Plague | marieqrogers

Posts Tagged ‘Plague’

How an Escape Mechanism Can Backfire

Posted in Marie's Musings, tagged Coping Mechanism, Escape Mechanism, How to Prevent an Outbreak, Pandemic Movies, Plague, Quarantine, Science Fiction, Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, The Fourth Horseman, wormholes on May 29, 2021| 1 Comment »

No one can argue that this past year has been stressful. We all needed escape mechanisms to help us cope. I’ve tried several. After the shut-down last March, when COVID was still fairly new, I came across a list of streaming movies about pandemics to watch while quarantined. With ghoulish curiosity, I watched a few. Because those fictional accounts bore little resemblance to the existing situation, they provided a sort of comfort.

Netflix has a series, ominously released in January, 2020 before coronavirus became popular, called Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak. This documentary introduces the viewer to “heroes on the front lines of the battle against influenza” and showcases “their efforts to stop the next global outbreak.” Well, they didn’t stop this one, maybe because they focused on influenza and we were hit with a coronavirus. I watched a few episodes, but they were too close to reality, and I needed escape.

I seldom binge watch, but in the evening I’ll sit down to a movie or a couple episodes of a good TV show. Half the world found diversion from reality in Tiger King, but it was short lived. Science fiction is usually a good escapist genre. Even issues pertinent to our real world are disguised well enough to take us out of ourselves. I watched several seasons of Star Trek before I found Stargate SG-1.

If you are unfamiliar with the show, the Stargate is an ancient alien artifact that connects to other stargates throughout the galaxy by way of wormholes. SG-1 is a team of four adventurers. Each episode takes the heroes to a different planet where they encounter and surmount new perils. Each season, they save the Earth from impending doom. Good entertainment. Nothing, other than the occasional politics, to remind me of current problems.

Until I came to Season 9. A two part episode was titled “The Fourth Horseman.” Only after I watched the first part did it dawn on me that they were referring to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In the Old Testament, the Fourth Horseman is Plague.

In the last century, when we were sending people to the Moon, NASA would quarantine returning astronauts just in case they picked up some microorganism that could wreak havoc on Earth. The SG1 team bopped from planet to planet without a care. Only occasionally did they bring something undesirable home, and then it was usually an alien life form other than a disease.

Main characters are not allowed to die, of course, unless they can be restored to life, but lesser actors are fair game. In Episode 10 of Season 9, a team of lesser characters brought back a virus. I should have stopped watching, but I was addicted to the show.

One man developed a fever and respiratory distress and died. Others began to fall ill and were quarantined. Unfortunately, a lieutenant with no symptoms had already left the base, and he was a carrier. By the time they reined him in, the public had been exposed. The CDC was called in.

Back at the base, even individuals who had no contact with the infected team began to test positive or fall ill. The virus was described as “airborne and persistent.” Efforts to contain it to Colorado (where the story takes place) failed and cases began to pop up in other states. Public transportation was halted. Citizens panicked as the contagion continued to spread. Hospitals were struggling and waiting rooms crowded. Cases emerged in major cities. The US borders were closed. Contact tracing was put into place.

It was like watching a recap of the past year’s news. How was this supposed to take my mind off my worries?

The script writers seemed to have done their homework. They must have consulted with the CDC on how a pandemic would play out. That, or they had a crystal ball. If that was the case, why didn’t they warn us?

There was one difference—no one wore masks. The general ignored the advice of the physician and went to visit his suffering airmen. I yelled at the screen, “Put on a mask!” He didn’t listen. Next scene, the general was in sick bay. I should have skipped the second episode, but I wanted to see how our heroes managed to save the world this time. They were furiously working on a vaccine.

Remember the cigarette-smoking man in The X Files? The actor William B. Davis? He is the arch villain in this story. In an attempt to conquer the Earth, he had purposely infected the doomed SG team. However, I don’t think he was responsible for our recent situation.

By part two, there were cases in Mexico and Canada. Other countries grounded air travel and closed ports. The Stock Market crashed. Work on the vaccine continued, day and night, as the contagion continued to spread. Finally, the vaccine was ready and being distributed. (No mention of testing for safety and efficacy.) This team of fictional crack scientists developed a vaccine in two episodes in 1995, but it took us months in 2020.

At the end of the episode, a news reporter said, “The final death toll of the pandemic has been estimated at a little over 3000 worldwide.” Only 3000? The reporter seemed to think that was a lot. Do you remember when ours was only 3000? As I write this, our death toll has surpassed 3 million.

How did I remember so many details? A writer must sacrifice for her art. After I thought about writing this post, I watched the episodes again and took notes. Besides, plunging into it gave me a morbid sense of comfort.

The rest of the series thankfully offered more escape from reality. Now I’ve resumed Star Trek. Captain Picard’s world, while beset with conflict and danger, gives an optimistic view of the future where self-interest and greed have largely been replaced by ideals of cooperation and benevolence. What better way to get your mind off your troubles?

