What we can learn from books about deadly pandemics like 'The Stand'
Novel-writing may be the weirdest occupation on the planet. While public health officials are out there at all hours desperately trying to save humanity from potential pandemics — including the latest threat, the new coronavirus — fiction writers can spend entire careers threatening to murder us by the same means. And they've been doing so ever since the novel became a thing in the 19th century.
Relatively few writers, however, have succeeded in eradicating the majority of humanity. For starters, that just isn't realistic; not even history's most notorious killers, the Black Death and the 1918 flu virus, managed more than a third of any given population.
Also, it's often more dramatically interesting if the bug keeps us alive while turning us into something nightmarishly incurable — usually vampires or zombies. (See Richard Mattheson's I Am Legendin 1954, Max Brooks' World War Zin 2006, and a zillion books in-between).
But a handful of authors have managed to stay zombie-free while pushing their pandemic to the post-apocalyptic limit. Each of the books below follows the same chilling template: A virus suddenly grips a complacent world, civilization breaks down in a matter of weeks, and one or more survivors roam around, marveling at how quickly everything returns to nature. (Often a character bonds with a stray animal.)
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Our familiarity with this kind of fiction probably doesn't help the panic-buying and other unnecessarily fearful behavior when threats like the coronavirus roll around: we're conditioned to expect apocalypse. But at the same time, it speaks to our morbid curiosity about what the world might look like without us — a question even nonfiction books have tried to answer.
So who are the leading lights of these perverse post-apocalypses, how much of humanity do they manage to kill, and who is the undisputed queen of civilization-ending plagues? Let's dive in at the deep end of the world.
4. Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart
Credit: fawcettYear published:1949
The killer:"Some new and unknown disease of unparalleled rapidity ... a kind of super-measles," according to one newspaper found by the protagonist, an academic called Ish. He is made accidentally immune by a snake bite.
Kill count:Since Ish is in a cabin in the Sierra mountains when the outbreak happens, details are sketchy. But driving across the U.S. afterwards, he encounters fewer than a dozen people — suggesting that more than 90 percent of the population has died.
How fast does it spread?Very. Ish was in that cabin for just two weeks. This is the first novel to suggest that a new virus, "aided by airplane travel," could appear "almost simultaneously in every center of civilization, outrunning all attempts at quarantine."
What we learn:Another science fiction writer, Brian Aldiss, coined the phrase "cozy catastrophe" to describe books like Earth Abides. The pandemic is oddly neat, and Ish rarely encounters a single dead body. He's able to find food, fuel supplies, and a dog named Princess for his road trips. It's an introvert's paradise! Soon, however, nature starts fighting back — and Ish returns to California to find it filled with wildfires.
3. The Stand, by Stephen King
Gary Sinese gets a disturbing update from the CDC in the TV version of 'The Stand.'Credit: ABCYear published: 1978
The killer: "Blue Virus", a military-engineered superflu commonly known as Captain Trips.
Kill count:The flu is described as having "99.4 percent communicability," which doesn't exactly translate to it killing 99.4 percent of humanity, but it's in that ballpark. Although its first symptoms feel like a head cold, everyone who gets it dies within days.
How fast does it spread?King spends the whole first section of The Standpainting a very clear picture of how a virus can spread rapidly, from person to people, through a community, a state, a country. The U.S. is pretty much toast inside of three weeks.
What we learn:The U.S. government, afraid and embarrassed by its inability to contain the virus, tries to shut down all reporting that contradicts its official story. Of course, this just makes the problem worse. Imagine that.
2. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
Credit: penguin randomhouseYear published:2011
The killer:"Georgia flu"
Kill count:"Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent" of the human race, according to the novel's villain. Take that, Stephen King.
How fast does it spread?In the opening chapters, most people die within three weeks.
What we learn:After the familiar tropes of those opening chapters — panic-buying, locking yourself in your apartment, looting, the TV news going offline —we fast-forward 20 years and the mood turns surprisingly positive. The narrative mostly follows a troupe of actors around a smaller, quieter world that is, for the most part, functioning pretty well. An old airport has become a whimsical "museum of civilization." Message: Life goes on, even when most of us don't.
1. The Last Man, by Mary Shelley
Credit: wikimediaYear published: 1826
The killer:Uncertain, but this was written in an age before we had precise names for diseases. "Were it yellow fever or plague," writes Shelley, "the epidemic was gifted with a virulence before unfelt."
Kill count:Literally everyone in the world except the narrator — and this is set in the year 2100, so in theory, we're talking a greater death toll than any other novel.
How fast does it spread?The plague takes a leisurely seven years or so, and seems to take a break during winters. But it doesn't stop completely until there are three people left, then two of them drown at sea. Infection spreads by "pernicious qualities in the air;" this was written back when the miasma theory of disease was all the rage.
What we learn:Nobody's safe. The novel serves as a satire of future British society, which has turned itself into an aristocratic republic (there's still a king, he just happens to be called the Earl of Windsor). Borders are closed, politicians think their island nation is protected, but the plague hits London anyway. Eventually, the UK is invaded by desperate American refugees, and the thousand or so remaining Brits decide to go on a continental tour from Paris to Venice before they die.
In short, The Last Manis a pretty grim read about the inevitability of death. Which isn't surprising, considering Mary was mourning her husband, the poet and radical Percy Shelley. But it ends on a note of optimism: the lonely hero visits Rome, finds a sheepdog, and sets sail around the world to confirm he is in fact alone. "It was still possible, that, could I visit the whole extent of earth, I should find in some part of the wide extent a survivor," he says. We smell sequel!
These aren't the only fiction writers eerily forecasting future scenarios. For more, check out Mashable's podcast, Fiction Predictions.
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