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Remember during the COVID-19 pandemic we all rewatched Contagion? I’ve created this list to scratch that same viral itch. The course of human history has been shaped by deadly disease. Smallpox, the Bubonic Plague. the Spanish Flu, with each strain of infection, our culture mutates as well. Science fiction authors throughout history have utilized infection narratives to do what they do best: conjure up all the ways the future could go wrong. Humanity needs to read these 10 sci-fi books with terrifying viruses and plagues, so when COVID-20 comes around, we’ll all be better prepared.
The Stand
Arguably tied with It for the best Stephen King novel, The Stand is a post apocalyptic tale about a deadly pandemic, and a world that refuses to die. After a government engineered super-virus wiped out 99% of the population, the few immune survivors struggle on in a forever changed world. Like many of King’s characters, each survivor experiences “the shining” – a type of psychic attunement that appears in other works like The Green Mile, The Shining and Carrie. Depending on whichever direction their moral compass points, the survivors begin having visions of two separate spiritual leaders. The good dream of America’s oldest woman, a folk guitarist and prophet who lives in rural Nebraska. The bad dream of a mysterious man in black, an agent of chaos who is setting up shop in Las Vegas. As the survivors journey across plague-ridden nation to answer their respective callings, it becomes clear that Armageddon is only just beginning.
The MaddAdam trilogy
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy begins with the end of the world, and continues from there. Told in a series of flashbacks, the series’ first novel Oryx and Crake tells the tale of a mad genius who engineered humanity’s doom. A brilliant bioengineer, the scientist Crake imagined a world populated by “Crakers,” post-human beings of his own genetic design. After patenting a wonder drug that was secretly laced with Crake’s “Jetspeed Ultra Virus Extraordinary,” the scientist distributed lab-made doom across the planet. The second novel tells an alternate perspective of the end, focusing on two women who survived the apocalypse by sheltering with a religious cult – which obviously has its pros and cons. Part Mad Max, part Children of Men, part Frankenstein, this trilogy tells the tale of the man who spliced apart the world, and the survivors left to pick up the mutated pieces.
Station Eleven
One of the most uplifting post-apocalyptic novels ever written, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is theatre kid Armageddon. The novel follows the Traveling Symphony, a perambulatory band of actors and musicians who travel about a post-pandemic world performing Shakespeare. Jumping back and forth between the post-collapse present and the pre-pandemic past, the novel plays out The Tragedie of Planet Earthe in real time. Society fell due to a deadly super-virus – no government bio-weapon, no mad scientist engineering, just a freak of nature disease that our immune systems couldn’t beat. Told with all the subtle grace of a Shakespearean sonnet, Station Eleven paints a picture of humanity during our planet’s final act. The show must go on, after all.
The Andromeda Strain
From the mind that brought us Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton returns with another novel about humanity’s poor decision making skills. Like building a theme park full of resurrected dinosaurs, The Andromeda Strain chronicles the ill-thought out plan to collect alien microorganisms from the far reaches of space. After a germ-collecting satellite crash lands in Arizona, scientists are shocked to discover that a small town has been entirely annihilated by disease – save for an old man and a baby. The Tyrannosaurs Rex in this novel is “Andromeda” an extraterrestrial virus capable of rapid mutation. Clever girl. Sadly, Jeff Goldblum isn’t there to stop it.
The Girl With All The Gifts
The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey isn’t your average zombie apocalypse novel, rather a subversion of the genre. After a global pandemic turns average people into flesh-eating “hungries,” scientists in Beacon set up a facility to study a special group of children infected by the disease. Unlike their mindless adult counterparts, child hungries are able to retain their mental faculties, but become hostile when exposed human scent. Melanie is one of these young hungries, a 10 year old with a genius level IQ and a love for Greek mythology. The novel is a day in the life of a little girl who, despite her occasional ravenous hunger for flesh, is just like any other kid. If Ellie from The Last of Us grew up in a Firefly research facility instead of the mean streets of the Boston DMZ, you’d have this book.
The Last Man
Not to be confused with Y: The Last Man: a comic book about a mediocre dude who is the survivor of a plague that kills everything with a Y chromosome – Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a pandemic story from the mind that brought us Frankenstein. Hailed as the first great post-apocalyptic novel, the story takes place in the late 21st century, where a resurgence of the bubonic plague is causing rapid societal collapse. The novel follows Lionel Verney and Lord Raymond, two aristocrats who travel the world with their loved ones in a doomed attempt to outrun the disease. A elegiac, grief haunted novel, The Last Man was written after the death of Shelley’s husband and their mutual friend Lord Byron. It single-handedly birthed the trope of the “lone post-apocalyptic wanderer,” further cementing Mary Shelley’s legacy as the great-grandmother of science fiction. Without her, the genre as we know it simply wouldn’t exist.
Zone One
Zone One by Colson Whitehead is a zombie apocalypse story that focuses on the minutiae of post-collapse life. Humanity has managed to stabilize itself, and the military is now mopping up the infected with procedural efficiency. In an effort to retake New York City, civilian volunteers have been tasked with eliminating a less dangerous strain of infected, who go about their un-lives in state of catatonia. Centered around an everyman named Mark Spitz, the novel swings back and forth between the bad old days of the early pandemic and the rebuilding efforts of the present. It’s kind of like a day in the life novel about Fallout NPCs, just going about their end of the world business, until things go horribly wrong.
Blindness
Blindess by José Saramago is set in a world ravaged by an epidemic of sightlessness. Set in an unnamed city and revolving around a cast of unnamed characters, the novel details the early days of the pandemic. The government has quarantined the infected into a hospital, where rule of law breaks down as desperate people attempt to horde supplies and resources. An unrelated group of infected people (along with one woman who remains curiously immune) evolve into a tight-knit found family, and attempt to navigate their way through the claustrophobic world. A literary take on the post-apocalyptic novel, Blindness is strange, surreal, and thought provoking meditation on human nature. When things go wrong, we tend to lash out with one hand reach for each other with the other.
Clay’s Ark
When it comes to Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark, I can firmly guarantee you’ve never read a post-apocalyptic novel like this before. The story takes place in the not so distant future, where societal collapse has caused humanity to band together in small groups called “car families.” Dr. Blake Maslin and his twin teenage daughters are a car family traveling across the Mojave desert, carjacked by a spaceship crash survivor who is infected with an alien microbe. The alien disease causes anyone infected to be consumed with the desire to reproduce, the result of which is the inevitable birth of something far from human. After Blake and his daughters are kidnapped and taken to the crash survivor’s creepy ranch to meet his own “family,” things really hit the fan. Yes, this novel is about an alien sex plague that results in mutated offspring. Yes, it is as exciting, grotesque, and fascinating as it sounds.
The Companions
Another highly unique take on the post-apocalyptic virus novel, The Companions by Katie M. Flynn takes place in a world where a deadly plague has forced humanity to remain indoors. Stuck in eternal lockdown, the living can only be visited by the dead. I don’t mean zombies, I mean the digitally uploaded consciousnesses of the deceased who are implanted into machines. The “companionship” program allows people to return from beyond the grave, implanted inside everything from rolling R2-D2 style robots to androids that pass for human. While wealthy companions are able to return to their families, the less fortunate are “leased” to strangers in order to ease the epidemic of loneliness. A sixteen year old girl named Lilac is one of these unfortunates, digitally resurrected in a mechanical body and forced to obey commands – but when she overrides her own programing, she mounts a daring escape into the post-pandemic wasteland. It’s a novel about how capitalism, like a cockroach, is able to survive and thrive in the grimmest of circumstances – and so can its victims.
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Sarah Fimm
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