The esteemed science fiction author on how we may never go "back to normal"—and why that might be a good thing
More than two weeks into self-isolation, I am starting to wonder whether I will ever be able to come out. I don’t mean whether I’ll be legally allowed to come out—I wonder who the person that comes out will be. Stiller, more quiet maybe. More appreciative of the simple pleasures of everyday life, I hope. Even if I manage to keep my job, and my loved ones survive, even if I am among the fortunate few whose life returns basically to normal, will I continue to cook my meals at home, and Facetime with my parents multiple times a week? How long will it take before I’m eating out and stretching the time between phone calls? How long before I’m complaining about the subway and having too many plans and generally taking my freedom for granted?
The question of what will change applies to everything from the mundanity of everyday to the very shape of history. Will we ever elect a careless an incompetent leader again, knowing what is at stake? Will we continue to systematically disadvantage the most vulnerable among us, and to degrade facts and science and statistics? And as for the positive changes being made or discussed—bipartisanship, direct governmental aid, paid sick leave—what will stick, and what will be forgotten?
To answer these questions, I turned, as I often do, to books and the people who write them. And since I’m speculating, this time I turned to a master of speculative fiction, Ted Chiang. I’ve heard Ted Chiang speak exactly twice, and both times I’ve quoted him, or maybe misquoted him, for subsequent years. He generously agreed to correspond with me over email.
HM: Do you see aspects of science fiction (your own work or others) in the coronavirus pandemic? In how it is being handled, or how it has spread?
TC: While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.
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