Immunity Index
A Novel
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Sue Burke, author of Semiosis and Interference, gives readers a new near-future, hard sf novel. Immunity Index blends Orphan Black with Contagion in a terrifying outbreak scenario.
Bustle's 40 Best New Books May 2021
Amazon Best of the Month May 2021
In a US facing growing food shortages, stark inequality, and a growing fascist government, three perfectly normal young women are about to find out that they share a great deal in common.
Their creator, the gifted geneticist Peng, made them that way—before such things were outlawed.
Rumors of a virus make their way through an unprotected population on the verge of rebellion, only to have it turn deadly.
As the women fight to stay alive and help, Peng races to find a cure—and the cover up behind the virus.
Other Books by Sue Burke
Semiosis duology
Semiosis
Interference
Immunity Index
Dual Memory
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Burke (Semiosis) uses a futuristic world to comment on the present in this politically charged dystopian novel. In a near-future America where human clones are stigmatized as second-class citizens and an authoritarian "Prez" titillates his patriot cult with sloganeering straight out of the Big Brother playbook, a nationwide mutiny is brewing. When the government releases a vaccine against the rampaging Sino cold—purportedly to induce herd immunity nationally, but secretly to sicken the mutineers—the narrative refracts the ensuing chaos through the experiences of four characters: Avril, Irene, and Berenike, young Wisconsin women from various walks of life who discover they are clones of one another; and Peng, the scientist who cloned them and who has a hand in the virus's release. Burke endows her characters with distinct personalities and conjures a frighteningly real sense of national destabilization as events spiral out of their control. Though the ending is somewhat anticlimactic, references to coronaviruses and a nation wracked by social unrest are sure to resonate. This hits close to home.
