Novelists have long found pandemics compelling. Here are 20 fictional takes, ranging from the historical to the futuristic
Photo: Vulture Just as the film Contagion has found a second life with news of the coronavirus outbreak, so too are novels about epidemics popping up on reading lists around the country. With stakes so high, it’s easy to see why novelists find outbreaks of disease so compelling. Here are 20 great fictional takes, ranging from the historical to the futuristic.
$10 at Amazon Buy $10 at Amazon Buy The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton $12 A group of scientists deal with an epidemic caused by an extraterrestrial microorganism — one that’s constantly evolving and has no precedent in human history. $15 at Amazon Buy $15 at Amazon Buy The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman $9 Ryman’s sprawling, thought-provoking The Child Garden deals with a futuristic society in which viruses are used as a tool to benefit and educate humans. In this world, cancer has been cured but life spans have been reduced as an unexpected consequence. It’s a novel in which concepts of sickness, health, and mortality itself are turned on their heads. It’s also reflective of Ryman’s approach to fiction.
$10 at Amazon Buy $10 at Amazon Buy The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson Over the course of a few years in the 14th century, the bubonic plague killed millions of people in Europe. Robinson’s alternate history, The Years of Rice and Salt, is set in a world that one character describes as “a mutation of the plague, so strong it killed off all its hosts and therefore died itself.
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