SEVERANCE | Ling Ma

READ MAY 2021

This book was read in the original LAX LAB climate fiction book club, which was active between 2020 and 2023. 🕷

SEVERANCE |
Ling Ma

2018
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art. Or whatever. To music, to poetry, to paintings, and installation, to TV and the movies.”

— Ling Ma, Severance, 2018

Candace Chen loves her work and she loves the city. She is a millennial, first generation American, recently orphaned, and working an office job in New York. Absorbed in the routines of urban life and her job managing the publication of specialty bibles, she is oblivious when Shen Fever arrives in the city. The deadly virus from China kills many and transforms others into zombies who become trapped in repetitive tasks. As people flee the city and companies shut down, Candace keeps on working, spending her down-time blogging and photographing the empty city. Soon, Candace too must escape and she finds herself on a quest for a new life with a group of ill-equipped survivors led by a computer programmer named Bob with big promises and a thirst for power.

Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance is the office-satire-apocalyptic-zombie-novel that you never knew you needed. While not exactly climate fiction, the themes in Severance are certainly relevant and may spark conversations on the relationship between climate change and pandemics and how to survive the zombie apocalypse.

“The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

— Ling Ma, Severance, 2018

About the author

Ling Ma — author website

Further reading, listening, viewing

‘Ling Ma’s Severance captures the bleak, fatalistic mood of 2018’
Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker, 10 December 2018

‘How climate change is ushering in a new pandemic era’
Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, 7 December 2020

‘Severance predicted the slow-burn performance of our pandemic’
Hillary Kelly, Vulture, 18 March 2020

Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century by Andreas Malm

‘“Office politics is, to some degree, horrifying” - Ling Ma on her horror-satire Severance’
Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times, 24 August 2018

Original LAX LAB book cover illustration by Emma Arnold, 2021