Episode 54: Transcript
Podcast: Our Opinions Are Correct
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I’m Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who thinks a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:08] And I’m Annalee Newitz, a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:11] Today we’re going to talk about pandemics, which is an unfortunately very topical subject right now. And joining us in the studio, we have the amazing Mike Chen, the author of A Beginning at the End. Let’s go viral!
[00:00:25] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:52] Mike, why don’t you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Mike: [00:00:54] Hi, my name is Mike Chen. I’m a science fiction writer. My new novel is a very unfortunately timely pandemic novel called A Beginning at the End. My debut novel Here and Now and Then came out last year and I also write for geek media like StarTrek.com, Tor.com, and The Mary Sue.
Annalee: [00:01:10] All the best places.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:12] All the awesomest places.
Annalee: [00:01:12] Yeah. So, today we’re going to talk about something that we’re all going through right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:19] Yes, indeed. Pandemics. And pandemics have been a big deal in science fiction for forever. Basically since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man if not before then. And we’ve always kind of freaked out about plagues and pandemics, and Mike, I wanted to ask you. Why do you think pandemics are so scary? What is so scary about pandemics and how are they different from other kinds of apocalyptic stories?
Mike: [00:01:41] I think with a pandemic, there’s two things. One of them is you can be infected and not know it which is what we’re seeing right now with the coronavirus, with 14-day incubation periods. So even though, I just dropped my daughter off at preschool today and everyone’s cleaning and they’re suspending class and everyone seems healthy. But then there’s always in the back of your mind, even your friends or whoever, you’re like, could you be incubating? Because I don’t know who you met with at work, or that sort of… that spiraling sort of tangential anxiety that comes from that. So there’s that. And then the fact that it’s exponential spreading type of thing. I think that’s the other part of it. It’s like, when you think about climate apocalypse, that is a slow-moving but gradual destruction of the world type of thing. And then if it was a nuclear fallout type of thing, you would have, okay, well, it’s contained to these are the missile blasts and then this is the fallout radiation.
[00:02:50] It’s a different kind of terror. With pandemic, you have this spiraling out of control, something that stays hidden and you’re not sure how to stop it. You’re relying on scientists who have to go to work and work in labs and manufacture something.
Annalee: [00:03:05] One of the things that’s really struck me over the past few days as people have been preparing to deal with COVID-19 is it feels a lot like the days before a hurricane hits in the US, where we’re getting these models and predictions and people are being told to either evacuate or shelter in place. And there’s that sense of kind of gripping the edge of your seat and gritting your teeth and getting ready. But the difference is, when we’re waiting for a hurricane, there’s no extra message that says, oh, and by the way, at least 2% percent of you will absolutely, 100% die. And that’s the thing with the pandemic is you’re not waiting for the wave to hit. You’re waiting for the deaths to hit and that is just terrifying on top of all of the other stuff that you’ve already been talking about.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:56] Yeah, and I’m sort of interested in this idea of people being carriers, people who are… it’s a recipe for distrusting each other. Annalee and I were talking on the way over here about the whole idea of Patient Zero, there’s this one person who we can blame everything on. And I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, but there’s this amazing Canadian musical about the HIV crisis called Zero Patience that kind of has Patient Zero as a character in the movie. Like, the mythical person who spread HIV.
[00:04:28] How do pandemic stories kind of appeal to our paranoia about the enemy in our midst, kind of.
Mike: [00:04:33] I think the idea is that we all want someone to blame, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:04:35] Right.
Mike: [00:04:35] I mean, that makes everything easier. And then, as we’re asked to be more responsible about washing hands, clean things, don’t go to work when you’re sick. A lot of people are doing that begrudgingly. Like, you see in the news right now, people are actually publicly saying, like why is the NBA shutting down? Why is March Madness shutting down? This is all overblown. And I think we probably all agree that we’d rather be more proactive than reactive when we’re past a tipping point. But there’s definitely people who just see this as a nuisance. So everyone wants someone to blame for their inconvenience. It’s like, why should I have to wash my hands. There’s a frightening number of people who’ve said that they’ve never washed their hands before. [crosstalk]
Charlie Jane: [00:05:18] Oh my God, that is terrifying. I don’t want to share a planet with those people.
