Mods, move if you think this is more IMHO. Really wasn’t sure of where to put it.
I’m a Steven King fan. But does anyone else feel like COVID is sort of like the Stand?
Just moving much slower. COVID by King would be a 10,000 page book.
We have some people ignoring it and supporting a leader that is just trying to capitalize on it. A leader that doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself.
Other people are trying to make do and make things better.
Trying to ignore the religious aspects of the Stand, but it is sort of eerily similar. Just in slow motion.
IIRC, in the Stand the super flu had something like a 99+% mortality, so Covid isn’t even close to that. It was also super infectious and had enough of a delay that it spread then basically killed everyone. I’m not seeing the parallels to Covid, to be honest, though we aren’t exactly done with this thing yet so there is still time for it to get that nightmarish I guess.
In the early days of quarantine/pandemic I decided to reread The Stand. Man, what a mistake that turned out to be. My mood was pretty awful for a couple of weeks.
I am not going to re-read it now - but it’s really not the same at all. Leaving aside the much higher mortality rate rate in The Stand , it really wasn’t a matter of people ignoring the flu and supporting a leader who was trying to capitalize on it. The flu had already killed everyone it was going to and was no longer a concern. It was something much different - it was never really clear to me most of the people drawn to Flagg were inherently evil or if they were just willing to follow him because he got the electricity on and draconian rules were a price they were willing to pay for that. Although come to think of it, that second possibility is not that different from what’s going on now.
It’s been a while since I read “The Stand”. Though there are similarities, “The Stand” was really about the post-apocalyptic world. In “The Stand”, the virus spreads and kills so swiftly, most of the population is wiped out in a matter of weeks (?). So it is like “Earth Abides” in that the majority of the earth’s population is just gone. So the story is more about how the few survivors 1) find each other, and 2) try to figure out what to do next.
The situation with COVID is a bigger “test” of how we will respond. It is deadly enough to kill, but nowhere near the mortality rate of “The Stand” virus. And it’s manner of spreading is slower. In “The Stand”, the virus was transmitted so quickly there wasn’t time for anyone to even figure out how best to avoid catching it. With COVID we have a pretty good handle on how to inhibit the transmission - it’s just getting everyone to comply that is the issue. So it is testing how we handle something that is “kind of” dangerous. If not handled well, it could eventually devolve into “The Stand” scenario, only with likely a lot more survivors.
Well sure…on a timeline of 10 decades most people will die. I’m thinking we are looking at nearly 100% mortality, certainly in the 99.99% range that, IIRC King was talking about in the Stand.
The point though is that even if we are talking about really, really slow, Covid isn’t in the same league as Captain Tripps (I think that’s what they called it)…it’s not even on par with the 1918 flu pandemic wrt gross mortality. It might get there at some point if it mutates to a much more dangerous strain…it certainly gets high marks for communicability, though I don’t think there it’s on par either, but grim enough.
No real comparison. The Stand is really about the breakdown of society. The exact cause of the death of 99% of the population is irrelevant. It could have been something else. Usually the apocalypse is due to a nuclear holocaust; King just decided to use something different. The main difference is that with a pandemic the infrastructure remains intact (although largely not usable for lack of people to run it).
COVID is never going to come close to removing 99% of the population anywhere, no matter how long it lasts. While it certainly has caused some strains in society, and the economic fallout will continue to do so, it hasn’t (and won’t) cause its complete collapse.
One interesting (?) quirk of The Stand is that there’s no one who survives the first wave just by being isolated from society. As we’ve seen with COVID, staying home and away from other people is a pretty effective way to not get sick (of everything. Flu and other infections are way down too). Surely there’d be some ranchers or survivalists who would just shut down and not let anyone in or out who would survive (for a while at least).
If you want a novel that is more similar to our current circumstances (with a hell of an ironic twist), I’d recommend -
It is a closer parallel to COVID, in that it is a ‘naturally’ occurring Flu strain with high mortality (much higher than COVID, much lower than the SuperFlu), which spreads worldwide, and has huge disparities on how different political groups, nations, and regions handle it.
The twist is, the author (who writes a great deal of military sci-fi and very strong rightwards leaning tendencies) has cast it as a failure of multi-cultural societies and liberals in dealing with the problem. In his case, it’s a liberal female president (and yes, I think it is very directed at Hilary) is the one being hysterical in denials, in refusing to follow EXISTING plans for pandemics, to be obsessed with optics, and firing all the professionals in the administration to be replaced with cronies.
It was the first novel I thought of when COVID became prominent, and was torn with the desire to write an open letter to the author going “WTF how did you get the conservative response so damn wrong?” but in honesty, Trump is trump, not a conservative and what damns republicans is that they’ll throw out all their own values to pander to him.
Okay, rant /off, sorry. It’s a solid book if you like military fiction, has fun slice of life, and honestly looks at both local and large scale responses well - you just will find the political message portions extremely ironic in light of our ‘real world’ response.
King can be a bit all over the board with his numbers.
“This is nine! NINE! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six!”
“Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four! Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight!”
Why, you little copycat !! I bought a used copy at The Strand on Broadway and ( about ) 11th St. Did it in late February because what we were seeing in China and Seattle was freaking me out- and I though gee, how appropriate.
Agreed. Very depressing. Also, though, I fell in love with Frannie all over again.
I wasn’t trying to literally compare COVID to Capt. Tripps. But in my life time this is as close as I have seen it. Streets shut down, social distancing and masks. 200,000 dead in the US. Social disorder for some. Businesses that will likely not be able to recover. The Government in disarray. Though that didn’t really happen in The Stand.
I understand this isn’t Capt. Tripps, or The Stand.
It’s just a slow moving real life version of The Stand. Polarized people that absolutely disagree with each other (to put it gently), and a pretty much a complete different social structure for the last seven months.
I was just saying in my OP that this COULD be a Stephen King book, but it looks like it would have to be a series of books.
I reread The Stand last year for the… well… let’s just guess 5-10th time. I’m seeing some parallels, but I saw more politically speaking with The Dead Zone and current non-covid events.
I read Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers right before all this happened and I found it to be scary at the time and if I were reading it now, I think I’d have to put it down.
