Fiction's deadliest pandemics and what they tell us about coronavirus panic

Novel-writing may be the weirdest occupation on the planet. While public health officials are out there at all hours desperately trying to save humanity from potential pandemics — including the latest threat, the new coronavirus — fiction writers can spend entire careers threatening to murder us by the same means. And they've been doing so ever since the novel became a thing in the 19th century.

Relatively few writers, however, have succeeded in eradicating the majority of humanity. For starters, that just isn't realistic; not even history's most notorious killers, the Black Death and the 1918 flu virus, managed more than a third of any given population.  Read more...

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