Annalee: [00:05:22]This is like, I love that we live in the world of like OCD introverts. I feel like I’m ready to conquer everything.
Mike: [00:05:31] It’s funny because, I was just telling my wife the self-quarantine for us as introverts would be so easy to do if we didn’t have a five year-old who was an extrovert. That’s the—
Charlie Jane: [00:05:43] Oh my God.
Mike: [00:05:43] —curse of our existence. But if it was just us, we would just binge so many shows and play Borderlands together. And that’s basically it.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:54] Speaking of that kind of intersection of paranoia, like who’s spreading it, and also the kind of the weird, all the stuff about the modeling and the trying to figure out scenarios. One story that I’ve been thinking about a lot is the movie 12 Monkeys from the 1990s, the Terry Gilliam film. Where, basically, Bruce Willis plays a guy who goes back in time, not to stop the plague, but to model the spread of the plague. And I’ve actually got a great clip of Bruce Willis talking about this.
12 Monkeys Clip: [00:06:23] Five billion people died in 1996 and 1997. Most of the entire population of the world. Only about 1% of us survived.
Are you going to save us, Mr. Cole?
How can I save you, this already happened. I can’t save you, nobody can. I’m simply trying to gather information to help the people in the present trace the path of the virus.
We’re not in the present now, Mr. Cole?
No. 1990 is the past. This already happened.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:57] Part of what’s so creepy about that clip is the fact that Bruce Willis is talking to a room full of people and he’s like, you’re all, already dead. This is the past to me. There’s no changing what’s already happened. You’re all dead and there’s no. You’re gonna die, and that’s just it. Most of the human species is gonna die. But also the fact that he’s this paranoia about who caused this disease? Was it the army of the 12 Monkeys, was it Jeffery Goins, this character played by Brad Pitt? Was it some other person or entity? There’s some kind of mysterious enemy that he’s trying to track down and it’s part epidemiology and part conspiracy thriller, kind of.
Annalee: [00:07:33] And it’s two of Mike’s favorite things, it’s time travel and pandemics, so.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:36] Right!
Mike: [00:07:37] Yes. Crossed my books over together. There would just be a lot more crying in my version of it.
Annalee: [00:07:43] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:45] That would be a way better one, too.
Annalee: [00:07:45] Ther would be a lot more processing of feelings, I think. For sure. I think that 12 Monkeys is a really interesting one because it does also play into all of these images of patient zero. For example, during the early AIDS crisis, there was this idea that patient zero had had sex with a monkey. That was one of the models that they came up with. And monkeys—the idea of something crossing over from monkeys to humans, is so provocative and it’s also in 28 Days Later. It’s this weird moment where the origin of this terrible conspiracy, which of course, is a very human thing somehow gets traced back to this animalistic thing.
[00:08:26] I wondered if we could talk a little bit about something that I really liked in A Beginning at the End, Mike’s novel, which is that instead of it being something like 12 Monkeys, where there’s a vast conspiracy or there’s this shady organization behind it, it’s really just, I think of it as a domestic melodrama, basically. It’s about people sitting around and having feelings and of course, they’ve passed the pandemic, so they’re also dealing with PTSD. But I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, Mike? Your choice to, instead of having this crazy international intrigue zombie tale, to just be like, well, what happened to this guy’s feelings and his marriage?
Mike: [00:09:05] Yeah. So, well, I realized that there’s this big space in apocalyptic fiction where it’s either the first year of everything’s falling apart and everyone’s killing each other for groceries, or it’s like, 100 years in the future where society has already shifted and there’s been several generations of people who know how to live in the new world. And I thought it would be much more interesting to focus on that near-future area where people have survived and they’re just processing their shit because there’s a lot of shit to process.
Annalee: [00:09:41] Yeah.
Mike: [00:09:41] And that’s where the idea came from. And I think, it feels eerily similar to what we’re experiencing right now. Because you’re seeing, I think, a lot of people feeling the stress of, one, is not knowing. My book takes place in six years after there’s been a pandemic and a quarantine. But you can still see the after-effects of it, like everyone’s wearing breathing masks, and everyone’s using hand sanitizer and keeping social distance. So, there was—it was really frightening seeing those things start to play out.
