Science Fiction Studies

321 PANDEMIC SYMPOSIUM Thinking Through the Pandemic: A Symposium Introduction. It would seem that both science and science fiction had prepared us well for the pandemic. Though nicknamed the novel coronavirus, SARSCoV -2 was in fact not new from an epidemiological perspective; it was only the latest iteration of a long line of zoonotically transmitted viruses with the capacity of rapid spread among humans that have been appearing with increasing frequency and severity over the last several decades: HIV/AIDS, SARS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola, and most recently SARS-CoV-1. The specter of its emergence was as robustly rehearsed in war-game pandemic simulations that have become staples of policy and governance as it was in killer viruses and zombie contagions that have returned with a vengeance to entertain viewers and gamers. It was this latter-day subgenre of pandemic sf—The Hot Zone (1994), Outbreak (1995), Pandemic (2008), Contagion (2011), Spillover (2012), and Plague Inc. (2012), among others—that served as the most immediate concordance for critics and commentators mandated to make sense of the world from the confinement of their desks. As the sub-microscopic, semi-living entity, transmitted through shared air, continued to defy geopolitical borders as easily as it overwhelmed the most sophisticated biomedical infrastructures, the search for prophetic prefigurations and manuals for survival in sf’s predictive and diagnostic capacities expanded far beyond this thematic corpus. A rich archive of visionary reckonings with the end of the world began to serve as synecdoche for the sweeping scope and monumental scale of facts—a pandemic “infowhelm” commensurate with climate data (to which Heather Houser applied the term in her eponymous book of 2020). Color-coded models and mobile interactive projections, tracking unthinkable numbers of the sick, the dead, the unemployed, and the dispossessed, generated their own neologism of “doomscrolling” through newsfeeds (Brian X. Chen, The New York Times, 15 July 2020). What made the coronavirus novel, then, was not the event of its emergence but the totality of its effect on the imagination, one that rivaled the most ambitious tropes of sf and made apocalypse and dystopia the lexicon of scientists, policymakers, journalists, and storytellers alike. It was the pandemic as consummate novum that brought Mary Shelley’s forgotten 1826 classic The Last Man out of obscurity (Eileen Hunt Botting, The New York Times, 13 March 2020) and reminded readers like us that the common cold wiped out the Martians in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898)—a detail illuminating not so much a viral continuum as the resilience of the colonial imagination in which epidemics stay corralled in foreign lands and “invisible enemies,” as the US President dubbed it, are easily vanquished. Atomic Armageddon, which Susan Sontag famously called the archetypal “imagination of disaster” in 1964, wormed its way into opeds via numerous comparisons of the US response with Chernobyl (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times, 25 April 2020; Calder Walton, The Washington 322 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Post, 8 July 2020; Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 29 July 2020). Staunch defenders of literary fiction discovered the sublime terror of environmental catastrophe in the unnamed plagues of Margaret Atwood’s MADADDAM trilogy (2003-2013) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). As both a symptom and a terrifyingly concrete manifestation of this last frame—the deep, slow, unimaginable, and multifaceted disorder often shorthanded as the climate crisis—the pandemic also repurposed apocalyptic science fiction into a politics of hope. “The pandemic is a portal,” declared Arundhati Roy in the early days of the lockdown in India, as the smog-filled skies cleared and millions of migrant workers were left with the stark choice between death by proximity and death by starvation (Financial Times 3 April 2020). Roy called the virus “a chemical experiment” that simultaneously exposed the “great derangement” of fossil-fueled global capitalism, as Amitav Ghosh put it in 2016 (The Great Derangement), and the magnitude of economic inequality it had engendered; a planet on pause was the unique opportunity to “emerge on the other side” without either pollution or prejudice. Rupture and revelation also infused Rebecca Solnit’s return to the concept of disaster utopia and liquid...