Serendib: White Plague

Seventeen-year-old Stephen Ashley-Cooper’s father is a virologist. Jonathan’s research focuses on developing targeted vaccines, and he discovers a way to modify the RNA of a virus to make the infection ethnicity-specific. But the company he works for sells the research to a shadowy organisation who use it to create a virus targeted at people of colour. Something goes wrong in development, and the virus mutates to target only white people. It spreads across the world, infecting white people with a horrible strain of encephalitis. 

Stephen’s parents catch the virus, and they become seriously ill in the middle of the Nullarbor. Stephen is stranded and unable to call for help. He stumbles across an abandoned school and time-travels 100 years into the future, to the futuristic city of Serendib. 

Following the collapse of society, an international civilisation formed with Serendib at its heart. A tropical paradise, Serendib is inhabited by people of colour with advanced telepathic abilities; they are the caretakers of the white people or “noncy”s, who were irreversibly brain damaged by the encephalitis plague. 

If Stephen wants to save his family and the world as he knows it, he must confront the racist attitudes that allowed the plague to be developed—including his own family’s dark past as Virginian slave owners. And as the only carrier of the plague in its original form, Stephen is the only viable test subject in the future. The people of Serendib are able to develop a cure for the virus by experimenting on Stephen, and he returns to the present to share it with the world. Stephen creates a global network of people using his father’s research to combat disease and combat racism in the present and future. 

A highly topical exploration of racism, responsibility and medical trauma. The subject matter of a disease sweeping our world, paired with the social commentary on racist and colonialist ideas in medicine and Western culture, makes this a deeply affecting and poignant story. The discussion of pharmaceutical companies and proprietary research adds another layer of depth. Stephen’s process of admitting the faults of his ancestors is a necessary and highly cathartic action, and adds weight to his determination to help others in the present. 

 racism, genocide, pharmaceutical companies, virus, plague, cure, time travel, speculative fiction, utopia, responsibility

 The book focuses on a plague sweeping the world, but is not referring to Covid. 2. Depiction of historical slavery. 3. Discussion of rape of women of colour—this is not depicted, but is an important reminder for Stephen of the intersectional elements of oppression. Stephen sees scars on the back of a black man—”the overseer whipped Tom for refusing to hand over his wife to be raped” (p. 60). A Black slave is told to sleep with the son of her master or she will be raped by her master (p. 65). It later transpires that she was her master’s daughter (he raped her mother) and if her master’s son had slept with her, it would have been incest. The master’s son instead helped her to escape (p. 69). Stephen meets Georgie, who was imprisoned and raped by Sinhalese soldiers during the ethnic war in Sri Lanka (p. 116, 118).   4. Alcohol (p. 60, 91).