Harry Turtledove writes in a genre known as alternate history. The premise is to usually take an event in history and to wonder if something different had happened what the effect on the world would be. In The Wages of Sin, Turtledove creates a world where HIV was spread via the slave trade in the 1500s, then takes the reader to 19th-century England.

What if Henry VIII died of “The Wasting” (as it’s known) before he could separate England from the Roman Catholic Church? We find England to still be under the Papacy. When we could have Queen Victoria, we have King Michael III. Reacting to the spread of The Wasting, the patriarchy decided that all women should be sequestered away from men, locked like prisoners in their homes, only going out in groups and covered much the same way some Muslim sects use burqas.

In the city of Salisbury, a young woman resents the way things are. She resents being a prisoner, and she resents the way men are free to treat her like a piece of meat. Viola Williams is a doctor’s daughter and has access to books that stir her imagination. Her father also talks to her like more of a contemporary. Women do not choose their own spouses. Deals are brokered between families and her father reaches an agreement with his closest friend for Viola to marry his son, Peter. Peter is about to leave for London to study law like his father.

The industrial age has also not happened, and travel to London is still by stagecoach, making Peter’s return to visit his family any time during his law studies an impossibility. He’s an intelligent young man, and Viola does like him the one time they meet, so she agrees to the marriage. Her father does give her the final say. London, however, is very different than Salisbury and Peter is exposed to all kinds of temptation.

The Wages of Sin is very well done. At first when I was reading this, I felt much like Viola Williams does. Why is it that women are sequestered away and treated like prisoners while the men have freedom that goes beyond even what they had in our timeline? Men are allowed to cat-call and grope women in public and no one bats an eye. Violet’s father is not outraged when it happens to her, as a father in our time would be.

The response of the patriarchy to The Wasting was to sequester women, but The Wasting was spread by men who slept with slaves, then came back to their countries and slept with prostitutes and their wives back home. They didn’t sequester the men, although once a man is confirmed to have The Wasting, he is branded. Even then, he is not kept apart from society. Men have all the advantages and women have nothing except a life as a virtual prisoner once they hit puberty.

Viola represents change. She is tired of the life she lives, as are many other women. However, they cannot do much about it with the rules of society that keep them oppressed. While waiting for Peter to return, she begins writing a book about what a society might look like if The Wasting with its oppressive laws hadn’t happened. Does this signal the beginning of change? The character of Viola is central to the setting. She represents the women who are fed up all over the world, but they are prevented from having these conversations. The book she is writing threatens to expose how women really feel. Even her father and her future father-in-law don’t understand just how unhappy the women in their households are.

Like many of Turtledove’s books, there’s a lot of repetition. He repeats things over and over, such as Peter’s dissatisfaction with his roommate, Viola hating the way men treat her when she does venture out, and her father the doctor beating himself up when he loses a patient. Some of this serves to drive home the sheer boredom of the womens’ situation. However, the vast majority of it could have been cut out. I kept waiting for the book to make its point, and it does in the latter half of the book quite well. My question now is if Turtledove will make this a series. I don’t think it needs to be. The Wages of Sin stands fine on its own, but the temptation is there to show women finally being empowered to not be prisoners in their homes.

The story here is quite different for alternate history, and I really enjoyed it. I liked seeing AIDS presented just as a disease as well. There was not connotation with homosexuals as the majority of the spreading of the disease took place in the heterosexual community. It is a disease known to be spread by sexual contact and the idea of sequestering women so men can feel like they know their wives will be free of the disease for them seems a bit absurd, but the way it’s written it works quite well.