- Greetings from in front of a bookshelf in California instead of the normal green screen in Texas.

As you can probably guess, we have had to adapt the structure of this show because of the ongoing pandemic.

And what better way to start that off than a discussion about pandemics in literature?

What a time to be alive.

So let's take a look at some of the forms pandemics have taken in fiction.

How have they changed as our understanding of the science of illness has changed?

In the scheme of human history, pandemics are nothing new and in fiction they have been the inspiration for, and stuff of nightmares, for just as long.

Pandemic lit helps us contextualize the real thing.

It mirrors our fears about disease and societal collapse while simultaneously showing us that survival is possible and that rebuilding ourselves into something new is not only necessary but inevitable.

Hopefully.

(chuckles) (funky music) Fundamentally, a story about a pandemic is rarely about the disease itself.

As a genre, pandemic literature focuses more on sociology, psychology, and human behavior, in no small part because illness is a part of life.

But a pandemic is that part of life that has exploded into disaster territory.

According to Susan Sontag in her seminal work on pandemics, "Illness as Metaphor," "Illness is the night-side of life, "a more onerous citzenship.

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, "in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick."

For most of human existence, people didn't really know where disease came from.

Modern epidemiology was hardly a twinkle in our scientific eye until the mid-19th century.

So we gave it our best guess.

Magic, angry gods, too much phlegm in the system and not enough yellow bile, original sin, or maybe it's like an evil, stinky cloud of bad air.

So early examples of pandemic literature focus more what people do during pandemics, with perhaps a touch of moralizing and pontification about human nature.

To quote Sontag again, "Feeling about evil are projected onto a disease.

"And the disease, so enriched with meanings, "is projected onto the world."

The Black Death, which started in the mid-14th century and wiped out anywhere from 30 to 60% of Europe's population, makes its way into a lot of medieval literature.

Givoanni Boccaccio's "Decameron" is an elaborate anthology of tales framed by a narrative in which 10 young people flee plague-ridden Florence to the countryside.

In order to pass the time, the party takes turn telling stories over each night during their self-quarantine.

See, even during the Black Death there were long stretches of boring during social distancing that needed to be filled with (sighs) something.

Obligatory Netflix joke.

(air whooshes) But much in the way that social distancing with a good, bingeable story is nothing new, so too has the way early authors and thinkers tied disease to the issues of morality and self.

"The Pardoner's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century "The Canterbury Tales," conflates the treacherous, violent behavior of its three villains attempting to kill Death in the middle of the Plague to the sinful behavior thought to bring plague on.

Said professor of English, Byron Lee Grigsby about Chaucer and his contemporaries, "Lacking any knowledge of vector-borne diseases, "people of the Middle Ages were left to conclude "that the plague was a consequence of sinful behavior.

"The job of the medical, theological, and literary community "was to interpret the meaning of the plague, "the causes of God's anger and man's sin."

Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death" features the endolant, greedy Prince Prospero and his entourage's unsuccessful attempt to hide from a plague called the Red Death by holing up and throwing a massively extravagant party while the poor people outside are left to die.

As York University professor Brett Zimmerman writes, "Prospero and his guests employ art "and the carnal pleasures to forget death and disease, "but on some deep level they recognize the futility, "the vanity, of their hedonistic and aesthetic attempts "to forget disease, darkness, decay, and death."

Maybe man is the real virus.

By Poe's lifetime, in the mid-19th century, however, science began to fill in the gaps concerning disease that had previously been speculation.

Germ theory, pasteurization, hooray!

We did it.

But regardless of where the disease comes from, the disease has to spread in order to turn into a pandemic.

And again, as we have regrettably learned in our current situation, misinformation can be a plague of its own.

In "The Scarlet Plague" by Jack London, London writes the terror of a disease that science couldn't keep up with.

With no clear incubation period and death coming from within 15 minutes to two hours of the first symptoms, news of its spread is censored in the papers to avoid a panic, much like it was during an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1900s.

In London's book, economic greed and the herds of people fleeing the cities in terror further spreads the disease and is ultimately the doom of civilization.

Failed government response, or sometimes even government-engineered pandemics, became a popular concept in pandemic lit during the 20th century.

In Stephen King's "The Stand," a flu-like respiratory virus kills over 90% of the people on Earth and the survivors have to live out a God versus the Devil chess game.

As bad as King's pandemic is, it's made much worse by incompetent and war focused governance.

Then came "Outbreak" by Robin Cook, which became a best seller in the late 1980s, and echoed the public's fear of germ warfare and the inability of the government to stop the plague.

Although the book should not be confused with the terrible of the same name, which was based on a non-fiction book called "The Hot Zone."

"Illuminae" by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff elevates the inherent horror of plague by having the infected people trapped in close quarters on space ships with nowhere to escape.

When the ships' AI seems to turn on its own people in an effort to save the uninfected, the humans shut it down in an act of hubris, not believing the recommended safety procedures are necessary.

This, combined with the leadership's refusal to publicly share accurate information results in the plague spreading through the ships and annihilating the population.

