Jun. 11th, 2020

hudebnik: (Default)
Or more properly "speculative fiction".

There are various aspects of our current predicament that have been explored by SF authors in the past. Some that I know of:

  • Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I haven't actually read this one, but I hear that it's relevant to the Trump presidency.

  • Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Talents, in which a populist demagogue wins the Presidency on the slogan "Make America Great Again" and a lot of sucking-up to the religious right. But one gets the impression in the book that he's a competent adult, not a petulant toddler, and that he actually believes some of the religious-right stuff he spouts.

  • "Being There", the movie starring Peter Sellers as a mentally handicapped gardener who makes decisions and pronouncements by watching TV, and by the end of the movie is the Republican nominee for President. But he's gentle and good-natured.

  • Robert W. Sawyer's WWW: Wake, in which a highly-contagious disease jumps from animals to humans in a remote Chinese province. The Chinese government exterminates the human population of the infected area and temporarily shuts down China's Internet connections to the rest of the world to prevent the story from leaking.
    (Not really a spoiler: that all happens in the first few chapters of book 1 of a trilogy.)

  • And of course lots of people have written about racial conflicts in the U.S.



But there must be an already-written SF story in which a modern industrialized society responds to a pandemic by shutting down face-to-face businesses and social contact, and the effects of this. Such as what happens if workers don't go back to the office?, and how children who grow up being told not to leave the house or be within 6 feet of anybody outside the family will adjust when it's over.

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