Title:: [[How High We Go In the Dark]] Authors:: [[Sequoia Nagamatsu]] Tags:: #fiction #plague #scifi Read:: [[2023-01-14]] ## Editions - Edition:: William Morrow, First Edition, 2022 - Original Copyright:: 2022 - Pages:: 292 ## Annotations # How High We Go in the Dark is a novel about a plague and the multi-generational social, economic, scientific, and cultural effects it has on the world. Its release in early 2022 could lead you to mistakenly read this as a response to our Covid pandemic, but in fact, [@sequoia.n](https://www.instagram.com/sequoia.n/) started working on it in 2011. The plague in HHWGITD is less apocalyptic than the one in Station 11 (which I think is lazily cited as a similar novel). There are enough people remaining in Nagamatsu’s world that they have to find ways to respond to the plague while going on with their lives.  These responses are often incredibly dark and morbid and borderline absurd, but, at least to me, in the context of our own absurdist responses to Covid, not that fantastical. Our response has been dark and morbid, too, and the situations Nagamatsu envisions feel less far-fetched than they would without the context of that response.  The prescience of HHWGITD is the mix of darkness, morbidity, and absurdity in how we respond to a pandemic. In the novel, that response is grounded in empathy for victims and survivors. What Nagamatsu could not predict is that the darkness of a real-world response would be grounded in an absence of such empathy.