“Covid novels”?
I reacted badly to an article in the February 21st NY Times, “Writers Wonder Whether People Want to Curl Up with a Covid Novel.” The reason? The Times wants to label any novel dealing with a pandemic in this manner, which is completely moronic, of course.
Is Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain a Covid novel? What about my own More than Human: The Mensa Contagion and “The Last Humans” series? We can’t ask Michael his opinion, but I can tell you mine: I’ll verbally blast anyone who says my books are Covid novels (as I’m doing now to the editors of the Times!).
Many stories have been written with a pandemic theme. Strain and More than Human are both about ET viruses, but mine turn out to be a lot more benign than Michael’s. In “The Last Humans” series, I consider the plausible scenario where an enemy uses a bioengineered virus as a WMD. Clancy also did that in one of his novels—I can’t remember which one—but his hero stopped that attack whereas mine has the more difficult job of coping with the post-apocalyptic aftermath. (Of course, in the real world, we might want to blame Xi’s China of doing that with Covid…or maybe Trump?)
The WMD scenario is actually more plausible than the ET scenario, but both are examples where bioengineered viruses can lead to drastic upheavals and die-offs. It would be another case of tech coming back to might the foolish humans who create it, perhaps well-meaning but not too bright as they ignore their unintended consequences.
I prefer the benign consequences of More than Human to Strain‘s. And I don’t know why I continue to promote “The Last Humans” series. The traditional publisher of the first book in the series (Black Opal Books) really disappointed me, and then the Amazon bots confused both books. The series seems to be doomed whether the Times might call it a Covid book or not.
Right now, I suppose that most readers aren’t in the mood for any fiction involving pandemics. I can understand that. But readers’ complaints about vaccine and masking mandates enacted to protect us against Covid fall on my deaf ears when I think that people would have had ample warning about pandemics if they had only read more pre-pandemic literature.
Sci-fi, mystery, and thriller novels often provide useful warnings about threats humans could face. When we ignore them, there can be real and deadly consequences!
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Coming this spring! I hope you weren’t spoiled by the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” novels, Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance, that you can download for free (see the list of free fiction on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). I was thinking about ending the series, you see, but I’ve changed my mind. Esther and Bastiann conspired with my muses (really banshees with Tasers!) to “encourage” me to write novel #8, The Klimt Connection. Despite the title (Gustav Klimt was an Austrian artist), the novel is another warning about how we can never let our guard down in the eternal war of democracy vs. autocracy (Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine is a recent example of the dangers). This novel will be published in ebook format by Draft2Digital. Look for it then, wherever quality ebooks are sold.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
