"Immunity Index" by Sue Burke is a riveting tapestry of speculative fiction, expertly weaving science, drama, and societal introspection. Burke's narrative is both timely and timeless, offering readers a mirror to our own world's challenges. With a keen eye for detail and a profound understanding of human nature, she crafts a tale that is deeply resonant and thought-provoking. A masterclass in blending science with storytelling, "Immunity Index" is a standout in contemporary sci-fi.

Fantastic stand-alone post-apocolyptic scifi novel from Sue Burke. Her duo Semiosis and Interference are among my favorite all time science fiction novels, and this book did not disappoint.

One of the most intriguing parts of Interference was a sub-plot about a character on earth- not Pax which the rest of the novel was set in, and this novel felt like it took a thread from that storyline and successfully made it into a full novel.

Burke, again, did a perfect job of mixing hard science and social commentary. She also excels at writing thrilling plots with surprising reveals.

I enjoyed the midwest setting (specifically Chicago) and the inclusion of critiques of right-wing nationalism/fascism - including the clear anti-racist message.

Recommended for fans of Blake Crouch, especially his latest -Upgrade.

It also reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler's nuanced explorations of how people come together in extreme situations and new create ways to relate to one another, in both hierarchical and non-hierarchical ways. It's a novel that at it's heart is about how idealists figure out how to rebel against an oppressive & authoritative state, and then try to build a new and better society.

Was gifted this ARC in exchange for review
Honestly I really wanted to like this book… but I just couldn’t get into it the three cloned characters storylines bored me, the scientists was the only interesting one. And even then the science was…so-so. As a scientist, I found myself disappointed with the lack of reality or description

Sue Burke's latest novel is one that may feel all too familiar to many readers – as a contagion threatens the country. Immunity Index is one part science fiction and one part dystopian, and its timing is so very eerie. At least, to me.

Things are not going well. There are food shortages abound, inequality is painfully familiar, and the government is only making things worse. This is the life three women have always known, and yet they hope for so much more.

These very women as some of the last of their kind, created and designed by Peng. However, they were meant to have much in common, and now they are fighting to stay alive while trying desperately to help find a cure for what humanity is facing.

Wow. I think that Immunity Index is a novel that would have hit hard regardless of when it was released. But to have it come out now after COVID-19 has so impacted the world...it hurts. Not because Burke is taking advantage of the situation, but because it is easy to picture the world she is describing here.

The story unfolds through the use of four different perspectives. As you might imagine, they are the four women mentioned above (the fourth being Peng, their creator). It was fascinating getting to know them all like this, and it helped move the pacing forward steadily.

I should probably mention that I haven't actually read anything else by Sue Burke, so unlike many other readers out there – I'm not comparing Immunity Index to Semiosis. However, I do not know if this is a good thing or not (but I do know that many readers loved Semiosis), so it felt worth mentioning.

Overall I really enjoyed this story, even if it did kick me in the emotional gut a time or two. I would advise that readers take a moment to ask themselves if they're ready to read a novel that handles this subject, given what we've gone through in the last year. But otherwise, I would highly recommend it.

Thanks to Tor Books and #NetGalley for making this book available for review. All opinions expressed are my own.

So much potential and a few great gems but overall a difficult story to follow. I was willing to be a bit lost at the beginning with the alternating chapters for each of the main characters because this type of outline tends to weave together as a story progresses. Unfortunately, the storylines and characters did not come together until the very end and then I felt like it was still jumpy and rushed. I was expecting the clones / "dupes" to meet up with each other and/or their creator or to fight the virus on some sort of unified front, like the Orphan Black reference in the main summary blurb. That reference was what initially drew me to this novel and I believe why I was so let down. I did love the realistic portrayal of the Prez and the "patriots" who believe they can fight the virus by simply hanging a flag. The idiocy was both humorous and sadly relatable to this US citizen.

Great creative minds often see humans as collateral. Three women race to keep themselves safe. Depending on each other in time rough and smooth.They use insight and a real grasp of the consequences science can create to survive. All the while the genius behind the cure is running as well. Can they outrun their fate?

In the near future, a deadly virus outbreak impacts the world, and particularly, the lives of three young women with a shared, unusual heritage. They were all designed by the same geneticist. The President of the United States exploits the stewing bigotry and distrust of the people, turning them against each other in a time of food shortages, corporate semi-feudalism and fascistic federal governmental leadership. The three women, Irene, Avril and Berenike, each with much to lose, must find their own motivation to fight and survive in a society that had been trained to hate them for what they are.

