Episode 54: Science fiction didn't prepare us for the pandemic
In the 1993 musical comedy Zero Patience, people are trying to cope with the AIDS pandemic and homophobia with panache.
Pandemics are a recurring trope in science fiction, but this turns out to be surprisingly unhelpful when we're facing a contagion in reality. We talk to Mike Chen, author of the new pandemic novel A Beginning at the End, about how science fiction uses disease as an allegory for almost everything except, well, disease. Mike wrote his novel over a year before the COVID-19 outbreak, and tells us what it's like to make a prediction that comes true--sort of.
References, citations, & etc.
Mike Chen and his novel A Beginning at the End
The Last Man, by Mary Shelley
Zero Patience, dir. John Greyson
12 Monkeys, dir. Terry Gilliam
28 Days Later, dir. Danny Boyle
Planet of the Apes (1968), dir. Franklin Schaffner
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), dir. Rupert Wyatt
The Last Ship series (2014), based on the novel by William Brinkley
The Stand (TV series, based on the novel by Stephen King)
The Wanderers, by Chuck Wendig
Famous Men Who Never Lived, by K Chess
Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
The White Plague, by Frank Herbert
Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuarón
Inferno, by Dan Brown
Road to Nowhere Trilogy, by Meg Ellison
Slither, dir.
Palimpsest, by Catherynne Valente
The Cell, by Stephen King
100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
Codon Zero, by Jim Hendee
The Last of Us (videogame)
Vampires Anonymous, by Jeffrey McMahan
Scene with blood tests in The Thing, dir John Carpenter
Contagion, dir. Steven Soderbergh
Andromeda Strain (2008 mini-series), based on a novel by Michael Crichton
Guy murders his friend after binge-watching Walking Dead
Legends of Tomorrow series (2016)