But pandemic can also be a good subject to explore what it means to be human and what crisis does to our humanity.

- French philosopher Albert Camus also used pandemic as a vehicle to explore the we live in a society experience in his novel 'The Plague" in which he uses plague as a symbol to talk about war, occupation, and oppression.

Said Camus later, referring to his experience during the German occupation of World War II, "I want to express by means of the plague "the stifling air from which we all suffered "and the atmosphere of threat and exile in which all lived."

In "I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, a pandemic not only wipes out most of the world's population, but the ones that are left are now vampires.

The changed people are horrifying and they're all that's left besides the protagonist.

But the book ends with the protagonist's realization that the people he'd taken for monsters actually had a society of their own and saw him as the horrible monster that hunted them while they slept.

Did you ever think that the real monster might be man?

And in "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel, a flu wipes out most of the population and the survivors split into cults and traveling Shakespeare companies.

As a pandemic novel written in the time of social media, it focuses on how separate we become based on petty things like our interests and the media we consume.

Good thing we don't have that problem now.

(chuckles) And of course no discussion on pandemic literature would be complete without talking about zombies and other creatures that turn the sick into monsters, "I Am Legend" style.

For that, I wanna turn it over to Dr. Z who is something of a zombie scholar.

- Zombies, like all undead monsters, can represent a whole slew of things, from the dangers of science to Haitian slavery, fears of globalization to commentaries on political parties.

They're kind of like a catch-all for everything we're afraid of.

A zombie outbreak or pandemic is even something the CDC uses as a way to teach people about emergency preparedness.

One of the most famous literary interpretations of a zombie plague is Max Brooks' "World War Z," a recorded oral history of the survivors of a fictional undead pandemic.

Brooks says that he uses zombies as substitutes of real world plagues.

He wrote "World War Z" and "The Zombie Survival Guide" as ways to explore what would happen to the majority of the population if such a pandemic occurred saying that, "Most people would die from what the military calls "second-or-third effects.

"For every person who dies from a zombie bite, "how many people would die from sickness or infection?"

Basically, the books are an intellectual exercise into how different countries respond to real plagues, something that it looks like we should've paid more attention to.

"The Walking Dead" comic series is an example of how large scale pandemics affect communities on a more micro level.

Tensions arise not only because they are trying to survive flesh eating monsters, but because race, gender, religion, sex, and politics still affect day to day life.

Spoiler alert.

When it's revealed that every living human is infected with the zombie virus, those social dynamics become even more pronounced.

Zombies pop up in parody literature, like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," and even in romance novels, like in "Warm Bodies," so it's not all depressing mass destruction all the time.

But it's usually not very fun.

- Thanks, Dr. Z.

But the genre is not only about what it does to people.

Sometimes the disease itself can be a character.

Sort of.

In "The Expanse" series by James S. A. Corey the protomolecule, what looks initially to be nothing more than a horrible infectious agent, might sort of also kind of be like an alien hive mind?

And ultimately it radically alters the trajectory of human civilization.

And in Orson Scott Card's "Ender" series, there is a virus called the Descolada which is not only integral to the reproduction of life on its home planet, it's also deadly to humans, especially if it gets off-world.

Which is further complicated by the discovery that it might also actually be kind of sentient, so we can't kill it or that would be xenocide and Ender already did that once by accident.

(laughs) Oopsie-daisy.

Boy, those books got squirrely.

It's important to note in these examples that the disease does not think or act like a human.

It operates on its own logic and for its own ends.

The same could be said for diseases in the real world.

They aren't like an invisible enemy to fight, they aren't an antagonist to go to war with, and they don't think like a human, so it's best not to think of them as such.

Living through a pandemic is scary and stressful, and it would be a disservice to not honor those feelings.

But if there is hope, it's in literature's ability to show us that we have always survived, learned, and adapted.

John Scalzi's "Lock In" series is an example of books that aren't about the experience of pandemic itself, but the world that arises after the dust has settled, how society has adapted to this, and now includes this entire class of people who live with the disability that resulted from the pandemic.

By using androids.

Life after the pandemic not only exists, it creates a new normal.

To again quote Professor Grigsby on the subject of plague in the Middle Ages, "Eventually the plague becomes so common "that people begin to deal with it "as a normal part of the human experience.

"The disease, consequently, "becomes a part of normal experience.

"If one lives long enough, he or she will experience plague, "either directly or indirectly."

We're always worried and scared of the unknown.

For all our scientific progress, there's always a lot more than we'd like to admit that we don't understand.

But with that comes the idea that society survives after chaos and fiction can tell us what to look out for and some cases it can seem downright prophetic in hindsight.

According to "World War Z" author Max Brooks, "When I was thinking up an origin story "for my fictional pandemic, "I needed an authoritarian regime "with strong control over the press.

"Smothering public awareness "would give my plague time to spread, "first among the local population, then into other nations.

"By the time the rest of the world figured out "what was going on, it would be too late."

Sometimes art imitates life and sometimes life imitates art.