Great book so far. A virus makes animals fatal to eat, so of course there could only be 1 solution, systematically breeding and eating people. I know it’s another reality/universe but the main character remembers eating animals as a child. That means people went from normal to completely evil in 1 generation. By the time the man is grown, he lives in a world where everyone acts like a psychopath, trying to normalize it. It’s like in one person’s lifetime, everyone lost their souls to the point where empathy was practically illegal. If the world in this writer’s mind changed that fast, I wonder what a sequel 100 years into the future would look like…
This post contains minor spoilers, but if you’re having trouble with the contrivance of the book, I think this will help.
Tender is the Flesh is not first and foremost genre literature about a future where we eat people and exploring that space; it is an allegory for how under Capitalism we treat people as commodities.
Now to the spoilerey bits:
You find out over the course of the book that the virus is just made up. The ruling powers did so in order to justify the mass imprisonment and slaughter of immigrants and the poor.
If you think “there’s no way people could become comfortable with this level of oppression in a single generation”, the book leads us to realize that we already live in a world where much of the horror of the book is currently happening and yet the vast majority of people go on with the lives anyways.