Morgan Glyn
Science Museum, London, UK.
Interface Focus. 2021 Oct 12;11(6):20210027. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2021.0027. eCollection 2021 Dec 6.
In unprecedented times, people have turned to fiction both for comfort and for distraction, but also to try and understand and anticipate what might come next. Sales and rental figures for works of fiction about pandemics and other disease outbreaks surged in 2020, but what can pandemic science fiction tell us about disease? This article surveys the long history of science fiction's engagement with disease and demonstrates the ways in which these narratives, whether in literature or film, have always had more to say about other contemporary cultural concerns than the disease themselves. Nonetheless, the ideas demonstrated in these texts can be seen perpetuating through the science fiction genre, and in our current crisis, we have seen striking similarities between the behaviours of key individuals, and the manner in which certain events have played out. Not because science fiction these things, but because it anticipates the social structures which produce them (while at the same time permeating the culture to the extent that they become the touchstones with which the media choose to analyse current events). This paper demonstrates that science fiction can be a valuable tool to communicate widely around a pandemic, while also acting as a creative space in which to anticipate how we may handle similar events in the future.
在前所未有的时代，人们转向小说寻求慰藉、消遣，同时也试图理解和预测接下来可能发生的事情。2020年，关于大流行病和其他疾病爆发的小说作品的销售和租赁数字飙升，但大流行病科幻小说能告诉我们关于疾病的什么信息呢？本文考察了科幻小说与疾病相关的悠久历史，并展示了这些叙事（无论是文学还是电影）总是更多地关乎当代其他文化问题，而非疾病本身。尽管如此，这些文本中展现的思想可以在科幻小说类型中持续存在，在我们当前的危机中，我们已经看到关键人物的行为以及某些事件的发展方式存在惊人的相似之处。并非因为科幻小说导致了这些事情，而是因为它预见了产生这些事情的社会结构（同时在文化中渗透到一定程度，以至于它们成为媒体选择用来分析当前事件的试金石）。本文表明，科幻小说可以成为围绕大流行病进行广泛传播的宝贵工具，同时也可作为一个创造性空间，用于预测我们未来如何应对类似事件。
