Fictional dystopia and Pandemics
Christopher G. Moore
Edward Casagrande 2020
Global pandemics and dystopia are literary Siamese twins joined at the hip and sharing the same vital organs: lungs in particular. As the current COVID-19 is a repository virus that attacks the lungs, killing a small percentage of those infect — mostly the elderly (over 70 years old).
COVID-19 opens a window on our species vulnerability to novel and deadly viruses. What we are experiencing — the fear, disruption, panic, incompetency of political authority — is a preview of what will become a more frequent and deadly feature of our lives as a result of climate change.
Drought, flooding, extreme heat create an environment that allows for more COVID-19 like-viruses. Such virus are likely to find this environmental hospitable allowing them longer breeding seasons and the ability to migrate to new regions no longer hostile to their well-being. Other viruses will likely emerge from the melting of permafrost and ice sheets. We will likely lack immunity to these newcomers. Our immune system has evolved within the perimeters of certain temperature, heat and humidity perimeters. Changing those perimeters suddenly is what leads to extinction.
There is a history of writers fashioning stories from deadly viruses attacking a large percentage of the global population, leaving death, famine, dislocation and the collapse of civilization. Films have used the virus trope to great effect. 28 Days Later is pure noir in the way people hand a pandemic. Contagion which was released in 2011 was another dress rehearsal on how institutions, relationships, government, and families breakdown under the weight of a full-blown pandemic that killed millions.
Novelists have also gazed into crystal ball examining a future where a virus reigns terror on the population. Stephen King’s 1978 novel Shinning featured a virus that unleashed a pandemic killing off 99% of the population. With that level of destruction, the book by necessity turns into a horror story. We have no other way other than horror to experience such a massive level of death. We fall back on our basic primitive emotional tool kit in order to survive.
‘The Eyes of Darkness’ by Dean Koontz is high on the top ten list of scary/virus/contagion books. In Koontz’s 1981 novel the reader enters a world with a killer virus was manufactured in Wuhan, China. That more than ticked the box for prophesy making. Unfortunately other parts of the story have no basis in the current reality. Never mind, people read only those parts of the novel which track the few similarities that connect the book to the COVID-19. There are other novelistic devices used by Koontz for which there is no evidence in our situation. For instances, there is no evidence (conspiracy theories aside) that the current virus was in fact a Chinese bioweapon created by the Chinese.
In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2011 Station Eleven, 99% of the global population is wiped out by a virus. Sometimes the virus originates in outer space as in Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain. It is a race between us and them. Outside invaders gathers the species into collective action and a surprise ending. It is life on our planet in the aftermath of a near extinction event that reinvents who we are and what we have left behind. In 2018 Ling Ma’s Severance was premised on the infection of a Chinese virus converting New York City into ZombieVille.
The contagion novel doesn’t have to be dystopian. In 1985 Greg Bear’s Blood Music envisaged the mass extinction of the species by a virus had liberated people whose merged consciousness appeared into another dimension of time and space. There are many others including Robin Cook’s Outbreak and Max Brooks’ World War Z.
My personal favourites in this genre are Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Jose Saramago’s Blindness. Each of these two works brilliantly reveals the feral emotions deep within all of us, dormant, lurking below the surface waiting for a virus to open the door and let them control the space with violence.
I have a ‘bat’ in this game, too. Make that a Rhinolophus bat.[1] I’ve added a book to the list. The final novel in a long-running crime/mystery/noir series. Vincent Calvino takes his last case takes place in a virus infested Bangkok.
In Dance Me to the End of Time, a secret Chinese lab in Bangkok has produced a virus that genetically alters those who are exposed. The mood of the book is captured by Edward Casagrande’s art exhibition inspired by the book.[2] The artwork and the novel reveal how the infected population experienced a large spike in their ‘intelligence.’ Some were immune to the virus. Others sought a vaccine. I set mystery in an imagined Bangkok decades from now, climate change has left the city, country and region in the midst of a great upheaval. The book was released on 27th January 2020 before the news of COVID-19 began to circulate widely. In other words, I’d been unaware of the COVID-19 virus at the time of writing the book. My interest in a virus scenario came from reading the climate change studies, projections and analysis of various experts. One of the risk that I kept coming across was the idea of a pandemic occurring more frequently and with greater lethality because of climate change. That possibility caught my attention.
I believe that COVID-19 is only the beginning of a long-line of infection-agents, both natural and manufactured, that will accelerate with the impact of climate change. In Dance Me to the End of Time, it seems a natural, almost organic evolution, that a dedicated small lab could sequence the DNA of a virus and weaponize it for a variety of purposes. What protections will be have in a world where such virus are being developed, tested, and deployed?
We’ve judged our societies on how they are able to adapt to the pace of cultural, political and social changes. But the metronome has quickened its pace. Changes, environmental and technological, are moving us ahead much faster than we can understand or appreciate. The complexity of things makes the way we’ve shaped and live in the world fragile. People seek safe spaces and have lost basic survival skills. There is less time for institutions and people to adapt to the accelerated rate of change. These issues are made more salient because of climate change. I’ve used the vehicle of pandemic, bio-engineering, and a changed climate to construct a world where the old problem solving processes and techniques falter. Set in the Great Upheaval, I examine the conflicts, the way people handle the hard choices when their backs are to the wall. We will need to learn from fiction how to behave in the future. We need working models. Our existing one’s won’t be there to save us.
I am one of those writers who had a brief, blurry glimpse of the future of viruses on our planet and how this will be the ultimate test for our survival. A month later, the world is consumed by the latest news of month COVID-19 virus. This relatively benign virus has caused mass fear and panic. This is a Small Upheaval compared to what we should expect is coming down the road. The Great Upheaval will be much worse. It will hit harder, quicker and with more lethal force.
We have seen a vague outline of how our future lives will be shaped by natural and man-made viruses. Going forward, we face a higher risk from both state and non-state actors who have access to the science of biotechnology and who with a small team can assemble the machinery necessary to create deadly pathogens. Our changed climate world will allow the evolution of new viruses to which we have little or no immunity. Natural virus or engineered pathogens are in our future. It’s only a question of how far into the future we must go before all the doors are closed behind us and there is a high hostile wall in our path. COVID-19 is a reminder our civilization is a work in progress. Going forward, we are all volunteers in an involuntary experiment on our resilient and robust we are physically and mentally. We can expect that experiment to be run many times. How many times? No one can say. Nor can we say who and what will emerge out of the other end of tunnel of contagion.
[1] https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-020-01533-w
[2] The opening artwork is from Edward Casagrande’s art exhibition titled Mapping Calvino, Station NO. 7: Smoke on No Water https://www.christophergmoore.com/art-terminal