[00:10:12] But there’s the idea of these things that we have taken for granted as a society for so long and now that they’re being infringed upon, everyone’s stressed out and not sure how to cope. And they’re coping in different ways. And now that everyone’s on Twitter and social media, we’re all seeing everyone’s freakout in real time, which is probably not good.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:33] Yeah, so Mike, you wanted to have an apocalyptic story and sort of tell a story about the aftermath of the apocalypse. What made you choose a pandemic versus some other kind of disaster?
Mike: [00:10:44] I really wanted to have something where on the surface, like, if you took a snapshot of these people in the story. On the surface everything would look the same, because they’re in a city and there’s probably cars in the background and there’s electronics and things. But then when you look closer, the electronics are dated. The cars are not working that well. The infrastructure is not holding up, and underneath the surface for the people, they are harboring a lot of trauma. And so the only way to really pull that off, I specifically selected two billion survivors. So you’re killing off about 75% of the population. And I looked at what are the different models you could use for that?
[00:11:24] Climate apocalypse would fundamentally shift infrastructure, where people lived, how people lived, everything. And so that really wouldn’t work for this type of story. A zombie apocalypse would mean you’re dealing with violence every day and that doesn’t work for this either. And then, a nuclear apocalypse, you’d be dealing with radiation fallout and mutation and sorts of other stuff. So that doesn’t really work either.
[00:11:49] So it’s specifically the pandemic to lop off a significant part of the population but then keep the infrastructure the same. That was basically the idea behind it.
Annalee: [00:11:59] So it’s kind of the quiet apocalypse.
Mike: [00:12:02] Yeah. The quiet apocalypse in that you’re not surviving anymore. You think about a lot of apocalyptic fiction is just focused on survival. You’re fighting off the zombies to survive, or you’re fighting off the motorcycle gangs to survive, and I really wanted a world where people could congregate and on a core level, live they’re day-to-day life like we expect in modern society. And that’s when all of the trauma starts to unpack.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:31] Yeah, and it’s interesting. One of the things that I’ve been obsessing about as we prepared for this episode is the fact that a lot of apocalyptic stories that would have used nuclear war or some other kind of fast and hugely destructive force are now using plagues instead. Two examples that came to mind were Planet of the Apes, like the 1968 movie, we find out at the end that there was a nuclear war and that’s why the Statue of Liberty is buried, and that’s why apes took over. But in the 2010s version, the trilogy that starts with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it’s something called the Simian Flu, and actually we have a clip of people talking about the Simian Flu.
Planet of the Apes: [00:13:07] Due to the extremity of the Simian Flu crisis, all regular government functions have been suspended indefinitely. Attention: due to the ex—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:17] And then there’s also The Last Ship, which is a show that started airing about six or seven years ago, where it’s based on a novel from the ‘80s, in which, again, a nuclear war wipes out most of humanity and there’s this one naval vessel left kind of to survive. But in the TV show, which started airing, like I said, six or seven years ago, it’s suddenly a plague instead. And it’s interesting that there’s been this—people who take older apocalyptic stories, one of the things that they reach for almost automatically is replacing nuclear war with pandemic because it’s either scarier or more in the front of our minds or easier to dramatize in the moment, maybe.
Annalee: [00:13:55] I thought it was so interesting what you said, Mike, about how the zombie apocalypse is a violent one, versus pandemic being essentially non-violent in some ways. Although there is violence in your book. But I think that’s the same thing with nuclear war, it’s like moving from a violent apocalypse to something quiet.
Mike: [00:14:13] If you look at when those pieces of media were made, there’s still a lot of Cold War anxiety around there. And I think there’s a fundamental shift where, we kind of mock in the Fallout series of video games where the war in Fallout is between the Chinese and everyone else. Now as we’re shifting more to a pandemic-style apocalypse in popular media, I think it’s more about, we don’t necessarily fear the same things that we did in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, even the ‘80s. And now it’s more this creeping anxiety of… I mean, the apocalypse is always a metaphor for something, right?
