It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

of science fiction have inflicted on humanity. In Alice Sheldon’s chilling and brilliant short story ‘The Screwfly Solution’ (1977) a new disease provokes men to murder women en masse. At the end of the story we discover that an alien species had introduced a brain infection to make the human race destroy itself, so they can inherit the planet – apocalypse by targeted disease. In H. P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (1927) an alien infection arrives via a meteorite and drives people mad. In other stories the world-threatening plague has been caused by that other science fiction stalwart: the ‘mad scientist’. The scientist in the movie The Satan Bug (1965), having inoculated himself, hopes that the rest of the world will die of his germ, for reasons of environmental fundamentalism. In Frank Herbert’s novel The White Plague (1982) a geneticist who has been driven to insanity by the murder of his family creates a pathogen that kills only females. On the other side of the gender divide is Joanna Russ’s feminist masterpiece, The Female Man (1975), where in one of the alternative versions of earth’s future it portrays, a gender-specific virus has wiped out the men. By the novel’s end it is hinted that the man-destroying plague was engineered by a female scientist irked by the patriarchy. Likewise, dozens of zombie franchises start with a rogue scientist infecting the population with a genetically engineered virus.

So characteristic is assigning agency to pandemics in modern culture that the video game Plague Inc. (2012) styles its players not as doctors who are attempting to stop the spread of a pandemic, but as the sickness itself. The player’s mission is to help their plagues spread and exterminate the human race. The game’s algorithm uses a complex and realistic set of variables to simulate the spread of the plague, and models a convincing version of today’s interconnected globe. If you make your sickness too virulent, people will die before it can be passed on; if you make it too mild, people will develop resistance or medical science will create a cure. The game has sold over 85 million copies, which suggests there are plenty of people interested in adding smallpox to The Sims or introducing syphilis into Sid Meier’s Civilization.

Another twist in a slew of science fiction tales, from H. G. Wells’s seminal The War of the Worlds (1898) through to various modern retellings such as Independence Day, is that the virus is on our side, destroying alien invaders that lack our acquired immunity.

Perhaps the best portrayal of this conceit is Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985). A mad scientist, angry at being sacked from his job, smuggles an experimental virus out of his lab. It infects everybody, becomes self-aware and then assimilates everybody to itself: not only human beings but their houses, cities and landscapes melt down into a planet-wide sea of hyperintelligent grey goo. It sounds unpleasant, but it is actually a liberation: the accumulation of concentrated consciousness causes a transcendent new realm. Bear’s plague is responsible for a kind of secular Rapture.

Is it odd that we sometimes take the side of the pandemic in our storytelling? Maybe not. The theory of the contagion being God’s anger implies that we are guilty and deserve what we are getting. When Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver reinvigorated the Planet of the Apes franchise, they assumed that the same agent that raises the apes’ level of intelligence, a neuro-enhancing compound spliced into simian flu, would prove fatal to humans. The resulting trilogy (2011–17) was more than just a commercial hit; it was also an eloquent, if sometimes rather unsubtle, articulation of environmental anxiety. The few surviving humans on the planet move through the movies’ lush forestscapes, encountering newly intelligent apes who have become avatars of humanity’s contempt for the natural world. The plague that has destroyed us has given these animals wisdom, and they are angry with us. Hard to blame them, really.

Our fascination with plague has something to do with our fear that we are the offenders and that these diseases are furies that have been aroused by our guilt. Think of the artificial intelligence Mr Smith in The Matrix (1999), played with sneering panache by Hugo Weaving. Humans, he tells Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, are incapable of developing a natural equilibrium with their environment:

You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.

The third Matrix film contains my favourite scene, what to me is a visually inventive and extraordinarily eloquent critique on the subject of plague within the story of machines. Inside the Matrix, Smith has copied himself over every other human being alive. The world’s cities throng with reduplicated Smiths wearing black suits and dark glasses, glowering malevolently and preparing to destroy Neo, who walks down a storm-lashed street past ranks upon ranks of Smiths. Everybody is Smith now, evil and destructive, and Neo’s fight with one of these myriad Smiths, on the ground, in the air, through buildings and finally into a terminal crater in which his inevitable defeat is enacted, is wonderful cinema. The two men fight like gods and Neo is cast down. ‘This is my world!’ yells a gloating Smith as he hovers in the sky with lightning bolts behind him – and he’s right.

As a visual representation of the way in which the spreading of plague symbolises the proliferation of the human race, I don’t believe these scenes have been bettered. This is world-ending disease personified, and rendered with all the melodramatic dash and special effects that modern film-making can bring to bear. The crucial thing about the plague here is that it wears our face. We are disease. What