Three Books That Predicted This Pandemic
By: Shourya Agarwal
Tags: Culture, Coronavirus, Astrology, Creativity, Books

Three Books That Predicted This Pandemic

It turns out that we did see it coming after all

Credit: Pexels

All around the world we are surrounded by pandemic-talk. Every morning we wake up to a gazillion shocking Covid-19 stats. From rates of transmission to the endless wait for the vaccine, the days seem to have been tied in an infinite loop. I have even begun repeating the same conversations with my family over and over. Really, the pandemic has convinced a lot of us that there’s nothing new under the sun. In one such pandemic-induced deja vu, began to wonder about how come a contagion simply swept the 21st century off their feet. Surely, we must have seen it coming. Didn’t the authors who are the dreamers of far-flung fantasies manage to predict this catastrophe? As it turns out, they did, and that too with a near-perfect estimate. Check out these books which had warned us of the disaster well in advance. Apart from their prophetic charm, their literary brilliance is out there to startle you.

1. ‘The End of October’ by Lawrence Wright

“Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination. And yet young people like these doctors were willing to stand in the way of the most fatal force that nature has to offer.”

The Prophecy

A deadly ‘novel’ virus emerges from east Asia and slowly devours the globe. By April, a global catastrophe has shut down the economy. Silence creeps through once-busy airports and misinformation abounds. In the United States, the President, a divisive leader offers baseless reassurances and appoints the dubious vice-president as the leader of the pandemic response. This would have made a spectacular summary of the last few months, only if this had not been the plot of Lawrence Wright’s latest novel, The End of October. Wright began writing this book in 2017 and the book was scheduled for a release in late March this year, much before the pandemonium broke loose. The author was shocked by the eerie yet precise similarities between contemporary geopolitics and his writing. When inquired about his inspiration, he explained that he sensed a global health crisis brewing. He thought that the world would soon encounter some variation of his fictional ‘Kongoli virus’, something for which we weren’t prepared.

2. ‘The Eyes of Darkness’ by Dean Koontz

“Laughter is a balm for the afflicted, the best defense against despair, the only medicine for melancholy.”

The Prophecy

Koontz prophesized about the origins of the pandemic with bone-chilling accuracy in his 1981 novel. Something which was quickly noted by a curious few on the Gram. His virus, ‘Wuhan-400’ originates at the exact same place as the Coronavirus. Additionally, some of the medical data like the virus spreading through the respiratory tract and its short lifespan outside the body seem to corroborate. However, the most accurate bit would have to be the depiction of human disillusionment in face of the pandemic. The protagonist of the book is perhaps as confused as we are these days. I was also intrigued by its depiction of futuristic international relations. Though written at the heart of the Cold War, we see a near-prophetic receding of the Soviets, leaving plenty of room for China to emerge as the counter pole of the United States

3. ‘Twenty Twenty’ by Nigel Watts

“Our generation knew our cleverness would be our undoing, but we thought the end would come quickly, apocalyptically. We were wrong. It was our children, born into the 21st century, who could truly see it was not a bullet to the head that would kill us, but the seeping of poison into our bloodstream.”

The Prophecy

Though Nigel Watts tragically took his life in 1999, he lives on with his literary legacy. This 1995-book gained traction in 2020 due to its resonance with our current situation. Twenty Twenty looks at an airborne virus wreck havoc in a futurized world. Strangely, the novel is set in April 2020 and shows an America got affected the worst by the virus in the fictional world. The detail gets even more unsettling when we realize that cities like New York and Los Angeles are depicted as the epicenters of the virus in an uncanny resemblance with our present-day milieu. Watts started the book for his Ph.D. program in 1993 and it went out of print about twenty years ago. However, a new-found interest in this pandemic age has resurrected his work into bookstores.