THE WAGES OF SIN, deeply disappointing alt-hist

THE WAGES OF SIN
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: A terrifying tale about HIV spreading in the early sixteenth century by an author, Publisher Weekly calls “The Master of Alternate History.”

What if HIV started spreading in the early 1500s rather than the late 1900s? Without modern medicine, anybody who catches HIV is going to die. A patriarchal society reacts to this devastating disease in the only way it knows it sequesters women as much as possible, limiting contacts between the sexes except for married couples. While imperfect, such drastic actions do limit the spread of the disease.

The ‘Wasting’ (HIV) has caused devasting destruction throughout the known world and severely limited the development of technology as well, creating a mid-nineteenth century England and London almost unrecognizable to us. This is the world Viola is born into. Extremely intelligent and growing up in a house full of medical books which she reads, she dreams of travelling to far-off places, something she can only do via books since her actions and movements are severely restricted by both law and custom.

Meticulously researched and exquisitely detailed in a way only a master like Harry Turtledove can do, this book is a tour-de-force from one of the best historical and alternate history writers ever to write in the genre.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Big ideas chopped to bits, tossed around some, then left to collapse where they collided. Are we in the 1509 Congolese-disease plot? The 1850s jerkoff's plot? (That is more literal than figurative here.) What made me read the book was Turtledove. Why I finished it was Turtledove. I disliked its underdeveloped alt-hist; I deeply disliked the crude and demeaning language, though both period and setting appropriate; I never felt as though, unlike a certain character, the story ever got near a climax as Viola and Peter, the straight people whose story I expected (not unreasonably) this to be, spend the entire story apart. Then, after a betrayal, a confession, and a shocking comeuppance(!), all conducted by letters between them, there's a wedding and...

...off you and I go. Contracts all fulfilled, we have a story thay does the absolute bare-bones minimum.This can't be all, thought I, but indeed it was. Please note there is absolutely not more than one tiny whiff of gayness, of sodomy as an act, of the merest hint of the existence of queers at all. In three hundred pages about AIDS.

Now it's the poor straight women get all the fallout of the AIDS epidemic because, I guess, there weren't gay people in 1509 Congo (great, let's put the source of the STD plague in Africa...at least it's a change from South America's factual syphilis plague...then switch to straight people in whiter-than-white England! Ignoring Africa thereafter! It's the twenty-fucking-first ventury, colonialism is on the cross so let's drop it, k?)

So I think I'm being pretty magnanimous with two stars.