‘My novel now feels unnerving’: authors who predicted the pandemic
Aplague that starts with a pangolin, doctors sounding the alarm but not being listened to, countries slow to close their borders, a virus spreading until it’s too late to contain it, a cruise ship of passengers stranded with nowhere to dock. Sound familiar? I’m describing 2020, of course, but all of those things are also present in my novel, The End of Men,which I wrote between September 2018 and December 2019. I’m now answering to Cassandra.
The End of Menis set between 2025 and 2031 and shows a world in which a virus to which women are immune kills 90% of the world’s men. I didn’t actually set out to write a “pandemic” novel. I wanted to explore what the world would look like without men – what would parliament and hospitals and dating and childcare look like? What would change? What would stay the same? What would it feel like to live in a world so affected by loss and which needed to be rebuilt around, and by, women? A pandemic was the most realistic way of writing that world; a reverse-engineered thought experiment.
Speculative fiction has always offered an opportunity to explore big ideas through an alternative reality in which a “What if?’’ question is introduced into the world as we know it. The physical dominance of women exposes gender inequality in Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel, The Power;the inhumanity that follows global infertility in PD James’s The Children of Men, from 1992, shows society’s vulnerability;the clones created in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) explore what it means to be human.
But as a writer of speculative fiction, I never expected to gauge the distance between my novel and the world I was living in. Some things I wrote about, for instance how characters would feel after years of a pandemic, now feel unnerving. I imagined Dawn – a character who rises quickly up the higher ranks of the civil service partly by dint of remaining alive – being excited to travel again. For her, a late flight and cramped plane seat seem both exotic and nostalgic after years of closed borders.
My editor and I removed the pangolin from the final draft of the book because, as she told me: “People will think you’ve stolen it from the real world.” Other elements of the story that I worried would seem far-fetched have been mirrored by reality. The drive for a vaccine throughout 2020 and 2021 has been, arguably, one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements. As I wrote about fictional scientists trying to find a cure in my fictional 2020s, I wondered if a vaccine being discovered quickly would be dismissed as silly. Would it take months, years, decades? Would it, maybe, not happen at all?
Pandemic stories have always been popular but, as real life became dystopian in the terrifying, uncertain months of spring 2020, many found comfort in stories of viruses even worse than Covid-19. Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagionbecame one of the internet’s most watched movies. Station Eleven,Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 novel,in which a virus kills almost the entire population and society breaks down, rose back up the book charts. Plague Inc.,a video game first released in 2012, has had a resurgence. Fictional plagues even cropped up in discussions about public policy: Matt Hancock, the health secretary, referenced the panic around the order of priority for vaccination in Contagionwith regard to his own vaccine policy (although I should note he was clear that he was separately advised on policy). At first glance this seems strange, ghoulish almost. Is it so unexpected, though? People have always used fiction as a way of processing the world in times of crisis.
While those stories were published long before 2019, the recent spate of pandemic novels will be the last prepandemic pandemic novels ever to be written. Severanceby Ling Ma (2018) tells the haunting story of “Shen fever”, a fungus that originates in Shenzen and leaves sufferers technically alive but unaware of their existence. “The state media in China controls the optics of this, so we don’t know the real statistics,” Ma writes, with a prescience that made me mark the page and keep returning to it. Later, the protagonist, Candace, recalls the doctors claiming the US needed to quarantine “whole regions, especially during Thanksgiving”, which cast my mind back to the “I’m not travelling this Thanksgiving and neither should you” posts that swept American social media in November 2020.
In Last Oneatthe Partyby Bethany Clift (published in February 2021), a pandemic is a source of intermingled humour and horror. The novel’s unnamed main character has the time of her life (raiding Harrods, getting drunk on champagne) before falling apart as a virus, 6DM, kills almost everyone else on Earth within six days of their contracting it. Under the Blue by Oana Aristide, published in March, follows a reclusive artist and two enigmatic sisters on a road trip across a deserted, post-pandemic Europe. Meanwhile, The End of Octoberby Lawrence Wright is almost painfully prescient – a specialist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigates a potential coronavirus originating in Indonesia.
More than a year into a pandemic, at times it still hits me in waves that we are living through the unthinkable and yet, these times are not entirely unprecedented. A globalised world with electricity and internet and flights has never experienced a medical crisis of this magnitude but pandemics are not new, nor confined to the 21st century. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, set during the 1918 influenza pandemic, arrived with uncanny timing in summer 2020.One of the most successful books of the last year has been Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, in which a child is killed by the plague. Set in the 1500s, with Shakespeare’s family at its core, it would not, at first glance, seem relatable to a childless 27-yearold living in London in 2020. And yet, as I read Hamnet,more than the horror, it was the normalityof the disease that I connected with: the way it was woven into the characters’ lives; accepted and dreaded and dealt with. “It is also plague season again in London,” O’Farrell writes, a sentence that felt plucked out of my own life as we faced yet another lockdown in December.
One question authors now have to reckon with is whether or not to include Covid-19 in their books. The End of Menwas bought by my publishers in early February 2020. By late March I was unwell with Covid and approaching edits with a lingering cough. My editor and I had the bizarre job of reviewing my manuscript in which a pandemic spreads across the world, as a pandemic spread across the world. We changed the cause of the virus from a pangolin (at that time prime suspect as the source of coronavirus) to a type of monkey but preserved every other part of my imaginary characters’ response to the pandemic. And, even though the book begins in 2025, we chose not to mention Covid. It felt too jarring then, and now, to introduce into fiction the real-life pandemic we’re experiencing, even if that fiction is close to the truth. I wonder if we’ll reach a point when Covid can be referenced – briefly, casually – in a novel without it feeling painful. Will romance novels and thrillers mention, in passing, people wearing masks and social distancing in the strange days of the early 2020s?
Now there is light at the end of the tunnel, I wonder how many of us will keep reading pandemic stories, or pick them up having avoided them. There is something primally comforting about reading the resolution of a story when that resolution isn’t yet, in real life, in our grasp. Hope and resilience are, after all, the parts of TheEnd of MenI’m happiest to have predicted. Nurses and doctors continuing to do extraordinary work, with care and compassion, in unbearable circumstances. Scientists doing the previously impossible and finding a vaccine in years when it “should” have taken decades. People coping, adapting, enduring.
•The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird is published by Borough (£14.99).To order a copygo to guardianbookshop.com.Delivery charges may apply.
My editor and I had the bizarre job of reviewing my manuscript in which a pandemic spreads across the world, as a pandemic spread across the world