Immunity Index is a science fiction novel with themes that are very timely and pertinent. Examining the problem of anti-science fanatics and science denialists who have the authority to make policy and recruit followers, and the manner in which conspiracy theories gain dangerous footholds that lead to societal unrest. Science is pivotal to the story, and it is delivered in a plausible way. It is also a very human story about love, family and loss. The narrative is confusing to follow at times, as the story jumps around between the various lead characters. Additionally, some characters feel underdeveloped and less believable in their motivations. For a short novel, Immunity Index packs a punch, although it leaves a reader wanting more.

3.5 stars.

Reviewed for Affaire de Coeur Magazine.

The nitty-gritty: A bleak futuristic pandemic story that felt a little too familiar for comfort and lacked emotion and drive.

I’m sorry to say this book just didn’t work that well for me, which is a shame because I loved Burke’s Semiosis. It took me a solid two weeks to read it, as I picked it up and put it down numerous times before I finally said “Enough!” and ploughed through to the end. 

Immunity Index takes place in an undisclosed future and revolves around two main events: a deadly pandemic, and a left wing political group who are trying to unseat the President of the United States. The story alternates chapters and perspectives among four main characters. First, we have three clone “sisters” who don’t know each other yet all look identical. Avril is a college student and lives in Chicago. She’s trying to join the “mutiny,” a group of resistors who promise social change. But Avril is considered a “dupe,” slang for “duplicate,” someone created in a laboratory, and she’s having trouble getting her peers to take her seriously. Berenike is a young girl who works at a car rental company called AutoKar and who is drawn into helping the mutiny movement later in the story. Irene is a college graduate who has found work on a farm, taking care of the family’s woolly mammoth Nimkii, resurrected from ancient DNA and forced to act as a tourist attraction. Finally, Peng is the scientist who bred all three girls in a laboratory and who now does secret government work with viruses and vaccines.

The backdrop for all four of their stories is the emergence of a killer virus that spreads like wildfire, and the reader follows each character on their own personal journey. Eventually the stories merge, but it takes the entire book for that to happen. The current President—or “Prez” as everyone calls him—is mismanaging the country and only those with money and status are considered to be true citizens. (sound familiar?) The story itself doesn’t really offer anything new to the genre, unfortunately, with all the usual elements in place that you would expect.

Still, despite that, the story could have been redeemed by interesting characters, but on that note Immunity Index fell flat as well. I never really bonded or connected with any of the characters, except maybe Irene, whose love of Nimkii was the only real emotional content, believe it or not. Otherwise, the characters felt rather lifeless and wooden, and most of their decisions seemed to be based on reactions to the horror around them, rather than true agency. Even now it’s hard for me to separate the three girls into distinct personalities, and Burke’s deadpan prose didn’t help much either. Peng is the only character who speaks in first person, and his sections were jarringly different from the rest of the book. The author implies that Peng is a trans man, which made him only slightly more interesting than everyone else. The tone of his personal story is rather ominous, as he and his fellow scientists are developing a virus that will be secretly introduced into the population on purpose.

I kept waiting for the moment when Avril, Irene and Berenike would finally meet, hoping it would give the story some life and excitement. But when they do meet, it's at the very end of the story and it's almost an afterthought, tacked on to a rather lackluster ending.

The format—jumping around from character to character—made for a fractured story, and I’ll admit that’s one reason it didn’t hold my interest. Without a clear, driving plot, I was confused for most of the story, and even when the pace finally picked up a bit, it was too late for me. The bottom line is that I didn't hate the book, so much as I just didn't find much to care about.

Sue Burke mentions in her afterward that she started writing Immunity Index before 2020, but finished it in the midst of Covid last year. Because of this odd circumstance, it’s hard to tell whether parts of the story are eerie coincidences, or whether the author included actual references to the situation we’ve been dealing with for the last year and a half. In any case, it was rather uncomfortable reading this because so much of it is familiar: the lockdowns, the mask wearing, the disinformation coming from the White House and the rash of rumors and fear mongering perpetuated by social media, and the sheer panic and hoarding by confused citizens. At this point in time, I’m ready to forget Covid and move on, so in some ways the timing of this book’s release is a bit unfortunate. Also, it doesn’t help that the cover features a huge, looming virus that looks exactly like the Covid-19 virus!

The best thing I can say about the ending is that my favorite character, Nimkii the woolly mammoth, survives everything that happens and even seems to be thriving at the end. Just like our own pandemic recovery, there is never an explosive moment in the story where the good guys win. Rather, all the characters find themselves on the other side of the crisis more or less intact, but without any kind of fanfare or emotion.

With thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

In the book Immunity Index, author Sue Burke follows three seemingly random normal young women through a virus outbreak. What makes these three so different? Why are they not getting sick? And who is really behind the virus? Could the governmental leaders really be trying to exterminate their political opposition?
This was a fascinating well thought-out story. I would recommend this book. I received a copy of this e-book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I didn't finish this one. Despite my liberal political leanings, the set up seemed too on-point, over-the-top liberal vision of dystopia. It just didn't work for me.

