Post #208 April 6 2020

“Plagues and Writers”

Plague stories have a long tradition in the world of literature.  To my way of thinking, such stories are a part of the larger apocalyptic tradition…stories of the end times.  Stephen King’s The Stand comes to mind, when we speak of plague stories.  In fact, I just finished reading Stephen Baxter’s Ark, about a world that has been totally flooded and the few survivors escape the ensuing chaos in a starship headed for a distant world…not specifically a plague story but very much in the same vein.

 What makes for a good plague story?  Below, I’ve come up with a few ideas.

1. Plague stories are thick with a sense of fear, ultimate doom, and the end times.  Apocalypse is the word that comes to mind.  We get this word from the Greek word for revelation.  Plague stories often deal with implacable, invisible enemies.
2. To be successful, plague stories must provoke a sense of empathy for the main characters.  This kind of story is usually done with a broad brush, so it’s better to dramatize things by experiencing it through the eyes of a selected few characters.  There are often lots of people in these stories, the poor souls.  Many of them are essentially cannon fodder for the storyteller, dying in grotesque ways, often in great numbers.
3. Many plague stories are known for sweeping settings and ghoulish depictions of the horror, made worse because you can’t see the enemy and no amount of money or resources can hold it off.  One of the delights that readers get from these stories is seeing the upper strata of society get the same treatment as the little people…a cruel sense of justice prevails as everybody suffers equally.
4. As mentioned, plague stories are very much in the tradition of most apocalyptic stories.  Today, we see stories of this type often dealing with environmental or climatic disasters.  Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 comes to mind and there are many others. 
5. Many plague stories offer some kind of redemptive resolution at the end.  The characters heal and learn new things about themselves, their families and neighbors and society.  Plague stories sometimes resolve themselves with a kind of ‘love overcomes all’ theme, even overcoming gruesome disease and death.  Also, we see how critical togetherness is for the main characters, as misery loves company.
    
   Many years ago, I began my series of sf novels Tales of the Quantum Corps, with a book called Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor (still available online at Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers).  In this story and the ensuing titles in Tales, I describe the development and employment of a nano-scale robotic entity which has some of the characteristics of a programmable virus.  I called it ANAD, for Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler.  Though technically a very small robot, ANAD has a processor architecture based in part on the discovered genome of an ancient virus, a virus left on Earth by ancient extraterrestrial visitors, who had planned that Evolution would make their virus the dominant lifeform on this planet.  Of course, that didn’t work out (so far), so much of the series deals with the growing understanding that the Old Ones are coming back to fix this ‘mistake.’
   There are, of course, many well-known plague stories: The Plague (Albert Camus); Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe); The Andromeda Strain (Michael Crichton); The Last Man (Mary Shelley); and Mask of the Red Death (Edgar Allan Poe) are just some that come to mind.
    
   Face it: we love plague stories.   Why should this be such an enduring storytelling tradition? 

1. There but for the grace of God go I.  We can live vicariously in a dangerous time through these stories. 
2. We like to see memorable characters overcome great odds.
3. We like to believe that humanity can prevail even against great odds.  We seek resolution to problems that seem too big to have a resolution.

Perhaps there is no better example of this than a story from real life.  In 1665/66, Sir Isaac Newton fled London to escape the effects of the Black Death (aka, the bubonic plague).  Hunkering down at his family estate Woolsthorpe Manor, ripped from his career as an academic at Cambridge University, Newton was left with little to occupy his restless mind.  Yet out of this experience and during his enforced isolation, he developed the initial ideas for something he called “a method of fluxions,’ which today we know as modern Calculus.  There are even apocryphal stories that it was at this time that Newton witnessed an apple falling from a tree and began pondering something he would later call a Law of Universal Gravitation.

Done well, plague stories emphasize many aspects of human nature and society.  They give us a chance to live in another world, one which we wouldn’t normally chose to live in, and experience a full range of emotions and incidents, fear, love, togetherness, redemption, social justice, compassion and selfishness.  Plagues and plague stories seem to bring out both the best and worse in us.  In some ways, plague stories are a mirror in which we see ourselves for what we are: complicated moral beings simultaneously capable of both surpassing heights of compassion and devotion and unimaginable depths of depravity and greed, often at the same time.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 13, 2020.

See you then

Phil B.