Annalee: [00:14:56] Yeah.
Mike: [00:14:56] In fiction. It can be capitalism, it could be climate change, it could be the Cold War. It think it just kind of reflects on feeling safe but not feeling safe, and I think that’s especially prescient in this era of digital information where we know everything but we don’t know everything. And I think that we’re starting to get this sense of like, there’s just this underlying anxiety because everything is interconnected now. You’ve seen a marked shift that way.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:24] Yeah, and it’s interesting. I’ve got a clip from the 1994 miniseries, The Stand based on the Stephen King book, which kind of dramatizes the paranoia and also the uncertainty, because the authorities are telling people that the Captain Trips virus is not real, but people are panicking and freaking out and the hospitals are full.
The Stand Clip: [00:15:43] You might want to consider delaying your trip back a few days.
Why, what’s the problem?
Things are weird. People are really scared about this Captain Trips thing.
The radio here says it’s just bull.
The radio out here says the hospitals are filling up with sick people. Some of them are dying.
What, people are dying of the flu?
There’s a lot of soldiers…
Charlie Jane: [00:16:00] And that miniseries is right after the end of the Cold War, although I guess the book came out in ’78. It feels like The Stand is a seminal work in the kind of disease apocalypse genre.
Mike: [00:16:12] Yeah, I think… if you look at the lists of, for whatever reason, there’s been a lot of, I’d say in the past few weeks, read these or watch these pandemic things right now. The Stand always, no pun intended, stands out.
Annalee: [00:16:27] I think, also, Chuck Wendig’s recent novel, The Wanderers, which deals with a lot of the same issues as The Stand, which is to say, it’s very American. It’s all about different forces in the United States ripping the country apart. And The Stand is also about a right-wing creepy nuke-loving white guy versus a nice black lady, which feels very of the moment in some ways. I’m sorry, I just gave away the spoilers for The Stand, maybe. But I feel like, again, that it’s about the US tearing itself apart.
[00:17:03] But the other thing I think that happens in a lot of these stories, like the sort of metaphor that’s being played with is fear of immigration. Which is why authors and creators often seem to want to have some bad guy to blame. The bad guy is always someone who’s coming from another place, like Dracula came from Transylvania and bought up a bunch of real estate in London and started turning people into the undead. It’s the original undead immigrant story. Which is kind of about contagion, ultimately. It starts out being about real estate, but it’s really about contagion and fear of immigrants coming in and taking over.
Mike: [00:17:40] I think, too, the examples you were talking about with the myth of who had sex with the monkey for the AIDS outbreak. That form of blame, even now you see with people blaming the Chinese, and oh, who ate the weird meat in the Wuhan market that started this. There’s this fear of the other. You’re othering the patient zero, into, like, wow, they’re just so messed up that they had to, insert blank action, there.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:14] Oh my God.
Mike: [00:18:14] That makes it easy to harbor blame and not take responsibility of, like, maybe that would have happened anyways but if our government had the proper infrastructure and coordinated internationally, maybe it wouldn’t be this bad. It’s easier to just blame this person who did a despicable act in another country rather than look at the mitigating factors that are not allowing it to be contained.
Annalee: [00:18:38] yeah, and I think it goes back to what you were saying, too, to this fear or anxiety around being interconnected and that that’s part of the pandemic fear because there’s nothing like immigration to show how interconnected we all are socially and culturally. And as many pandemic experts have been saying today, the cat is out of the bag. People have been immigrating for like, oh, 5,000 years. So that’s not something we can stop. And so instead we find ways of demonizing it.
