54 pages • 1 hour read
Larissa LaiThe Tiger Flu
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Illness and Greed
The book’s front matter includes an epigraph from “The Tyger,” a poem by the English metaphysical poet William Blake:
Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Contemplating the image of a tiger, the speaker wonders at the “immortal hand or eye,” in other words, the spiritual or transcendent power that can “frame,” or contain, the tiger’s power. The epigraph is an interesting opening to a novel that explores how plague, environmental havoc, and human greed have decimated and restructured the world in this dystopia. Illness and greed remain unchecked and uncontained, despite the characters’ efforts to contain or restrain them.
This idea of unfettered illness spawned by greed is embodied by the tiger flu, a global pandemic that has devastated the world prior to the events of the novel. In Chapter 32, K2 explains to Kora how Jemini (their grandfather’s company) bred Caspian tigers to create tiger wine even though the Ko family knew it was making people sick. Later in Chapter 32, K2’s own greed motivates him to kill Marcus Traskin, so that he can control the tiger farms and collect the profit for himself. As a counterpoint to the greed and corruption of those who populate Saltwater City and the surrounding area, the Grist sisters live in exile. Their queer separatist way of life—“living clean,” as Kiri describes it to Isabelle in Chapter 42—keeps them somewhat immune from the corruption that rules the people of Saltwater Flats.
The Exaltation of Alternative Femininity, Matriarchy, and Queerness
The Tiger Flu explores femininity, women, and a kind of queerness through the characters of Kiri and Kora. As with other feminist authors of speculative fiction (for example, Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ), The Tiger Flu explores ideas around the biological role of women, matriarchy, and female separatism.
The front matter also includes an epigraph from Les Guérillères (1969), a French novel by Monique Wittig that portrays a violent battle between the sexes and, ultimately, espouses female superiority. Relatedly, The Tiger Flu’s Grist Village is arguably the safest and most sincere setting in The Tiger Flu universe. While most of the other territories—certainly Saltwater City, but even the New Origins Archive and elsewhere—have been corrupted by power grabs or internecine struggles, the Grist sisters only wish to live harmoniously among themselves and commune with nature, in reverence of “Our Mother.” The New Grist Village is a place of idyllic peace and natural abundance: “The little doublers turn to admire the Starfish Orchard that surrounds them in a leafy, comforting dance of light and shadow” (328).
Kiri’s repulsion regarding heteronormative sexual intercourse (in the way that Salties—people from the Saltwater Flats—do it) underscores her queerness. On sex with men, Kiri says, “It will be repulsive no matter how old I get” (47). Moreover, Kiri and Peristrophe’s relationship offers a vision of queerness that is the most reliable romantic love story in this dystopian future where biological sex is uncertain and doublers and starfish allow for nonheteronormative means of procreation. Kiri’s attraction to Peristrophe provides an example of a deep and loving bond that invokes a kind of queerness and rejects heteronormativity.
Destruction of the Natural World and the Rise of Technology
As a result of factionalism and the power struggles in The Tiger Flu, most of the natural world has been destroyed. Echoing the contemporary environmental crisis of climate change, The Tiger Flu is set in a world where the environment has become increasingly toxic to human life. Monsoons, toxic rain, and planets with orbits that need to be corrected are all features of the characters’ everyday lives.
The Tiger Flu monitors the passage of time not only with the Gregorian calendar (it is the year 2145) but also with their own Cascadian calendar, which is marked by TAO, which stands for “Time After Oil.” In this world, oil has been depleted, and it is implied that the real-life crisis related to dwindling natural resources brought about a massive and divisive shift in the world.
Capitalistic enterprise lead to technologies that, while innovative, further accelerated the downfall of society and environmental exploitation and destruction. There are the batterkites, warships developed from seal and oyster DNA; catcoats, stealth garments made from live cats; the tiger flu itself, an illness borne from tigers cloned at Jemini; and perhaps most prominently, there is the LïFT technology that “uploads” human consciousness to the planetary mainframes of Chang/Eng. While Isabelle argues that the upload process makes people “even more real” somehow, the Grist sisters know better: As Kiri puts it in Chapter 42, Glorybind and Peristrophe were “spooky and mutated”—they were not themselves (307). The merging of technology and biology makes for a powerful but unnatural tool, one that ultimately corrupts those who wield it.
