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back catalogue, jumping up from number 270. Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion was, by March, the second most streamed and rented film in the Warner Bros. Yet, even if we accept this misconception for a moment, readers and viewers were drawn not to strange new worlds in galaxies far, far away, but to narratives of apocalyptic disease and societal disarray. Often portrayed as escapism, science fiction fans and critics will be quick to point out that in fact the genre is most interested in reflecting contemporary concerns and anticipating future ways of thinking. This paper demonstrates that science fiction can be a valuable tool to communicate widely around a pandemic, while also acting as a creative space in which to anticipate how we may handle similar events in the future.Īt the COVID-19 pandemic's first peak, amid confusion and conflicted messaging from some news and political sources, English-language audiences flocked to science fiction. Not because science fiction predicts these things, but because it anticipates the social structures which produce them (while at the same time permeating the culture to the extent that they become the touchstones with which the media choose to analyse current events). Nonetheless, the ideas demonstrated in these texts can be seen perpetuating through the science fiction genre, and in our current crisis, we have seen striking similarities between the behaviours of key individuals, and the manner in which certain events have played out.
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Sales and rental figures for works of fiction about pandemics and other disease outbreaks surged in 2020, but what can pandemic science fiction tell us about disease? This article surveys the long history of science fiction's engagement with disease and demonstrates the ways in which these narratives, whether in literature or film, have always had more to say about other contemporary cultural concerns than the disease themselves. In unprecedented times, people have turned to fiction both for comfort and for distraction, but also to try and understand and anticipate what might come next.