What aspects of the COVID19 pandemic haven’t been foreseen in works of fiction dealing with apocalyptic scenarios like plagues, nuclear war, zombie uprising, etc? For example take gas prices; a shot of an abandoned gas station after the end has an absurdly (at least for time of writing) high gas price or is completely sold out as a way of showing shit really hit the fan. I can’t think of anything that predicted gas prices would fall and crude oil would be over supplied. What are some other examples?
People just stayed home and watched netflix all day. We weren’t all out dying in public.
I gather US school shootings and general gun violence is down. Does that presage a less gun-obsessed apocalypse?
Also the heroes are usually ex-military good-looking-rebel-who-plays-by-his-own-rules stereotypes armed to the teeth. The hero who will lead us out of this apocalypse is a small brown underpaid woman with a mop.
The next Mad Max movie will centre on feral bikies chasing large road tankers filled with aloe vera and scented hand-soaps.
I don’t remember reading about distance teaching. Generally education is eliminated or there’s a small group of children sitting around a teacher when the author wants a semi-hopeful ending.
Also, religious services online or the gatherings in parking lots with people staying in their cars. Religion in dystopias is nothing like that, that I remember.
Empty gas stations with creaky signs blowing back and forth hold NO creep value to me. I remember the first gas crisis and all that followed. There used to be a dead gas station on damn near every corner in SCal.
Now, empty grocery stores will create a panic that will go far beyond all gas crises.
If the power grid goes all kerflooey, forget it, we’re dead. No internet, no phones, no municipal water gushing out of taps, and overflowing, nonfunctional sewage treatment plants.
THAT is a horror movie!
~VOW
The messages written on the windows of all the restaurants aren’t nearly as apocalyptic as all of those books and movies would have had me believe. I haven’t seen “THE END IS NIGH!” even once. It’s all “WE ARE OPEN!” and “AVAILABLE FOR DELIVERY OR TAKEOUT!” Then again, we are still in the early going. There’s plenty of time for shit to get really crazy.
It is hard to say. One problem with the question is that the analogy between what’s happening now and your typical post-apocalyptic story breaks down in some significant ways.
In your typical apocalyptic fiction the supply chain and infrastructure collapses. It wouldn’t surprise me if that leads to high (and probably geographically variable) prices. But that’s not really what’s happening today. Our economy has dramatically shrunk very quickly. But most essential infrastructure and supply chains are operational. It’s just that demand is way, way down.
A lot of apocalyptic stories depict the government as helplessly overwhelmed – did any of them foresee leadership magnifying a problem into a disaster through sheer incompetence and corruption?
People insisting that others endanger themselves that they can get their hair cut.
As I recall, Giuliani came on TV after the 9/11 attacks and I expected he’d start to talk about the human lives lost etc. No, he was saying, “Come to New York. Come see a play. Come shop,” or whatever, basically spend money—he was already anticipating the economics.
That’s just it. Books and movies condense the action for us. I expect things to get worse before they get better, but how much worse? Any unarmed persons thinking about getting a gun yet?
I didn’t foresee how much “unobtanium” the hand sanitizer was going to cost. But I didn’t foresee how dirt cheap gasoline was going to become, either. Not sure anybody would predict a price war like that, but even so, demand has to be mighty with so many working from home. Too much supply, not enough demand.
School shootings are way down. But child abuse concerns are way up.
Wanting a haircut is probably shallow and vain, but it may also be that you have to look presentable for a zoom meeting with an important client.
And leadership isn’t coming from the top down; it’s rising from the lower levels, and not because DC was “decapitated” or “incapacitated” or anything like that.
The places and forms that rebellion is coming from-- for example, loyal voters of the current president being the ones to shun masks and social distancing, but not being especially aggressive about it; dead security guards notwithstanding, I mean, there are not roving bands of Trump supporters clustering shoulder-to-shoulder, maskless, pushing their way into Walmarts just to make a point.
And, so far, no looting.
Also, the “Thank you for your service,” for the healthcare professionals, based on the considered response to the military post-Vietnam.
The term “social distancing.”
Well… sort of.