Mike: [00:19:07] There’s a really fantastic book that came out last year called Famous Men Who Never Lived by K. Chess. And it’s this parallel world story, but it’s actually about immigration because the parallel world in that story—it takes place in modern day New York City, but the parallel world in that story is dying from nuclear fallout and the scientists there find a portal to our world and they immigrate as many survivors as they can into our world. So the story is about how people who have left their parallel world, which deviated from ours in the 1930s are trying to adjust to this world that looks like theirs but is totally different. The science has developed differently, the pop culture has developed differently. That was just a really fascinating take on immigration in a completely different way. I loved how that story—it showed that even when these people who were easily unidentifiable in our society because they look exactly the same, there’s still this rampant demonizing because they’re like, oh, we took in an extra 200,000 people or whatever, and we don’t have the money to support them, we don’t have the infrastructure to support them, but they just popped up through this interdimensional portal, what are we gonna do?
[00:20:19] I love how modern fiction is willing to play with some of these tropes and twist them around in ways that probably we wouldn’t have seen in ‘80s media.
Annalee: [00:20:29] All right, so we’re gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about crazy viruses in science fiction and fantasy.
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Charlie Jane: [00:20:48] One of the things that makes viruses and pandemics and plagues so useful in speculative fiction, generally, is that they can do pretty much anything you want them to do. Like, any time you need a plot device that causes something weird to happen, you can just have a fictional virus and Wikipedia’s list of fictional viruses is kind of amazing, but also just all over the internet there’s tons of stuff. There are viruses that kill all the men, like in Ammonite by Nicola Griffith. There’s viruess that kill all the women, like in The White Plague, by Frank Herbert. There’s a bunch of viruses that basically make it impossible to reproduce like in Children of Men, and Inferno by Dan Brown. And to some extend in The Road to Nowhere trilogy by Meg Elison which kills, I think, most of the women and also makes childbirth deadly.
Annalee: [00:21:35] And then, also, that makes you super reproduce, like in the movie Slither.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:39] Right, yeah. Is that a virus? It’s like an alien parasite thing. [crosstalk]
Annalee: [00:21:41] It’s like an outer space contagion, yeah. I mean, it’s the scariest representation of pregnancy I’ve ever seen.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:50] Yeah, like Doctor Who just had a virus that interacts with the plastic in your body and makes you grow weird chonky scales and then explode into dust.
Annalee: [00:21:57] Gross!
Charlie Jane: [00:21:58] There’s a virus called the Hanahaki disease that people in the fanfic community are obsessed with that makes everybody who is in unrequited love cough up flower petals until they’re no longer in love and then they’re cured.
Annalee: [00:22:10] Aww.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:10] There’s the real-life disease that some people believe in called Morgellons that makes wires come out of your skin. China Mieville has a story where there’s a virus which makes anybody who says a particular word lose their mind, but only if you say that word. There’s diseases that kill magical people like in Harry Potter and [inaudible] hunters. There’s diseases that kill only mutants in Marvel comics.
Annalee: [00:22:34] And then there’s one of my favorite diseases from Cat Valente’s novel, Palimpsest where it’s a sexually transmitted magical portal that takes you to another world.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:43] Yeah! Like you do.
Annalee: [00:22:44] So, yeah. You know, it’s a contagious sexual city or something.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:50] Yeah, and you know, Stephen King has a virus that hides inside your cell phone in The Cell and kills anybody who gets a phone call, a particular phone call. There are diseases that cause insomnia in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, but also a bunch of other recent literary fiction.
[00:23:07] There’s a thriller called Codon Zero by Jim Hendee, where there’s a specially engineered disease that only kills Arabs and Jews.
Annalee: [00:23:14] Oh, God.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:14] That was engineered by somebody who’s trying to stop the Middle East crisis.
Annalee: [00:23:18] Somebody who doesn’t understand how genetics work.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:21] In Clive Barker’s The Plague, there’s a disease that puts all children into a coma for ten years and then they wake up wanting to kill all adults after the ten-year coma.
Annalee: [00:23:30] Uh huh. That’s just like, childhood, I think.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:32] There’s diseases that kill all adults but leave the children alive like in that one Star Trek episode and a bunch of other things. There’s zombies, there’s vampires. And then, my favorite, actually, is the Simian Flu in the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy, which first kills off most of humanity. I think 98% of humanity is killed and then mutates into a virus that makes the remaining humans unable to speak, just, randomly.
