"Vaccine Season" by Hannu Rajaniemi

LeVar Burton Reads

Stitcher

Arts, Performing Arts

4.9 • 17K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2021

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a post-pandemic future where scientists have made great strides in eliminating disease, a young boy faces his fears and ventures out to his grandfather's island to give him an important vaccine. This story appears in the anthology Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, edited by Gideon Lichfield and available for pre-order from The MIT Press. Content advisory: Discussion of pandemics, near-drowning

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.
0:09.9	In every episode I hand-pick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.
0:16.7	The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.
0:25.4	John, as I record this, we are in the thick of our own vaccine season and vaccination
0:32.8	rates are picking up by the day so that we can finally come to some sense of normalcy,
0:39.5	to see our friends and family, send our kids to school.
0:44.4	And of course, what everyone's been asking is, what is normal post-pandemic?
0:51.7	Is it normal to pretend that something like this couldn't happen again?
0:55.9	Do we need to fundamentally change how we interact?
1:00.9	How we address outbreaks of different kinds?
1:03.8	How we value human life?
1:07.1	What have we learned about our capabilities as humans during this time?
1:14.1	Today's story, vaccine season by Hanu Rionimi, is part of the forthcoming anthology
1:21.3	from the MIT Press entitled Make Shift, Dispatches From the Post-Pandemic Future.
1:28.2	It comes out next month and is available for pre-order right now.
1:32.7	Now, that anthology of fiction tries to envision how we can improve as humans post-pandemic,
1:41.0	how we can create a world that is more equitable for ourselves and for future generations.
1:48.3	And Hanu does a lot of thinking about the future.
1:52.2	He's a co-founder and CEO of Helix Nano, a synthetic biology startup developing evolution-resistant
2:00.6	mRNA vaccines for cancer, COVID-19, and other applications.
2:06.7	Hanu studied mathematics and theoretical physics and holds a PhD in string theory from the
2:14.9	University of Edinburgh.
	...

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