We’re all living in a science-fiction novel now
Let’s make sure that when this ends, it’ll be a sunnier day for everyone
As soon as Toronto let customers eat on restaurant patios again, I made a beeline for Orwell’s Pub — best dang chicken wings in the city. The indoor restaurant was closed, and Chris, the guy who usually tends bar, was serving. When he came by my table, he quipped, “Seems like we’re all living in a Robert J. Sawyer novel now.”
I was surprised he knew who I was. Despite Orwell’s being a cosy “Cheers”-style “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” place, as a non-drinker, I’m usually invisible to bartenders. But Chris was right: we are living in a science-fiction novel now, and a dystopian one at that.
Since my latest novel, “The Oppenheimer Alternative,” is about the Manhattan Project, I often get asked what should be the next big-science undertaking with an all-but-unlimited budget bringing together our brightest minds. My answer: developing a gen
eral antiviral technique, rather than an endless succession of vaccines targeting one, and only one, specific virus. The old method is why our annual flu shots are sometimes ineffective; we’d guessed wrong about which strain of flu would become prevalent. It’s also why we’ve never had a vaccine against the common cold, which is caused by a vast, evermutating range of coronaviruses.
Viruses aren’t even alive. They’re just bits of genetic code encased in a protein shell, sometimes (as with the novel coronavirus plaguing us now) slicked down with a fatty coating. And that’s it.
Surely, 10 decades on from the 1918 flu pandemic, science can find a method for rendering all viruses inert. Otherwise, there will be a COVID-22, a great flu of 2029, a COVID-31, another SARS, and on and on, literally ad nauseam.
Science fictional thoughts? Perhaps. But if we’d listened to science-fiction writers earlier — going right back to H.G. Wells’s 1895 story “The Stolen Bacillus” — we’d have been planning ahead for an outbreak. Wells, by the way, was also the first to propose atomic bombs, in “The World Set Free” published in 1913. Foolish humans: we decided to make the latter rather than prepare for the former.
Of course, we must acknowledge the enormous tragedy caused by COVID-19. That said, I’ve heard many writers say they’re enjoying lockdown, working without interruptions and catching up on their reading.
That’s true for me, too, I suppose, but I’ve also suffered a huge career setback — maybe even a career killer — thanks to this damned disease.
“The Oppenheimer Alternative” is my first novel in four years. It came out June 2, when just about every brick-andmortar bookstore was closed. Although many other titles had their publication dates postponed, my novel, an alternate history about J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, was time sensitive. Its whole promotional strategy was built around the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of the atomic age with the Trinity test on July 16 and the horrific bombings of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9.
We’d had a great book-launch party planned at Toronto’s Prehistoria Natural History Centre, the only place in the city where you can buy actual trinitite glass created in the first atomic explosion. Bakka-Phoenix, the world’s oldest extant science-fiction specialty bookstore (where I myself worked in 1982) was set to handle book sales.
But that got cancelled, thanks to the pandemic lockdown. So did my cross-Canada book tour. Being part of the literary festival circuit this summer also went poof!
I’m hardly alone in being devastated by the shutting down of so much. Many people have been on edge these last few months, and although social media has helped us feel like we still have some human contact, fights break out online even more easily these days.
I got into one on my Facebook wall with a reader who complained that the Black Lives Matter movement should have waited until the pandemic was over before staging protests. I tore him to pieces, but later sent him a free autographed copy of my new book with my apologies — not for what my reply was but for the tone in which I’d presented it.
Here’s my view in more polite terms. John W. Campbell Jr., a key science-fiction editor from the 1930s to the ’60s — and also such a racist that “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin has been excoriated across the interwebs for praising Campbell while acting as master of ceremonies at the Hugo Awards sci-fi awards ceremony earlier this month — did share one bit of enduring truth with the authors, all white and almost all male, that he deigned to work with: “The future doesn’t happen one at a time.”
COVID-19 is forcing us to redefine what we mean by work, socializing, home life, vacations, economic reality, and more. Things will never go back to the way they were pre-pandemic.
And, since a reset switch is being hit across the board, people have realized, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “the fierce urgency of now.” Carpe diem; lean in; be heard; shape tomorrow.
The surging trans-rights movement (and the backlash against “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling over her stance on this issue), Black Lives Matter, Canada finally acknowledging our horrific treatment of our Indigenous peoples: it’s all about making sure that when we come out of the tunnel into the light, it’ll be a sunnier day for everyone.
Another group, usually all but hidden, will also be better off in our reset reality. Yes, many now working at home have been sorely missing the social interaction that used to accompany their jobs. As this transition becomes permanent for large segments of the workforce, we’re told it’s a huge loss; the social aspects are what makes work fun!
Well, true — for some. But for others, that forced interaction has always been anxiety-producing. Introverts everywhere are breathing sighs of relief.
As for extroverts, in-person interaction will have to move back into neighbourhoods and, yes, restaurants and pubs. If you end up craving social contact in the future, go find yourself a place like Orwell’s, where, it turns out, everybody does know your name.