{"id":8217,"date":"2018-08-22T11:20:34","date_gmt":"2018-08-22T19:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8217"},"modified":"2018-08-22T11:20:34","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T19:20:34","slug":"n-k-jemisin-alpha-gal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8217","title":{"rendered":"N.K. Jemisin, Alpha Gal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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…and picking right up from where we left off last week, some of you may remember an ancient post about the Lone Star Tick<\/a>, whose bite can provoke a fatal hyperallergenic reaction to “alpha-gal” (galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose for the pedants in the audience), a monosaccharide found only in the meat of nonprimate mammals. You may remember cool scenarios in which vegan terrorists gengineer this reaction into biting insects of all sorts, spreading it worldwide and forcing human meat-eaters to choose between giving up meat or eating each other (basically, win-win either way). And if you are lovers of the opera, you may even remember this poster off to the right, a PSA I put together as one of the world-building elements of “Fish To Mars”.<\/p>\n

All ancient history now. But alpha gal is the gift that keeps on giving. Just last month, The New York Times published an update<\/a> on this tick-borne malady (cleverly illustrated with emoji-faces built out of veal cutlets and sausages) which made an interesting claim indeed:<\/p>\n

“OUR DISTANT ANCESTORS once made alpha-gal. Understanding why humans don\u2019t could shed light on the meat-allergy mystery Like other mammals, South American monkeys produce alpha-gal. Only Old World monkeys and apes (and humans) have lost the ability to make the sugar. Hence scientists deduce that the change most likely happened after New and Old World primates diverged from each other around 40 million years ago. One explanation for the disappearance of alpha-gal is that it was driven by some catastrophe, a deadly infection that afflicted Old World primates, perhaps, and as a result maybe these distant relatives of ours stopped being able to produce the sugar because doing so conferred an evolutionary advantage. The mutation that eliminated alpha-gal could have improved a primate\u2019s ability to fight off an infection by enabling its immune system to more easily distinguish between its own body and some pathogen with alpha-gal.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026and I can’t help thinking Hey, didn’t Blindopraxia’s vampires and their protocadherin dependency end up at the same point, but for opposite reasons? Both vampires and a post-tickular Humanity resort to eating fellow primates\u2014 but one does so because no other prey contains a vital substance, while the other does so because all<\/em> other prey contain a toxic<\/em> substance.<\/p>\n

It’s almost too symmetrical.<\/p>\n

So now, I’m thinking we might have an origin story for vampires. Maybe what bootstrapped the subspecies was an epidemic, something like this postulated alpha-gal pathogen but more recent. Something that knocked out protocadherin synthesis in a small, isolated population of hominins, most of which\u2014 having survived the epidemic\u2014 found themselves dying off for lack of that necessary protein.\u00a0 All but a few dispersers, who made it out of their isolated refuge and back into the mainstream where their unsuspecting cousins bred and fed, all unsuspecting\u2026<\/p>\n

Don’t really know yet how that might fit into the overall plot. Just starting to think about it. Maybe no more than a bit of background ambiance, throwaway background for readers to geek out over if so inclined. Or maybe something more\u2014 because once you know how vampires originally got made, you’re one step closer to being able to un<\/em>make them\u2026<\/p>\n

\"Apparently<\/a>

Apparently there’s also a sequel…<\/p><\/div>\n

Or I might just try to resurrect my idea for the big glossy hardcover Coffee Table Book\u2014 The Proceedings of the Second Biennial Conference on the Biology and Evolution of Vampires<\/em>\u2014 that I always wanted to pattern after that big best-selling tome on the natural history of Gnomes that was all the rage back in the seventies. The book that has, so far at least, never failed to make agents and editors alike roll their eyes and tell me to fuck off when I pitch it to them\u2026<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Some of you are probably wondering how N.K. Jemisin fits into all of this.<\/p>\n

She doesn’t exactly. Not into the vampire stuff anyway, although I suppose if you were given to terrible puns you could call her an Alpha Gal in her own right (what with three consecutive Best-Novel Hugos and all). But she is the editor of the 2018 Edition of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy<\/em><\/a>, and she did think enough of “ZeroS” to include it in that volume. And HMH let us off the leash just yesterday, and encouraged us to announce it to all and sundry. So, as a postscript, that is what I’m doing.<\/p>\n

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That’s four best-of-year collections “ZeroS” has made it into, which is nice by any standards. At the same time, the other three are edited by folks I’ve known and dealt with in the past. So it’s especially nice to have made it onto Jemisin’s radar\u2014 and if I might drop one more name, it’s also humbling to end up in the same Table of Contents<\/a> as Samuel Delany.<\/p>\n

I’ve been trying to write like that guy since I was a teenager.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…and picking right up from where we left off last week, some of you may remember an ancient post about the Lone Star Tick, whose bite can provoke a fatal hyperallergenic reaction to “alpha-gal” (galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose for the pedants in the audience), a monosaccharide found only in the meat of nonprimate mammals. You may remember cool […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,49,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-omniscience","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8217"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8229,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8217\/revisions\/8229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}