Annalee: [00:23:59] But I also, I want to—Planet of the Apes is one of my favorite franchises, I guess, and in the first series one of the things that happens in the many retcons is that there’s a pandemic that kills cats and dogs.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:13] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:24:13] And all cats and dogs die and as a result, people start keeping chimps and other apes as pets. And that’s the beginning of the uplift—
Charlie Jane: [00:24:24] I forgot about that.
Annalee: [00:24:24] —that causes the apes to achieve human-equivalent intelligence. There’s all of these weird moments, eerily in that film where we see statues in public squares to dogs and cats, and they’re like, To Man’s Best Friend and everyone is super sad about losing their cats and dogs. And it’s actually kind of an amazing concept because people would go nuts if that happened. We would be so incredibly sad.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:49] I know.
Annalee: [00:24:49] Yeah, so I don’t ever want another movie about how all cats and dogs die, so screw that.
Mike: [00:24:55] So, in Mass Effect, there’s the Genophage which is during the war between the Turians and the Krogans, the Turians develop a bioweapon that prevents a lot of the Krogans from reproducing and then after the war is settled they can’t stop it. And so this race of warrior creatures, even they’re the bad-ass tanks of the universe, they can’t persist as a species successfully because this thing has been injected into their society.
Annalee: [00:25:25] Oh, man. And then there’s also The Last of Us, which is another video game plague that has totally destroyed my mind, which has the mind-controlling fungus. I don’t know if that’s really a plague. I mean, it’s a fungal infection.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:37] It’s… yeah.
Annalee: [00:25:38] It’s kind of a plague. It’s a plague.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:38] It’s a kind of plague.
Annalee: [00:25:40] It counts.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:40] It counts.
Annalee: [00:25:41] It’s really gross and awesome.
Mike: [00:25:43] Isn’t it fictionally, isn’t vampirism considered a plague, more or less because it’s transmitted through blood?
Annalee: [00:25:49] I think so, I mean, there’s a lot of—
Charlie Jane: [00:25:49] Often.
Annalee: [00:25:49] —and especially in the ‘80s, there were a lot of sort of fantasy stories in which vampires and AIDS were kind of intertwingled. I read a novel back then called Vampires Anonymous which is explicitly about a gay vampire plague and how people coped with it. It was kind of a funny horror novel.
[00:26:09] Contagion and blood and undeath, you know, they all get smooshed together. I have to bring up one of my favorite scenes from a contagion movie, which is the 1980s version of The Thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:22] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:26:22] Which, Charlie and I were debating, I don’t know what you think about this, Mike, whether that’s actually a contagion movie or if it’s more just alien invasion. But every time the presidential administration in the US tries to talk about testing, I always think that what they’re really thinking about is this scene in The Thing where they’re testing to see who might be the Thing. What they do is they put everybody’s blood in a petri dish. And the thing about the Thing is that every little piece of it is alive. So if they stick a hot wire into that blood that came from the Thing, the blood will literally scream and run away. So they’re going around the room and they’re sticking the wire in everybody’s petri dish, and it’s just kind of sizzling. And then finally they stick it in one, and the blood like, “WAAA!” And then the guy who’s the thing starts turning into the Thing and it’s really gross. But that’s what I imagine at the White House, like, that’s how we’re going to do these tests. We’re just gonna get everyone and stick a hot wire, and whoever screams and runs away, they have COVID-19. That’s how it works.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:20] It’d be great if that was how it works.
Mike: [00:27:22] I’m picturing the current administration trying to do that in my head and it’s just this ultimate bad comedy.
Annalee: [00:27:30] Yeah, it would be a reality show, for sure. All right, who’s next?
Charlie Jane: [00:27:35] But this is part of what I love about these stories, is you have these kind of realistic quote-unquote virus stories like Outbreak, or Contagion, or whatever, which attempt to deal with this in a semi-scientific way. But then you also have this thing, which is what I love about science fiction and fantasy in general, is this idea of just hey, it can do whatever we want. It can just kill this one ethnicity, it can just kill little kids. Whatever.
Annalee: [00:27:59] It’s the Holodeck of apocalypse stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:02] It kind of is. It’s like a Swiss army knife.
