"The Moral Virologist" is a science fiction short story by Greg Egan. It was first published in September 1990 in Pulphouse Magazine, and subsequently republished in 1991's The Best of Pulphouse, in the Summer 1993 issue of Eidolon magazine, and in Egan's 1995 collection Axiomatic. An Italian-language version, "Il Virologo Morale", was published in 2003.
Contents
Synopsis
John Shawcross is a fundamentalist Christian who is disappointed that safe sex has limited the spread of HIV/AIDS, which he considers to be God's punishment for sexual immorality; consequently, he becomes a virologist, so that he may create a new, more lethal virus.
Reception
Rich Horton, writing at the SF Site, calls Virologist "particularly memorable", while Jonathan Strahan describes it as a "standout".
Karen Burnham, writing in the New York Review of Science Fiction, however, considers Shawcross to be "cartoonish", and in her 2014 biography of Egan says that it is a "heavy-handed critique" and "obviously contrived", with "the author's thumb on the scales."