Parenting & Family Quote by Larry Niven

Niven’s line lands like cold engineering: a catastrophic human tragedy reduced to a familiar biological cycle. Calling AIDS “a plague” isn’t just metaphor, it’s a bid to drag the conversation out of moral panic and into evolutionary bookkeeping. The phrasing “we are human, we get plagues” shrugs at outrage and invites a darker kind of comfort: this is not cosmic punishment, not a uniquely modern scandal, just nature doing what it does. That rhetorical flattening is the point.

The subtext is more provocative than the epidemiology. “They come along every so often” positions mass death as periodic maintenance, a grim normality rather than an emergency demanding solidarity. The neat fractions - “two thirds,” “a quarter” - read like a science-fiction writer’s favorite move: quantify the unquantifiable until it feels manageable. It also implies a story of inevitable domestication: a lethal pathogen eventually becomes background noise, “a childhood disease.” That’s a narrative of adaptation, but it’s also a narrative of resignation.

Context matters. Niven, a hard-SF author steeped in systems thinking, was writing from a culture where AIDS was widely framed through fear, stigma, and speculation about societal collapse. His provocation pushes against hysteria, yet it risks importing a different cruelty: if the arc is prewritten, then suffering becomes merely transitional, and political choices - funding, care, harm reduction, public messaging - become footnotes. The quote works because it’s bracingly unsentimental; it unsettles because it treats avoidable death as an expected phase of human maintenance.