But I’ve been planning to purchase a .38 revolver for some time now, I just keep getting sidetracked because stuff like keeping my vehicles repaired and running sort of took precedence. So if I do finally get around to getting one it won’t be because of covid-19, it’s because it’s finally come to the top of my list of “stuff I want”
And technically, I’m not unarmed, I just don’t have a firearm. I still have that crossbow, although I suspect it needs a new cable because the old one is showing signs of fraying. Not sure it will effectively fire any more.
National leadership by gibbering idiots and foreign puppets. Lack of coups, counter-coups and public executions. The nation not yet physically balkanized. The panic-shortage, then glut of toilet tissue, not replaced by dollar bills. Distant communications still function. The nation short on medical supplies exports medical supplies. Pets are only very slightly contagious. No human or alien invading armies. Grocery clerks as front-line responders.
I read that as Soviet armies steamrolled across Germany in WWII’s final days, a popular subject of office conversations in Berlin was the most painless method of suicide. Now we debate safe-distancing and mask-making. Could be worse.
Most fictional apocalypses are from nuclear war, which happens very quickly and with very little warning. That’s naturally going to have different effects than something that plays out gradually over the course of months.
There are of course some fictional apocalypses caused by diseases, but those are generally “the disease spreads everywhere around the globe during its incubation period, then kills everyone all at once”. For which you pretty much need to assume an engineered bioweapon (with bioweapon technology well advanced beyond what we can do now), because there’s no real disease that fits that profile. But that’s the sort of disease you would need to produce apocalyptic effects.
I don’t recall any survivalist prepper books talking about the difficulty of getting haircuts when society shuts down. In retrospect, it makes sense, it’s one of the few regular life services that almost all of us outsource to a professional. Prepper handbooks will talk lovingly about all the different kinds of ammo and how you need to store them but not devote even a single page how to perform a basic haircut at home.
Prepper handbooks tell you how to do open heart surgery with an Exacto knife, binder clamps, and an office stapler.
But no haircuts.
Options are: shave it all off, hack away with a K- bar knife, or cornrows.
I’m just about ready for Door #1!
~VOW
One thing Contagion completely missed was the shortage of PPE. They’ve got people in masks, face shields and full hazmat outfits right up to the end. They did run out of body bags though.
If anything, they usually depict the emergency response as ridiculously competent, FEMA is right on time, they integrate seamlessly with the nat guard, etc.
They use that term in Contagion.
To be fair, in Contagion they have nurses striking and doctors refusing to see pts because they have no treatment (and that bug is WAY worse than this one), so maybe it wouldn’t have come up.
As others have noted, this isn’t really apocalyptic, but my ER has been slow, with lots of flexing staff off.
Plenty. It’s common to have the disaster occur because the government is too rigid in a single political direction and refuses to do anything that would compromise their own beliefs even if it kills them.
World War Z has the zombie apocalypse magnified in the United States because the current US Government (implied to be George W Bush IIRC) allows big corporations to manufacture and market “zombie vaccines” that don’t actually work, but they’re still allowed to because both the government doesn’t want to create a panic but also because the big pharma companies were lobbying congress to allow their “cures” to get to market. So the second the zombie virus hits the United States it quickly spreads because people have no fear of it because they assume that the pills they are taking making it impossible to turn into a zombie. That and the US Government attempts to “combat” the zombies rely on “Shock and Awe” tactics intended to be a huge PR move to boost morale with using aircraft and artillery to destroy the zombies in single giant setpiece battles which it’s woefully inadequate at the task and causes a giant rout of the US Army.
In addition the Fallout universe IIRC has the titular nuclear war occur because the US Government and society never move past the American 1950’s consumerism and politics, so there’s a giant drain of resources that eventually cause the world to fight over the remaining resources, and the US Governments response is that instead of trying to conserve resources they just start invading other countries including Canada to take their resources instead. The “Better Red Than Dead” mentality and government corruption means ultimately the US Government and Private Corporations decide it’s just better for everyone to die except for a select few powerful people and just start over the country. And even that doesn’t really work as due to corruption and mismanagement quite a few of the vaults made for the elites and rich aren’t ready in time for the nuclear war.
Deleted – a bit off thread topic.