Editor’s Note: Below is a very intriguing series of synopsis(s) which reveal the whole “pandemic” issue to be a rather constant theme of mankind in this modern era. These types of “global disaster” stories are not evident before “modern” times, with the exception of the Armageddon scenario found in the Christian Bible.
Perhaps other regions boost global disasters and I Am unaware of these,yet the main issue is how main takes technology (or whatever is at hand in any era), and uses that tool for destruction.
Why does this happen…fear is the answer, as the unknown becomes inextricably linked to death! This is why Love Wins with Love by providing only providing the BEST (Beautifully Educing Systems Transforming) circumstances for any situation!
So…let’s rethink each of the scenarios provided below with a positive outcome as each of the major protagonists learn the “secret” of their own source of internal essence, with resulting power…that of Love.
You say this is nonsensical? I remind you to look at a different alternative which is soon to develop on our world… a “Love Pandemic”! This realization will lead all to take and make actions resulting in holding and BEing in…
Quantum Joy
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Pandemic Tests – When Science Fiction Becomes Reality. By Disclosure News.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. (Sherlock Holmes)
In Science Fiction literature many writers have tried to predict a future where technology, scientific research, ideas and things change human life.
Sometimes they improve it, often they make it worse.
No doubt about man’s destiny: multiply, progress, build. Fight, destroy. In many stories the theme of the ‘next day’ recurs, where a humanity that has returned to its origins or is about to do so is described.
Many books, many stories and the most recent ones have predecessors that precede all the themes. The apocalyptic visioban of man’s destiny dominates as evidence that fear is often generated by the struggle between the social organization, which is supposedly indestructible, and nature, which is invincible.
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Edgar Allan Poe – The Masque of the Red Death, 1842
The master of terror masterfully describes how the plague can spread first in unawareness, then in removal, finally in the inevitable horror.
The Red Death is devastating the territories of Prince Prospero who decides to retire, together with friends and courtiers, to his palace so as to avoid contagion.
During a masked ball a mysterious figure appears wearing a blood-stained shroud and a mask depicting the face of a corpse.
t crosses the rooms of the building amid the bewilderment of those present. Someone manages to remove the costume from the mysterious guest: there is nothing under it.
It is the Red Death who managed to enter the palace.
Jack London – The Scarlet Plague (The Scarlet Plague, 1912)
Set in 2013 in a world dominated by the Council of Industry Magnates and where the entire human race is devastated by an epidemic.
Civilization goes back its history, regressing to the Stone Age. After sixty years, Grandfather and Grandchildren are the only living characters in the story, everything else is memory.
The grandfather is encouraged by the boys to tell his story, the last custodian of a “knowledge” that has now disappeared.
The story told by his grandfather is before the “scarlet death” when the entire world population was eight billion and airships and flying cars traveled in the sky.
The Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil
Pandemic Tests
Stephen King – The Shadow of the Scorpion (Stand, 1978)
It is one of his most famous novels. A dangerous virus escaped from a secret laboratory exterminates the population of North America.
The error of a computer, the unconsciousness of a few men and the end of the world is unleashed.
Much of the book tells the “after”, that is, the attempt to rebuild a civilization after the catastrophe.
A question hovers throughout the book: will the human race learn from its mistakes?
A question to which the answer is an ambiguous and repeated “I don’t know”.
Survivors (1975)
TV Series created by Terry Nation. It tells the adventures of small groups of survivors in an England deserted by a virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
The initials summarize the background: a pathogenic organism, studied or created in a Chinese laboratory, is beyond control and its global diffusion is symbolized by airport stamps from various countries.
12 Monkeys (1995 movie)
Vaguely inspired by the French short film La Jetée by Chris Marker (1962).
Human civilization has been exterminated by an epidemic caused by an artificial virus.
From the future, the few survivors send some agents back in time to try to locate the beginning of the catastrophe and cancel it.
I think, Dr. Railly, you have given your “alarmists” a bad name.
Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea, and air.
In this context, isn’t it obvious that “Chicken Little” represents the sane vision and that Homo Sapiens’ motto, “Let’s go shopping!” is the cry of the true lunatic?
(Doctor Peters)
Once again the animals will rule the world… (Twelve Monkeys Quote)
Pandemic Tests
Frank Herbert – The White Plague, 1982
The author imagines the creation of a virus created as revenge after an attack that kills the protagonist’s family.
The virus kills only women and the few survivors of the epidemic are protected as a very rare and precious treasure. While men compete with each other for descendants.
It’s figuring us out faster than we’re figuring it out. (Contagion Quote)
Pandemic Tests
Contagion ( 2011 movie)
It is the story of how the epidemic was born, starting from a village in China, with the inter-species jump from bat to pig. In the ending, the initial transmission of the virus is shown: mechanical shovels uproot palm trees from a forest near Hong Kong.
Some bats are disturbed when they move on a banana tree; one of these feeding on the fruit makes a piece fall into a shed where pigs are raised.
The pig who eats the piece of banana is killed and delivered to a restaurant in central Hong Kong.