Ahoy there mateys! This be an abandon ship! I really loved the author's Semiosis Duology so I was excited to get a copy of this. Sadly, this one didn't float me boat at all. The writing was very stilted and the characters felt unnatural too. It be a shame when the premise felt so great. I am going to consider this one a miss but I would give the author's work another shot given how much I liked their previous books. Arrr!

Timing is everything. Lawrence Wright’s The End of October, about a global pandemic, was released as Covid restrictions were starting to bite. As the pandemic in that novel was much more deadly, it put our current crisis into perspective. Last year also saw Carol Stivers’ The Mother Code in which the world pretty much ended due to a man-made pandemic. There are probably plenty of others. And now, coming at the tail end of Covid-19 is Sue Burke’s Immunity Index. Mainly written pre-Covid but centring, at least in its early going, around a deadly, fast moving covid-style disease which may not, as it turns out, be completely natural. And there are clones.
Immunity Index is a five minutes in the future book which imagines an ongoing Trump-like presidency. The hyper-nationalist leader is called “The Prez” throughout and comes up with the concept of putting up a flag to combat the spread of what he calls the Sino-Cold. Now, if this was written before the first half of 2020, Burke has shown some world class prescience as to how a Trump-led government would respond to a growing Covid threat. But her premise goes further, into dangerous territory of the President ordering the creation and release of an airborne vaccine, a move that does not go well.
But the plot actually focusses on three young women who, it turns out very early in the piece, are clones of each other. In this new United States, genetically modified humans, including clones, are second class citizens and known by the derogatory term “dupes”. They are second class because the ruling religious right believes that clones cannot have souls. All three are involved in a coming wave of protests against the current government known as the “mutiny”, a movement that is put back on its heels as the new strain of Covid starts to bite. There is a fourth POV character – Peng, a geneticist who created the clones and is now working to try and stop the current outbreak.
There is a lot going on in Immunity Index. Actually too much. And reader’s patience may depend on how much they are interested in even reading pandemic-related thrillers at the moment. Much of the first half of the novel is concerned with set-up of character and situation. So that while there appears to be some plot, most is taken up really pushing exposition and the rest is polemic dressed up as action as the “mutiny” gains momentum, aimed at an even more extreme form of Trumpian autocracy (although one that was not hard to imagine). Burke does not do enough to make readers care about side characters as they start dying from the pandemic. Or even to really care too much about the protagonists as they navigate finding out that they were not who they thought they were and a world that is swiftly going to hell. Which made Immunity Index occasionally interesting but never really engaging.

Immunity Index is fairly different from Sue Burke's first two novels. The story structure, while it does follow different characters as in Semiosis and Interference, starts out much more disconnected, though of course the tendrils do come together eventually. The characters themselves were interesting enough but I wasn't too invested in any of them. I thought the societal structure depicted in the book was both terrifying and unfortunately realistic, sort of like watching the Handmaid's Tale and realizing "oh jeez this could happen". Overall it was a fine read, though I much prefer Semiosis overall.

I was mixed on this one. It was readable and I read it quickly, BUT it was perhaps too close for comfort. The pandemic that Burke creates is a mirror of the current COVID outbreak, and I did read this while ill with Covid. There is a bit of satire that did make me continue to read.

Hay veces en las que las novelas, sobre todo las especulativas, se adelantan a la realidad, como por ejemplo A Song for a New Day de Sarah Pinsker. Pero, y ahora lo estamos viendo más, algunas veces la realidad se adelanta a la novela. Esto le ha pasado al nuevo lanzamiento de Sue Burke, Immunity Index, que gira entorno a una infección mortal por un coronavirus en EE.UU. y las consecuencias políticas, sociales y económicas que esto conlleva.


Como ya digo, es imposible leer esta novela sin retrotraerse al estado actual de la pandemia y comparar qué ha pasado en la realidad con lo que imaginó la autora. Burke nos presenta un cuadro mucho más terrible, primero porque una de las cepas del virus es tiene una tasa de mortalidad tremendamente alta y después porque el estado político del país es mucho más convulso. Se trata de una novela coral, que hace también hincapié en otro aspecto, el de la manipulación genética en general y la clonación humana en particular, que es quizá la parte más interesante de la narración.

El libro es una alabanza a la insurrección ciudadana contra la opresión gubernamental, aunque las ideas que expone son un tanto inocentes, ya que sería de esperar una represión mucho más brutal por parte de un presidente y su camarilla capaces de idear ataques contra la salud pública con tal de mantener su puesto. Pero para captar estos mensajes, hay que entrar en el juego de Burke, que nos muestra el patriotismo tal y como se entiende en EE.UU. algo que no tiene nada que ver con lo que se puede entender en otros países. Y el hecho de que haya personas capaces de sacrificar su vida para ayudar a los demás no quita que haya otras que se crean investidas de derecho divino a obrar como les plazca. A principios de año fuimos testigos de una versión mucho más moderada de esto, y por lo tanto, el libro se vuelve aún más creíble.

