Necessary Ill, Deb Taber’s debut novel (out of Aqueduct Press) is a difficult read, but a worthy one. Difficult, because it asks hard questions and refuses easy answers; and because it demands you extend your sympathy to all sides: mass-murderers, liars, haters, the wounded and the bereaved and the betrayed.
In another novel, Jin, one of our two protagonists, might be a villain. In a future where the human race seems doomed by resource depletion and overpopulation, Jin is a “spreader,” a creator and disperser of plagues designed to cull the population in the hopes of obtaining equilibrium between the demands of human consumption and the available resources. Jin is part of an underground community of genderless individuals (neuters, or “neuts,”) who fear violence at the hands of the rest of humanity, yet who nonetheless endeavour to help the prospects for humanity’s long-term survival through research, medicine—and yes, carefully targeted diseases.
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