Hi, Diane. Thanks for having me over on the release day for my book. It's about a disease-free society, and I'd like to share with your readers a post about what that might look like in reality.
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My book, Black & White, looks at a society in which all disease has been eradicated. Of course, the caveat to this is that all dirt and illness has been transferred to a neighbouring country, whose residents exist in a primitive state with none of the refined privileges enjoyed by the citizens of Harmonia. But let’s pull it back for a minute and imagine a world in which all disease really had been eliminated. What would that look like and is it really something we would want?
Well, on the surface this looks like a no-brainer. Of course we’d love to banish cancer, dementia, AIDS and all the other pernicious conditions that steal our loved ones from us. On the other hand, there’s something to the idea that we need to get a little bit ill to stay healthy.
What? Well, we’ve all heard that we shouldn’t bombard our children with medications for a common cold every time they get a bit of a sniffle. It stops them from building up an immune system that would help them deal with anything more serious. OK, so those more serious things may have been eliminated, but imagine if some hitherto unknown, devastating disease was unleashed – perhaps as a weapon of war, developed and stockpiled by an unscrupulous government, or even carried here on a meteorite from outer space. We’d be utterly defenceless and the population would be decimated.
There’s also the question of the social impact and the resources available to go around. People are already living longer, and in our ideal world, everyone would live to a ripe old age, usually into their nineties or over a hundred. How to keep these old timers sustained without draining the Earth’s resources?
Here’s where things could get interesting. With the entire medical profession becoming something of a redundancy, those who previously worked in healthcare could channel their energies into other areas of science, and we could see sweeping changes and innovations brought by the availability of so much manpower. In Harmonia, all food is artificially produced and dispensed at the touch of a button. That means we wouldn’t be worrying about resources, but on the other hand the entire service sector – grocers, restaurants – would find itself out of business.
Of course, there are other types of resources to worry about as well, including fuel. It’s likely we would become entirely reliant on sustainable forms of energy, or we could see a return to smaller families of just one or two children. In Harmonia, the government has officially sanctioned only one child per family. It would be impossible to have more – the sexual act has been erased from our biology and this one government-approved child is created in a lab. Probably not an outcome anyone wants to see. It was claimed that this would make things fairer by discouraging competitiveness at an early age, but actually caused many of these children to become overly selfish and entitled.
So there’s lots of possibilities and outcomes to think about here, not all of them entirely positive. What about you? Would you want a world that was completely free of germs and disease?
Title: Black & White
Author: Nick Wilford
Genre: YA dystopian
Release date: 18th September 2017
Publisher: Superstar Peanut Publishing
Blurb:
What is the price paid for the creation of a perfect society?
In Whitopolis, a gleamingly white city of the future where illness has been eradicated, shock waves run through the populace when a bedraggled, dirt-stricken boy materialises in the main street. Led by government propaganda, most citizens shun him as a demon, except for Wellesbury Noon – a high school student the same age as the boy.
Upon befriending the boy, Wellesbury feels a connection that he can’t explain – as well as discovering that his new friend comes from a land that is stricken by disease and only has two weeks to live. Why do he and a girl named Ezmerelda Dontible appear to be the only ones who want to help?
As they dig deeper, everything they know is turned on its head – and a race to save one boy becomes a struggle to redeem humanity.
In Whitopolis, a gleamingly white city of the future where illness has been eradicated, shock waves run through the populace when a bedraggled, dirt-stricken boy materialises in the main street. Led by government propaganda, most citizens shun him as a demon, except for Wellesbury Noon – a high school student the same age as the boy.
Upon befriending the boy, Wellesbury feels a connection that he can’t explain – as well as discovering that his new friend comes from a land that is stricken by disease and only has two weeks to live. Why do he and a girl named Ezmerelda Dontible appear to be the only ones who want to help?
As they dig deeper, everything they know is turned on its head – and a race to save one boy becomes a struggle to redeem humanity.
Purchase Links:
Meet the author:
I’d like to mention two other giveaways:
The Kindle Book Review Meet & Greet, featuring Dragon of the Stars by Alex J. Cavanaugh. Prizes include a Kindle Fire.
Tweet:
Dragon of the Stars by @alexjcavanaugh featured in @Kindlbookreview’s massive #giveaway https://www.thekindlebookreview.net/september-meet-greet/ Win a Kindle Fire
