Historic Science Fiction Offers Lessons for Living With Pandemics
Science fiction sometimes shows us the future, but really just shows us ourselves, asserts Associate Professor of Humanities and sci-fi aficionado Nancy Steffen-Fluhr.
She was teaching the 2014 novel Station Eleven, about a troupe of actors and musicians struggling for normalcy after a global pandemic kills most of the world's population, in spring 2020 right as COVID-19 formed in Asia, reached America and found its way to Newark.
"First time I ever taught it. I didn't know we were having a pandemic," joked Steffen-Fluhr, who teaches science fiction as a 400-level humanities senior seminar and a 300-level literature course. She is also director of NJIT's Murray Center for Women in Technology.
Station Eleven by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel won Britain's Arthur C. Clarke award and other prestigious honors for best sci-fi book of the year. But it may have improved with age, due to relevance. It could be a warning, even though it has a happy ending where the main characters stumble on a community rebuilding itself.
"The notion that you can see the future is a reassuring fantasy. But science fiction isn't really a window; it's a mirror. At its best, it creates a kind of metaspace from which we can see the shape of the present," Steffen-Fluhr observed. "But the future itself eludes us. Life is full of surprises, as we have recently been reminded."
She asked students what possessions they would want to take along if COVID or some future pandemic ever became as bad as in Station Eleven. She was pleasantly surprised that they didn't automatically say their smartphones, instead desiring the information therein. Memories such as pictures, messages and gifts were the most common answers. For humankind, merely surviving a pandemic isn't sufficient if our new normal lacks social bonds, she said.
In good sci-fi, she observed, "There's an intense sense of existential vulnerability. It pulls the ground out from under our feet, even if it usually restores our sense of equilibrium at the end."
Too many pandemic stories use disease only as an excuse to bring on zombies or special effects, however there is plenty we can learn from more realistic science such as depicted in the 2011 film Contagion, Steffen-Fluhr said. "But it won't make you necessarily feel better," she added. The plot features heroic government leaders, which many people today would see as differing from reality.
Steffen-Fluhr also cited British author H.G. Wells' 1897 story The War of the Worlds — better known here in New Jersey for Orson Welles' 1938 variant as a radio drama, set at the real-life Grover's Mill in West Windsor Township — for its surprise ending where marauding Martians are revealed as utterly vulnerable to human germs.
"Science fiction rarely gets the future exactly right. It's more like a collective whistling in the dark. But the best of it reminds us that, for all our dreams of transcendence, we are part of the web of life and not outside of it —a good thing to remember as we put on our face masks each day."