Now, in her follow-up to Severance, Ma returns to similar themes of solitude and isolation, albeit in a less-pandemic stricken landscape. It’s also the way she homed in on the profound isolation and loneliness that come with trying to save oneself from disease that have struck many readers as overwhelmingly on point. But it wasn’t just the way she predicted corporate America’s insistence on continuing work in the face of impending disaster or how she guessed that masks would become personalized by a wearer’s likes and dislikes that make Severance so relatable. Ma managed to get so much right about how humans would operate when faced with the possibility of the end of the world. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, suddenly the world Ma created began to feel eerily prescient. When Ling Ma’s Severance came out, no one had ever heard of the coronavirus pandemic, so when people sat down to read her debut novel about a young woman who ends up being one of the last people alive after a fungal disease wipes out much of the world, the story seemed dystopic, an alternate version of reality that only existed within the safety of the book.
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