First of all, I want to ask if this story would reach "the seriousness" level of this group, so I could add it here.

2986 Steps

One of the thing, that really annoys me in a stories, is descripting of the plagues. Especially, if it's some kind of "magical" disease. Oh no, this pony is suffering, we better find some artifact so we can cure it!

So I decided to write story about some serious illness, which is haunting the humanity for 4000 years ( at least ). The Leprosy. Thanks to the incredibly progress of medicine the lepra is now possible to be cure, but in some parts of the world lepra is still nightmare.

Second question. Do you know any other stories which are about "serious" epidemic? Cholera, typhoid, jaundice, tuberculosis or something like this?

Thanks a lot.

Verlax

The point of describing such debilitating illnesses in fiction is not merely to inform but to tell about the true character of the afflicted. Do they surrender to their lot? Do they rage? Do they weep? If they surrender is it a quiet acceptance of the will of some sort of fate? Is it a deadened hopelessness? Sickness is a theme, a motif, and a vehicle. If it becomes the subject, your readers will start getting sick themselves.

786510 Did you read "Why are we here?" Gotta read that first. It's not about whether the tone of the story is serious. It's about whether the story can be summarized as a debate between different views about something.

Daniel Defoe's "A journal of the plague year" is a famous true account of plague, but I haven't read it.

786876

Yes, I read that one even before I joined the group. And I'm asking, because I'm not that sure.

In our present world, the medicine stuff is really messed up. In theory, we have medicine for almost everything, while ( in theory ) the most dangerous disease can be easily countered ( like AIDS ). Besides, in media, have you heard about disease not being AIDS, cancer or H1N1? I guess that really rarely. If you would really listen to media, that you would think, that in general we have medicine for everything, while only a few plagues can be dangerous to live. What a bullshit.

Every 3 seconds, malarial mosquito bites a man. In India thousands of people suffers from a big variety of diseases like ( for example ) lepra. Tuberculosis with every passing year is becoming more resiliant to antibiotics, killing hundreds of people all over the world. To make this even more ridiculous, every disease I mention in this paragraph is incredibly old. Alexander the Great died from malaria, lepra was known to Ancient Egyptians ( there is theory, that lepra was this famous "plague" brought by Moses ) and Tuberculosis is really old too.

I think, that in some way this story is serious. The "real" disease is not AIDS, not H1N1, or other media-over-rated plague. The most deadly ones are haunting us for ages, and most people tends to forget about it.

787087 I don't know. It's definitely a serious topic. It's not what I had in mind. The name "serious stories" is probably misleading. The question is whether it just describes a plague, or poses some sort of question. If there's no difficult question being talked about, then probably not. Put it in "Main", make a comment in the (new) "Nominations" thread with the needed info, and see if some contributor reads it and adds it.

Go read Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

It's also about leprosy, and it's absolutely brilliant.