What dystopian novels can tell us about the COVID-19 pandemic
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian post war novels form genres of literature that are wide-ranging and diverse, but all share certain characteristics. This is largely due to the context from which they first emerged, which in those I focus on, imbued them with concerns that simply did not exist in human history before the second half of the twentieth century. Although plagues and pandemics have evolved alongside (and inside) human beings from our earliest days, the surge in the size of the human population, as well as the emergence of technological efficiency in decimating those populations, have lead us to imagine the many ways we can bring about our own extinction. Enter the dystopian novel.
These novels, particularly those centered on the post-apocalypse, have remained popular since their earliest post-WWII appearance. Why would such an unhappy topic remain popular? There are numerous reasons and theories, of course, from the Aristotelian theory of catharsis to the natural longing to reimagine our subconscious fears. Whatever the reason, these narratives echo our present-day fixations, even more so since we seem to be living in one.
What makes our current pandemic so much more "novelistic" than other global calamities? After realizing that the shock associated with this atrocity emerges from our privileged, "safe," Western experience, the fact that our privilege cannot even slow the onslaught of the virus seems to be itself an element of fantasy. We are accustomed to massively destructive weapons, incursions of aliens, and the dire reversals of the climate raining down on the heads of others.
Yet, the tantalizing fear remains that we may be subject to this unexpected and existential threat. Hence, novels such as the foundational I Am Legend (1954) remain popular even into recent years, and is an early look at the destruction of civilization wrought by a pandemic. Alas, Babylon (1959), a novel emerging from the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War era, takes place in the United States and brings to the forefront of the reader’s imagination the repercussions of nuclear destruction. The Day of the Triffids (1951) tells the story of a blinding meteor shower that leads to the deaths of human beings in numerous and horrible ways. However humans imagine human extinction, the impetus is the same: even with our vast technological invention and capitalist access to convenience, we are, even if only subconsciously, all subject to the same threats as every other human being on the planet. The control of our fates is taken from us, and it is thrilling.
More recent novels point to the genre's not just enduring, but increasing popularity, often leading to their re-interpretation in film. World War Z (2006), The Hunger Games (2008), Divergent (2011), Station Eleven (2014), are just a very few of the numerous dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels emerging in recent years, pointing to the fact that the concerns embodied in the novels remain at the forefront of our imaginative preoccupation. The characteristics that they all share—implicit or explicit existential threat, class struggle, overturning of common definitions of morality—are all present in our experience of this pandemic.
The significance of these novels within the present-day pandemic resides, in part, in the suddenness, and the unbelievability of it. Like the characters in such novels as Wanderers (2019), by Chuck Wendig, a book released just months before the appearance of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, the main characters discover a pandemic before it has manifested widely in the population, but are too late to stop its proliferation. The novel follows the infection’s rapid spread, which causes one of the protagonists, a CDC scientist, to think to himself, "Will the internet remain even as we cease to populate it? Will our satellites keep spinning up there, networks reaching out to a population that has long gone dead and rotten?" (480). This existential crisis, bound up as it is in our collective digital identity, may similarly cause us to reflect in the present moment: "Will our story, now, live on in a novel yet-to-be written? What part do I play in that story?"
