Quiet Collapse: Severance by Ling Ma

Ling Ma’s Severance was published in 2018, well before the pandemic changed how we think about contagion, labor, and isolation. But rereading it now, in the shadow of global lockdowns and the rise of generative AI, it feels not just timely but diagnostic.

This is not a dystopia in the conventional sense. There are no AI overlords or mass surveillance grids. Instead, Severance is a novel about routine. It’s about what happens when the machinations of modern life—economic, emotional, technological—outlive their purpose.

That makes it a rare and potent example of techno-drama: a genre where technology is not spectacle, but substrate.

Routine is a System

At the center of Severance is Candace Chen, a millennial office worker in New York whose job is to manage the production of Bibles—specifically, coordinating the outsourced printing and packaging of religious texts in China.

As a mysterious fungal infection known as Shen Fever begins to spread, society gradually collapses. But Candace, like many around her, continues to show up to work, even as the city empties. Even as the danger becomes undeniable. People are dying, but the routines persist.

That’s the first clue that Ma isn’t writing a disaster novel. She’s writing a critique.

Technology as Atmosphere

What makes Severance a techno-drama is not its setting, but its texture. Candace’s job could be done by an algorithm. In fact, it almost is. She coordinates tasks across continents, shepherds products she’ll never touch, and updates spreadsheets no one seems to read. And yet she continues—dutifully, robotically—because the system still exists.

That’s the techno-drama at work: a story where technology isn’t threatening because it’s too smart—it’s threatening because it forces us to keep going when we probably shouldn’t.

Immunity Without Explanation

One of the most intriguing aspects of Severance is that Candace never contracts Shen Fever. The novel does not offer a scientific explanation for her immunity—there’s no biological edge, no special gene. Instead, her survival is symbolic.

The fevered are caught in compulsive loops—folding laundry, setting the table, trying on clothes and posing for the mirror—repeating daily rituals with no awareness of collapse. They are nostalgic automatons, defined by repetition. Their humanity has been reduced to muscle memory.

Candace is different. As a first-generation immigrant whose parents are deceased, she carries no strong attachment to place or family. She is not subject to routine. Her rituals are pragmatic, not sentimental. Her continued documentation of the city isn’t nostalgic, it’s transactional. She survives not because she is untouched, but because she is untethered. While others collapse into routine, Candace remains suspended above it—disengaged enough to remain conscious.

That’s what makes Severance so compelling. It doesn’t just critique technological systems; it critiques our psychological reliance on them.

When the System is the Antagonist

Candace’s identity is already diffuse. Her memories of childhood in Fujian, her life in New York, and her connection to labor systems abroad all blur together. She is both insider and outsider, beneficiary and byproduct of globalization all at once. As the protagonist, she is not a heroine in the conventional sense. She’s not a rebel. She doesn’t escape. What she does is endure. That’s the heart of techno-drama: characters negotiating systems they didn’t build, can’t dismantle, and barely understand—but still participate in.

Severance doesn’t rely on speculative gadgets or evil corporations to tell its story. It offers something harder: a slow, sad unraveling of modern life, where the true antagonist is the system itself—too broad to blame, too routine to question. That’s what makes it relevant and also very real.

• Technology is essential, yet invisible.

• The drama is psychological and existential the same as everyday life, not explosive like an action thriller.

• The focus is on people—flawed, bored, hopeful—trying to stay intact inside a structure that no longer needs them.

  
  

Candace is not immune in the biological sense. She is immune psychologically: to nostalgia, to habit, to the comforting pull of a vanished world. In Ma’s universe, that makes her the last human truly awake. But it also makes her tragic.

Reverberating Truth

Severance is a quietly devastating novel not because of its virus, but because of its familiarity. Severance is what happens when routine overshadows instinct and when survival becomes submission.

Techno-dramas don’t just resonate; they reverberate. And the themes set forth in Severance will be echoing in my mind for a long time to come.