Flipping the traditional contamination plot on its head, the book tells a singular, exciting story through graphic novel, prose, visual art and science writing, inviting readers to question if we are all but a contagion.
The book will interweave a science fiction story with scientific essays, prompting the reader to think about questions reflected in the story, enhancing their understanding of the science of the story and priming them to interpret the narrative in specific ways. The structure of the book, the elegant mix of story and pure science is designed to build tension and bounce one element off the other, creating a super-narrative beyond just the fiction. Immersing in the science will allow readers to see the fiction in a deeper way, and the fictional aspects, in turn, will set up expectations to be confirmed or destroyed by the scientific writing. For example, the first essay on epidemiology will largely be focused on disease and will prompt the reader to be thinking negatively about the epidemic just introduced in the first chapter of the narrative. Later we will learn that this epidemic is positive and illustrates emerging scientific paradigms. Similarly, the visuals of epidemic spreading from different scientific models will be presented in the middle of the book in connection with characters whose personalities represent the corresponding behavior, but not until the essay on “beneficial epidemics” will these dynamics be explained.
CHAPTER ONE: We meet the characters and set up the beginning of a mysterious infection, with the first symptoms
The story starts with a descent into Paris while the captions inform us that something is carried on the backs of prevailing wings, something that is about to bring change. After swooping through Paris and down to The Marais neighborhood, we come to a street level view of a tree and an upper-class building…
Epidemiology: A History
Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Brendan Tracey This essay is based on three stories: (i) John Snow and the Cholera outbreak of 1866 in London, (ii) the First World War and the Spanish Flu of 1918, (iii) the relationship of human resistance to Malaria with sickle cell disease. The first sets up the relatively recent creation of epidemiology.…
CHAPTER TWO: Our characters start experiencing each other’s memories and are affected by them in the present
We open this chapter at a party. Teenagers, some of them of the BMX crowd we met before, have broken into an outdoor pool and are drinking alcohol. Marie-Elise is among them. Suddenly, she sees a moment repeat. A déjà vu? Later when she drunkenly walks home with her friends, she tells them about…
The Microbial World In and Around Us
Jessica Green Many people believe that microorganisms, including viruses, bacteria, and microscopic fungi, are dirty and dangerous pollutants to be avoided at all costs. But advances in biotechnology and data science have led scientists to challenge this misperception. Scientists, and also clinicians, now recognize that many of the microorganisms in, on and around us…
CHAPTER THREE: Integrated Interlude
This chapter foreshadows and builds mystery for the later essay on beneficial epidemics: the stories represent aspects of behavior and the artistic interpretation visualizes the results of the actual simulated model.
CHAPTER FOUR: ALOU, the first person short story of an evangeliser
ALOU is a five-year-old child, son of the Senegalese Ambassador to France. He grew up in Paris but in his dreams, he sees images and stories of Dakar, Senegal. He adores going back there and spending time with his traditional grandmother, whose life is vastly different than the Parisian, upper-class lifestyle he experiences through…
CHAPTER FIVE: MARIE-ELISE, the first person short story of a cool kid
MARIE-ELISE (MARLISE) is a fifteen-year-old angry teenager. She was raised mostly by her university prof father, who is often lost in his books and has little tolerance for Marlise’s dramas. Marlise’s mother, Sylvie, left when Marlise was about ten years old. She started a new family and has twin boys by her new husband.…
CHAPTER SIX: EZRA, the first person short story of a snob
EZRA is a twenty-eight-year-old Orthodox Jewish hipster. He lives in our hero building only because of subsidies, which he was lucky enough to get. He studied anthropology but never finished university. He works as a cashier at a bookstore. He is very social and has many friends and girlfriends. He loves music and often…
CHAPTER SEVEN
A year later in the life of our characters. They have been fully infected and react very differently to their new selves.
What Is A Benefit In Biology?
Chris Kempes, Eric Libby The concept of what is beneficial in a biological context is a topic with a long history. In some situations the concept of “fitness”, the rate at which an organism grows and displaces competitors, can be used to quantify the benefit of a property such as a new gene, or…
CHAPTER EIGHT
Characters experience a shared fever dream, fully sensing other organisms and entering a hallucinatory “foreign” point of view experience.
Non-biological Contagions: Memes, Language, And Technology
Vanessa Ferdinand, Artemy Kolchinsky, Yoav Kallus Languages, as well as many other cultural artifacts, spread among individuals much like viruses. Even today, we see new languages being born and spread, such as Nicaraguan sign language and Al-Sayyid Bedouin sign language. We can reverse their process of spread and adoption to learn about how language…
CHAPTER NINE: The story of Alou, the most evolved character
This is the final science section, and depicts a set of extreme outcomes for our story world. It follows and shows the outcomes of Alou’s spreading actions, and lets the reader image the consequences of the new spreading about to occur in the final story segment. This provides a thematic complement to the opening science…
Beneficial Epidemics
Christopher Kempes, Vanessa Ferdinand, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Yoav Kallus, Artemy Kolchinsky, Brendan Tracey This section talks about the dynamics of the spread of a _beneficial_ contagion, under different thought experiments about what it means to be beneficial. It talks about the different “mental states” of the infected and susceptible – do they want to be infected?…
CHAPTER TEN
A new, foreign character gets infected and takes the story into another world, creating an open ending.
Author Information
Dr. Jessica Green is an engineer and ecologist who specializes in biodiversity theory and microbial systems. She uses interdisciplinary approaches at the interface of microbiology, ecology, mathematics, and computer science to understand and model complex ecosystems with trillions of diverse microorganisms interacting with each other, with humans, and with the environment. She is the CTO…
Reference Cited
Adams RI, Bhangar S, Dannemiller KC, Eisen JA, Fierer N, Gilbert JA, Green JL, Marr LC, Miller SL, Siegel JA, Stephens B, Waring MS, Bibby K. 2016. Ten questions concerning the microbiomes of buildings. Building and Environment doi: 10.1016/j.buildenv.2016.09.001. Berdahl, A., Brelsford, C., De Bacco, C., Dumas, M., Ferdinand, V., Grochow, J.A., Hébert-Dufresne, L., Kallus,…