Me hubiera gustado más protagonismo para el científico encargado del estudio del virus y de las estrategias para su anulación. Me parece que se pasa un poco de puntillas por el tema dando más importancia a la parte política, cuando a mi entender sería más atractivo desarrollar más este personaje y la justificación de sus acciones.

Immunity Index es una novela tan actual que el propio entorno en que se desarrolla puede jugar en su contra, ya que no todo el mundo puede tener ganas de leer algo que a lo que podría asistir asomándose por la ventana. Es por tanto difícil recomendarla en la actualidad.

The first thing to note here is that I am an Australian, and this book is super American. There may well have been inferences that I missed; and there are definitely bits that I basically understand but just don't GET. In particular, attitudes around patriotism/nationalism, and attitudes towards the President, which are significant to this story. We have patriotism, and we even have what I would call extreme patriotism-shading-to-nationalism; but it's generally a minority and it's certainly not my direct experience.

The second thing is that Burke says in her afterword that she actually started writing this before 2020; this book is therefore one of those weird ones that happens to come out when it seems like an almost spooky coincidence, since it focuses on a virus - a coronavirus, even. I'm pretty sure she must have started it after 2016, though, since even from over here the stuff she includes about the President feels like a reflection on Trump.

The blurb described this as Orphan Black meets Contagion. Orphan Black is one of my favourite tv shows ever, and I didn't mind Contagion, so here we are. Thing is, that's pretty much EXACTLY what this is. There's not much more to it than the big parts of those two. So I was a bit disappointed in the end that it didn't go beyond that initial premise.

Each chapter follows, usually, four different people. Three of them are young women in very different circumstances - at uni, or working in different dead-end jobs. The fourth is a geneticist who apparently "used" to be a woman and is now an old man; honestly I don't know whether this person was trans, or hiding their identity, or what (and this ambiguity made me uncomfortable rather than intrigued, because of the way they referred to their previous identity; if they were meant to be trans, I think this aspect was done badly). As the narrative progresses, things go badly for America - people are getting sick, and "the Prez" - the generally unnamed president (although there's a reference to the idea that his parents changed his name to President when he was 12 because of an oracle of some sort??) is doing nothing about it (yes, so familiar). The Prez is also just generally evil, with people divided into different classes of citizens and awful new laws coming in all the time and flags suggested as a cure to illness.

I didn't love this book, unfortunately, for a number of reasons. I don't mind being thrown into a world and then working out things as I go; however I didn't feel like I ever DID work out how America got to the point that is presented here. All of a sudden there's clones and mammoths and incredibly genetically-altered humans, but... no discussion about how, or over what time span, or even why (even "because we could" isn't really offered). And the President having such power - also not discussed. The book basically opens with people talking about a "mutiny" against the President and the way things are, which makes more sense when it's a bit clearer that freedoms have been seriously curtailed (although, add in here the Australian perspective that America today doesn't look to us like it apparently looks to many Americans!). I know the suggestion that people are going to mutiny is meant to indicate just how bad things have got, but I still felt frustrated at not understanding the society very well. As well, a lot of people seemed to know about the mutiny, and I found it hard to believe the authorities wouldn't have been cracking down faster.

Overall, I found this a fast read, and I did finish it because I wanted to know where it would all end up. If you're after a straightforward narrative that really does take from both Orphan Black and Contagion, this is it.

Immunity Index by Sue Burke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book has the unique distinction of being the first novel since Covid to depict Covid within its pages since we began experiencing the dubious pleasure of this new, crappy world. Not that this should be held against either the author or the book, of course, only that it happens to have that little mark of realism that we've all come to love and enjoy so much. :)

There are a couple of really interesting plot points going on in this novel. One feels like a huge nod to the movie Gattica. Another, about the mutiny, is not quite BLM, but it definitely has the right political feel. Then again, I've always been a fan of people doing the right thing, so this book is pretty much in line with my own feelings. The sense of moral outrage, too, especially when we're tackling the intersection between political a**holes politicizing disease -- or even weaponizing it.

In that respect, this novel hit home.

I really got into the heroism of all the workers that did all they could to save lives no matter what the personal cost. Overall, this was the best part, but the other plot, of the cloning and the social problems surrounding it, was also pretty decent. It is SF, after all. :)

What about a good timing for this book! Sue Burke is a great new names in the science-fiction world and I love what she brings. Her own voices and style. Of course a lot of people, well everybody will be able to relate in some way in this time of pandemic. Scifi reader or not I would recommend you to read it!