While in quarantine for this Covid-19 thing, I had time to think about how this virus will change our lives in the short and long periods.
Starting with the fact that this virus will never pass because since before the first alarms, it was already everywhere.
People traveled from and to China and spread all around the world but is not this the meaning of the post.
Today I want to speak about the legacy that this virus will have worldwide in our lives and because I don’t have any qualifications in order to give my forecast in the matter of politics, economy, or freedom I’ll speak about something that I’m really invested with and that’s Literature.
In older posts, I spoke about how the current experiences that we do, change genres like science fiction.
Twenty years ago, sci-fi was into alien invasions and, even though now there are still more of those, the genre started to diverge in different directions.
There is global warming so we have movies like Interstellar that cover the problem.
There is the overpopulation so we have the Dan Brown Inferno or The infinity saga of the MCU
We start to watch Mars as something that is every day closer so we have The Martian by Andy Weir.
And now, out of thin air, we have this gigantic pandemic virus that is killing thousands and it will stay with our generation for so much time that we will have all the chances to use it in novels, but how this can make a new chapter in science fiction?
It already happened in the past with ebola where we got the movie Outbreak from 1994 with Dustin Hoffman and we have contagion from 2011, a movie with a cosmic cast, and if watched in 2020 can be the closest description of what is happening today.
There is a main difference with the current situation though: That was fiction about a virus that had not made to a pandemic and the Covid-19 is actually our own experience so it will be absolutely easier to create something about it, we don’t have to invent much.
We know that we are forced to stay at home, there is the fear of personal contacts, there are idiots around that don’t follow the rules and risks to cause more problems than we already have, the fear that, even when everything will pass, won’t be really because for years there will be the terror of getting it again.
Furthermore, maybe the most important of them all, the fact that every person can be infected.
You can be a nurse, an old lady, a teenager, the Prime Minister, or the Prince of Wales, if you are a person, you’ll get it.
This virus has a legacy now, it will last for a long time and will have repercussions on the way we see the world today, altogether with the world that we are going to leave to our children.
I guess that what I’m trying to say is that this outbreak changed our lives for good now but, as we always do, we have to use it to learn and improve together instead of getting defeated.
And this can be the best way to craft a story about these years and luckily as with many stories, it will drive future generations to avoid the same mistakes we did.
-ldmarchesi