If you haven’t already, check out my video at the Sunshine State Book Festival and my novel Trials by Fire on Amazon.

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Living in a Dystopian Novel

Posted in Marie's Musings, tagged 1918 Flu, Autonomous Regions, Climate Change, Coronavirus, Covid 19, Distopian Novel, End of the World, Hurricanes, Plague, Quarantine, Rewriting History, Science Fiction, Sea Level Rise on April 19, 2020| 3 Comments »

At first, they called it a novel coronavirus, but it mutated into a real-time dystopian novel.

At the turn of the year, Covid lurked in the sidelines, waiting to take center stage. Initially only a vague specter, it materialized from the shadows to become a source of ghoulish entertainment, dominating the airwaves. Can this be a replay of 1918? Surely not in this age of medical miracles! But the pundits could not hide their dread. Their knitted brows were enough to freeze my spine. Older ladies of my acquaintance, thinking they were prime victims, quarantined themselves. It was rumored this would become everyone’s fate, but surely that couldn’t happen, could it?

1918 Flu Epidemic

On Friday the 13^th, the world changed. Schools closed. People stopped going to work. Panicked hordes stripped grocery shelves clean. Of toilet paper, no less. Meetings, travel plans, even weddings and funerals were cancelled. Life, once plotted out in calendar entries, became a fogged-up windshield in a vehicle out of control, hurtling at unknown speed to a nebulous future. That’s when I realized I was living inside a dystopian novel.

Stories and movies came to mind, of catastrophic events that spelled the end of the world: wars, alien invasions, plagues decimating the world’s population. In some stories, heroes emerged to save remnants of mankind, while in others the heroes were lucky to save themselves. Dystopian stories are great entertainment, but they’re no fun for their besieged characters. And now I was a character in one!

As a writer, it’s not such a bad place to be as long as my retirement checks keep coming, the electric grid holds up, and I can get groceries every week or so. If the electricity fails and I can’t get to the store, I’d still survive, as long as my cache of last year’s hurricane supplies held out. But, darn, I’d have to write on paper instead of my computer if the power went off.

Then I found out how much I depend on technology. One day, my phone stopped working. Good, no spam calls for a few days until a technician can fix it. I still had internet. A week later, the internet went out! I nearly panicked. I was a character in a movie, surrounded by unknown perils, cut off from the outside world. How could I survive without email, Google, and Wikipedia? Fortunately, the phone company had it fixed within hours.

The first week of quarantine was unsettling. The second, I settled into the unreality of it and watched the movie play out around me. But the surreal turned bizarre when the world began to morph into my dystopian novel.

My yet-to-be-published dystopian novel takes place in the future when solar power has replaced fossil fuels, but it didn’t happen soon enough. South Florida has gone the way of Atlantis and autocrats build houses that can withstand Category 7 hurricanes. Books aren’t banned, but they’re obsolete. My heroine collects books on history and studies them to uncover lost truths. When information is stored digitally, it’s easy to rewrite history.

The federal government is weak and ineffectual and the US has been partitioned into autonomous regions, each with its own set of laws. When a killer hurricane strikes, Georgia closes its border to keep Florida refugees out. Hospitals are out of supplies and the sick and injured crowd the hallways and cover the floors. The poor are hit hardest and rich see opportunities to enrich themselves. Until the pitchforks come out…

My novel is a fantasy, a series of events that (I sincerely hope) won’t come true. Or will they?

Coastal communities are already dealing with sea level rise. Hurricanes are becoming more powerful. (My fellow Floridians really dread the advent of this year’s hurricane season.)

As Covid went viral in New York and New Jersey, and hordes of Yankees headed south to escape, there were rumors that Florida was setting up roadblocks to keep them, and their contagion, out. Hospitals are over capacity and undersupplied. An economic bailout has the rich corporations making out like bandits while the rest of us are being thrown crumbs.

I wrote my book long before all this became reality, and I never expected to see it happen. Each development has made me pause and reflect. Just coincidence. I’m certainly no prophet.

Then a government official gave out erroneous information and the website he alluded to was later altered to agree with what he said! Rewriting history is not a new idea. Remember 1984?

Now several states, frustrated by the failed leadership of the federal government, are forming regional coalitions to make pacts on how to keep their citizens safe while restoring normalcy.

But not all is gloom and doom. In my book, the heroes encounter good people, many of them have-nots, who share what little they can. Even some of the well-to-do show their charitable sides.

In the current pandemic, people are stepping up to contribute what they can to those in need. Mom and Pop restaurants are feeding the hungry. Ladies with sewing machines are stitching up face masks. It’s refreshing to see that compassion and service survive in in our present dystopia, as well as the fictional ones.

I’ll tell you, though, if any more elements of my book come to pass, (if the pitchforks come out!) I may just have to rewrite it. Maybe as a cozy romance? What could be the harm in that?