The contagion in science fiction

In early 2020, a 2011 movie,  Contagion, suddenly became a global hit due to its chilling resonance with reality. Contagion  “stars” a deadly virus carried by an apparently hale and hearty traveller from Hong Kong to Minnesota, triggering a pandemic. 

Plagues, pandemics and their outcomes occupy a large, if macabre niche, in popular culture. Think of the Bible with its personification of the “Pale Rider”, Pestilence, as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Or the Decameron, where the narrators practice social distancing during the Black Death. The Decameron even had its 19th century corollary in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, which imagines what happens when social distancing doesn’t work. 

More modern riffs on this theme would include Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera  with its doctor who tries to eradicate the epidemic disease, and Katherine Ann Porter’s Pale Horse Pale Rider,  which portrays heart-wrenching loss during the Spanish Flu of 1918-20. The Garhwali writer, Sudhir Thapliyal, also wrote a haunting short story about a soldier returning from World War I who wakes up to find he’s in a village of ghosts. 

Some of the most thought-provoking work about pandemics comes from the genre of science fiction and fantasy. SF is by definition, about speculating on unlikely situations, and an array of talented thinkers have tried their hand at a genre I’ll loosely label Pandemic SF. 
 

Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain and Stephen King’s The Stand were two works that made mainstream best seller status. Andromeda Strain is about a desperate scramble to contain an alien virus that arrives in Arizona, courtesy a crashed satellite. 

The Stand goes a lot deeper and wider in its perspective. It’s a doorstopper of a book, with the canonical edition logging 1,400-plus pages. The story starts with the release of a bio-weaponised strain of the flu, which causes a breakdown of civilisation. The book meanders through decades as it follows individuals in small communities struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. 

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy has a similar breadth of themes. In Ms Atwood’s vision, the dystopia is caused by a bioweapon created and released by a twisted genius (Crake).  The sequels, The Year of the Flood  and Maddaddam, continue to add detail to this post-apocalyptic landscape, and there’s an epic conclusion. The trilogy demands the reader’s full attention as it skips back and forth in time and looks at the same individuals and incidents from different angles. 

Another equally good exploration of similar themes is Station Eleven,  an under-rated classic from Emily St John Mandel, which won the 2015 Arthur C Clarke award in 2015. Station Eleven starts with a paparazzi-turned-emergency-paramedic, Jeevan Chaudhury unsuccessfully attempting to resuscitate an actor who collapses while playing King Lear. Inside a few weeks, most members of the cast are dead from the “Georgia Flu”.

The story then jumps a decade or so, to a period when some of the survivors from troupe are working as travelling players moving through a post-pandemic world. Then it winds back in time and space, into the backstory of that first dead actor, and of Jeevan, etc. It’s an unusual look at how a few people may try to preserve the last remnants of art and culture in a world gone insane. 

There’s lots more in the way of high-quality pandemic fiction, including variations such as John Christopher’s, The Death of Grass (1956) where the virus kills off wheat and rice, causing global famine. John Scalzi’s imaginary virus usually causes mild flu. But about one per cent of those infected lose neuro-muscular control, while retaining their mental faculties. These victims of Haden’s Syndrome, as it’s called, interact and travel by using robots (threepios) directly controlled by their brains. The hero is a Haden victim, who is also an FBI agent.  

All these pandemic SF visions vary in style and quality. But they tend to have a few things in common. There is a killer disease: It may be a bioweapon or it may be an alien mutation. This disease changes the world in drastic ways and we see how people learn to cope with a new, dystopic, post-pandemic reality. 

Some of this is likely to pan out in reality. It’s obvious that Covid-19 will change the world, indeed it already has. Living in the moment as we are, it’s hard to see the shape of 2021 but it will definitely be markedly different from 2019. 

However, one assumption common to most of the science fiction has been belied. Imaginary pandemics feature very lethal diseases, with high infection and mortality rates. Well, we’ve learnt the hard way that a moderately infectious disease with a relatively low mortality rate can cause a spectacular amount of damage.