Annalee: [00:28:05] Yeah, well, so what do you make of that? That was a pretty impressive list of possible—
Charlie Jane: [00:28:10] I know, and that was just some of the best ones.
Annalee: [00:28:12] —plagues, Charlie Jane. Yeah, and there could be, I’m sure there’s a million others that people are thinking about right now. So, why is it such a Swiss army knife?
Mike: [00:28:19] I think because you can tailor it to anything. So if you need your narrative device to be, I’m going to talk about racism or classism, so I’m going to create something that only affects this group of people. It’s a very easy mechanic to do that. So whatever your allegory, even in mine, I had to come up with, okay, how is this going to be transmitted. And it’s like, oh, I have this checklist of communicable ways. What’s going to fit the story, best? So if you’re creating fiction and you want to tell a certain story and use a certain allegory, you can kind of reverse engineer it and a pandemic provides a lot of flexibility for that.
Annalee: [00:29:01] Yeah, it’s sort of like mass death but targeted. How do you have targeted megakilling.
Mike: [00:29:10] When you’re reverse engineering that, then you can—there’s all sorts of fake science you can add in there where it’s like, oh, well, it was a conspiracy theory by people who hated poor people in this county and then it got out of control because it spread to other counties. It’s very easy to just tick the boxes off and, because it’s fiction, you only need some level of hand-wavy science to support it.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:36] With a lot of plague stories, there’s often the thing of science got out of control. Scientists meddled in something that they shouldn’t have meddled in and they played god, and I am Legend, the Will Smith movie, which we actually talked a lot about in our nihilism episode, starts out with this whole thing about how they created a virus to kill cancer, I think, and then the virus got out of control and just started killing everything. And it’s often that. That’s 28 Days Later, too, isn’t it?
Annalee: [00:30:05] Yeah, 28 Days Later it’s animal testing, so it’s linked to something that’s actually ethically dubious, or whatever. I think there’s often a moral, again, it goes back to the patient zero thing, where it’s like, even in a highly realistic movie like Contagion, how does patient zero in the United States happen? She does it because she’s fucking around on her husband. She’s cheating on her husband and screws this guy and gets the disease. A European, I think. So it justifies closing the border with Europe, I think.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:36] He probably had sex with like, I don’t know, a giraffe, who, you know.
Annalee: [00:30:40] Well, some sort of European animal, I suppose.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:42] Yeah, I don’t know.
Annalee: [00:30:42] What would that be? A bulldog, perhaps.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:45] Yeah, he had sex with a bulldog, I don’t know. God. This is.
Annalee: [00:30:47] What animals do Europeans—
Charlie Jane: [00:30:48] We might have to cut this part. I don’t know.
Mike: [00:30:51] That’s the UK, Annalee.
Annalee: [00:30:52] I’m sorry, yeah, that’s right. And they’re not in Europe anymore.
Mike: [00:30:53] Technically different now.
Annalee: [00:30:54] I know, we need to come up with a really vicious stereotype of the dirty things that Europeans do. I mean, they eat all kinds of gross stuff.
Mike: [00:31:05] Snails.
Annalee: [00:31:04] Snails, truffles…
Charlie Jane: [00:31:05] They had sex with a snail.
Annalee: [00:31:08] Yeah, they—
Charlie Jane: [00:31:08] He had snail sex and then he had sex with this woman and that’s how we got Contagion.
Annalee: [00:31:13] I mean, it sounds about right.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:16] It sounds very plausible. But yeah, part of what’s scary about these viruses is often their origin. Andromeda Strain, it’s this virus—
Annalee: [00:31:23] From space!
Charlie Jane: [00:31:23] —that comes from space! And actually, here’s a clip of them talking about how it eats through plastic.
Andromeda Strain: [00:31:28] It’s no accident. I suspect they were looking for the ultimate biological weapon.
You can change everything.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:38] It’s like, partly scary because it’s from beyond and partly scary because we don’t know how it works and it’s confusing and weird and it defies the rules of our science. I think that’s another thing about diseases is that we can easily believe that they would behave in ways that science doesn’t understand.