The cook works it with his bare hands and then shakes Beth Emhoff’s hand, making her become patient zero.
Richard Preston – The Cobra Day (The Cobra Event, 1998)
A fantasy novel where a virus is created by biotechnology called “black biology”.
In part it is set in truly existing governmental structures and the scientific aspects to which reference is made are not only plausible, but most of the time they are true.
A simple “cold” will prove to be the manifestation of a terrible virus capable of annihilating humanity.
Preston stimulates our curiosity by mentioning what is happening in the Pacific Ocean, while the lives of the protagonists continue to flow in unconsciousness:
“The activity carried out around Johnson’s atoll in the summer of 1969 was officially defined as joint naval exercise, but under this cover, in fact, field experiments were being carried out for the strategic use of biological weapons on large surfaces… The wave of biological particles, the bio-aerosol, advanced all night. It passed over all the barges with the monkeys and later also on the Russian fishing boat. At four in the morning, the order was given to bring the last barge back to the base. At that time all the monkeys had breathed the particles… The infected monkeys all died… “
The author gives us an indication between the lines: there is no way to check if, when and where violations of the law prohibiting biotechnology experiments take place.
Wil Mara – The Gemini Virus (2012)
US writer specializing in the genre known as “disaster fiction”. In this novel, the protagonist thinks he has a common cold, but dies after four, infecting dozens of people.
Healthcare facilities are overwhelmed with patients while the staff of the Center for Disease Control cannot however eradicate the virus because it cannot identify it.
Will man’s product mark the end of the world?
Michael Crichton – The Andromeda Strain (1968)
There is also a dangerous virus in this novel, but it is of alien origin. Brought to Earth by a satellite crashed in Arizona it infects an entire country leaving only two survivors, an elderly and a newborn.
The United States government is forced to activate “Project Wildfire”, a top secret emergency response protocol.
Fifty years the sequel to “The Andromeda Strain” arrives. Deep within Fairchild Air Force Base, the “Eternal Vigilance” project continued to monitor and wait for the Andromeda strain to reappear.
A Brazilian drone detects a bizarre anomaly of an otherworldly matter in the middle of the Amazon jungle and something that reminds Andromeda makes its sinister appearance.
A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored. ( The Andromeda Strain Quote)
Pandemic Tests
Richard Matheson – I Am Legend (1954)
Among the post apocalyptic setting novels it is one of the cornerstones, where there is not a vampire in a world of humans, but a single human being in a world of monstrous beings.
And Robert Neville is the last uninfected man on Earth after an epidemic caused by a virus that turned humanity and living creatures around the planet into vampires.
Safety and security are the most basic job of government. (Whiteout Quote)
Pandemic Tests
Clive Cussler – Virus (1980)
In 1954 a Boeing C-97 takes off from a military air base heading for a Pacific island with a load of bacteriological bombs.
Shortly after take-off the plane has an emergency and must land on a white expanse, disappearing.
After thirty years the protagonist Dirk Pitt discovers the plane on the bottom of a frozen lake.
The wreckage is recovered but two bombs are missing. What would happen if a terrorist organization got its hands on it?
Charles Eric Maine – The Darkest of Nights (1963)
It is one of the first novels to describe an unstoppable contagion caused by a virus.
Renamed Hueste, it begins to claim victims first in Japan, then spreading to China and Russia.
The affected nations close their borders but have no means of dealing with the epidemic.
Censorship is imposed on all media, in order not to panic the population.
Ken Follett – Whiteout (2004)
It is Christmas Eve. In a town not far from Glasgow, the red alarm goes off at the headquarters of Oxenford Medical.
Despite the sophisticated surveillance systems, a laboratory technician, involved in an animal rights movement, managed to remove a rabbit from the protected area from which the Madoba-2 virus, a dangerous variant of Ebola, had been injected.
Part of the plot is very reminiscent of the Army of the 12 Monkeys.
Albert Camus – La Peste (Black Death, 1947)
The story is set in the city of Oran, when Algeria is still under French domination.
A great metaphor for human nature, the story of how in the emergency, in the suspension of normality, the worst sides, but also the best ones, of people come out.
Through the protagonists, Camus contrasts science with faith, which claims the latter to exercise a right of control and censorship over the minds of the faithful.
Josè Saramago – Blindness (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, 1995)
An epidemic spreads inexplicably, wrapping people in a milky fog.
A masterpiece of fantastic literature and an allegory about our cruelty, the inability to see others, the indifference that explodes with the spread of blindness.
The writer, in the speech made following the award of the Nobel Prize, underlined how contemporary society is blind because the sense of solidarity between people has been lost.
Colson Whitehead – Zone One (2016)
The author tells of a pandemic that divided humans into two categories: livings and living deads.
The survivors have “every intention of continuing their march through the dead world” but always keeping in mind the human sample that populated it, that dead world.
But Whitehead’s narrative is full of hope:
Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter.
Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things.
That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place.
They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.
Where the goblin world and its assaults were banished and there was nothing but possibility. ( Zone One Quote)
Pandemic Tests
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Together
Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.
Bob Marley
(@JuliansRum) 
