Immunity Index
{5/5} “She had good roommates — but would they want to live with a dupe? If clones weren’t physically handicapped, they were morally deficient, unnatural, and soulless. It would be like living with a known thief, and if the mutiny changed the law, it wouldn’t change minds about the things that everyone knew.”
Immunity Index by Sue Burke, published in 2021
Avril, Berenike, and Irene have just found out that they’re clones and clones are illegal now. But there’s going to be a big protest, maybe even a mutiny, in a couple of days and hopefully things will change back to the way they used to be. Meanwhile, Peng has been tasked by the government to create a variant of a deadly virus that they can release on purpose — that won’t cause serious symptoms but will stop people from catching the deadly variant.
It’s about people who act reasonably during an emergency, and people who don’t.
Burke starting writing this book before the pandemic. She understood, in a way that most people did not, how likely it was to happen.
Many things have been terrible in real life lately. This book shows how things could be terrible in a slightly different way, and suggests that reasonable people need to work together to make things better.
This is the 3rd novel I’ve read by Burke. I previously reviewed Interference.