Your Reading List

Like most people, I always imagined that if I had to survive the Apocalypse, I’d be fighting through the dystopian wasteland dressed in leather, with a pump shotgun strapped to my back.  As it turned out, the reality appears to be “wandering around my living room in sweats and a pair of slippers while trying in vain to find the DirecTV remote”.

At least I was right about the scavenging for food part.  Last night, The Doc and I just barely managed to survive on a meal of baked salmon, garlic potatoes, and Caesar salad.  Thankfully, our survival shelter has a freezer heavily loaded with the pickings of Trader Joe’s frozen food aisle.  We can’t be the only people who are going to come out of quarantine five pounds heavier than when some moron shut down the world by lunching on bat tartare.

Sadly, I’ve been watching way too much of the news, where I have learned that the world has already gone to hell, and we’ve lost the basket.  The last couple of weeks have reminded me of several science fiction books that are relevant to the perceived panic, if not to the  pandemic.  Since I find myself constantly making mental comparisons of the day’s news to these books, I thought I would share the list.

The Naked Sun, by Issac Asimov, is a sequel to his Hugo-winning novel, The Caves of Steel.  Written in the early fifties, both books are eerily prophetic.  In a distant future, while the population of Earth is confined to densely packed cities, a small population of humans on the planet Solaria is attended to by a vast army of robots.  The humans on Solaria live almost completely solitary lives, interacting with each other only through “holography”—the equivalent of today’s Zoom or FaceTime.

Despite the ultimate in “social distancing”, there is a murder, so an experienced detective from Earth is brought to the planet to solve the case.  The Earth-man, conditioned by the hive-like conditions of life on an overcrowded Earth, suffers from agoraphobia while he interviews the suspects, who deeply resent his invasion of their personal spaces .

Asimov was way ahead of his time with this novel and it would not surprise me to see someone in Hollywood snap up the rights to this script.  I suspect that, shortly, we will see lots of television mysteries in which the plot is based on social distancing.

Next is The Puppet Masters, by Robert Heinlein.  First, if you saw the recent movie, about the only part of the book that Hollywood used was the title.  The book is about an invasion of parasitic ‘slugs’ that attach themselves to humans and take control of their bodies.  As the world fights this invasion, the first thing to ‘go’ is the wearing of clothing.  Public nudity becomes mandatory and anyone wearing even the smallest article of clothing in public is immediately under suspicion of harboring a slug and promptly killed.  (If Hollywood had filmed that, it would have been a much more popular movie.)

Heinlein’s book is far less a story about an invasion from space and more a commentary about how public attitudes change during an emergency then never return to their previous state.  This book comes to mind every time I wonder how long our wearing masks and self-imposed isolation  will remain with us.  If Heinlein is right, masks and frequent use of hand sanitizer may be with us a long, long time.

Power Play, by Kenneth Cameron, is a a post-apocalyptic tale, in which there is no overwhelming cataclysmic event—no nuclear attack, no virus, no asteroid strike—there is just a power failure.  One by one, the links that hold society together around New York City break, eventually leading to a cascade of failures as too many people in too small of a space suddenly realize that urban living is totally dependent of a chain of supply that can be broken too easily.

What this book does that no other similar book seems to do is drive home the idea that our society depends on the cooperation of a relatively large number of people.  Put plainly, survival requires a group of people and—sadly—Cameron also demonstrates how easily such a group can fall apart.

Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank (Harry Hart Frank).  When this book was published in 1959, it was one of the first post-apocalyptic books of the nuclear age, but despite its being over sixty years old, it consistently ranks in Amazon’s list of best sellers for science fiction.  The book is a classic and probably one of the most widely read books in this genre.

I think one of the reasons this book is so popular is that most of the book deals with ordinary life:  growing food, obtaining salt, dealing with feral dogs, and working with neighbors toward a common good.  I must confess, that, despite being the Anti-Social Poster Child, I am starting to miss being with my family, my friends and even the neighbors whom I’ve spent the last thirty years running from when they see me.   

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is another book highly reminiscent of our current situation.  In a world all but destroyed by a swine flu pandemic—called the Georgia Flu before we all learned that the centuries-old tradition of naming diseases? after their point of origin was racist—that has killed most of the world’s population over a period of twenty years.  The remnants of society create a Museum of Civilization that showcases the technology that they are no longer capable of supporting:  cell phones, microwave ovens, and the like.

The point of the book isn’t really the pandemic or even the day-to-day struggle of life after the Georgia Flu:  it is about the triumph of human life over adversity.  Somehow, a book that kills almost everyone on the planet comes off as optimistic.

That’s enough!  In no way does our present situation qualify as a dystopian hell and sitting on the sofa and reading a book is not only my idea of a vacation, but it is a pretty apt description for the last five decades of my life. 

However, I can’t stop making  mental comparisons between what I have read and what I see on television these days.  I can’t be the only one comparing this pandemic to fiction.  I’d be very interested to know which books you have been thinking about.