Connis Willis book The Doomsday Book? I vaguely recall that it does, but I wasn’t in love with the book. An epidemiological time travel story would be very cool.