Annalee: [00:31:55] So, before our final segment, I wanted to finish up with a question, which is mostly for Mike, which is: I wonder, do you think it helps us deal with a real-life pandemic to have fictional representations? Is it helping us prepare in some way, do you think?
Mike: [00:32:13] I think it’s helping and hurting. I think in some ways… there is the practical element of, if you experience it in fiction, your mind will probably be thinking about, well, okay, what I should I do in that circumstance. But I think the wrong people might take it the wrong way. It’s very easy to move it past the realm of fiction and assume that it’s a possibility. I’m sure everyone has seen on Twitter jokes about, oh, the zombie apocalypse is next ,we’re just one step away. And then even if COVID-19 turned people, like, brought people back from the dead and turned them into zombies, the way that a zombie would survive in our natural world is nothing like what would actually happen on The Walking Dead or something. There’s bugs, and UV radiation and all this other stuff that would just break it down right away.
[00:33:04] So, there was a story in the news, like four or five years ago where two guys were marathoning The Walking Dead and they were drinking at the same time. And they were getting 20 hours into it and one guy just lost his mind and smashed his friend over the head, and he was totally drunk at the time. And so, it’s like. Let’s not take this too far, you know. Use the fiction for the allegory and the practical, oh, what can we learn about survivalism, if necessary. But, I think some people might take it a little bit too much as fact.
Annalee: [00:33:39] Yeah.
Mike: [00:33:39] Having written a pandemic novel, I can attest that even though I’m seeing weird shit play out in real time, all of it was just based on very logical thinking of, what if this happened, and then reverse engineering, okay, what are the societal things that would have to fall into place for that. I’m not prophetic. It’s just very logic-based thinking.
Annalee: [00:34:01] Do you feel like you’re kind of seeing stuff that you had already imagined happen? Is stuff happening around where, oh, that’s what I was writing about last year?
Mike: [00:34:12] Yeah, it’s creepy. There’s… in one of the opening scenes where two of the main characters are talking in a café and one of them has her breathing mask off and someone just yells at them for like, why is your mask off. And then there’s in the school there’s these illustrated cartoon graphics of how to put on your breathing masks and how to clean your hands and things like that. We’re seeing that kind of stuff right now.
[00:34:42] The scariest part was when the Major League Baseball announced the cancellation of the Giants and the A’s, they’re preseason game. And in my book, there’s a scene that takes place in a—I wrote it in San Francisco, and it’s the last night that baseball played a game, and it’s right after a Giants and A’s game. So—
Annalee: [00:35:04] Thanks, Mike.
Mike: [00:35:04] Yeah, no. It’s totally my fault.
Annalee: [00:35:08] Oh, man. Yeah.
Mike: [00:35:10] All these things are, when I wrote that scene, I played it out because my virus moved from East to West, so it was a logical point. And, from a storytelling perspective, it’s because I wanted the book to take place in San Francisco, and that’s it. So, all of these things can be extrapolated backwards into what fits the storytelling and what would logically exist from a worldbuiling perspective.
Annalee: [00:35:37] Yeah. Now the real world is building it up.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:40] Oh, man.
Annalee: [00:35:41] All right, so let’s take a quick break and then when we come back, we’re going to talk about something very happy, which is how we’re all obsessed with Legends of Tomorrow.
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Annalee: [00:36:04] But first, Mike, tell us what is Legends of Tomorrow?
Mike: [00:36:07] Legends of Tomorrow is the best God-damned show on TV. It is… except for the first season was really bad. But after that, it’s basically like the B team from DC comics meets Guardians of the Galaxy meets Doctor Who. The writing staff has leaned into the ridiculous, and so—
Charlie Jane: [00:36:26] They really have.
Mike: [00:36:26] And so you have this immense chemistry between all of the lead characters and they’re thrown into these ridiculous scenarios where it’s really funny but the writers and the actors know their characters really, really well. And so you’re having these really authentic reactions to just, a giant plushy God…
Charlie Jane: [00:36:51] Yeah, Beebo.
Mike: [00:36:51] Beebo is the best.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:53] Beebo is the best.
Mike: [00:36:53] So, it’s funny and the action is great and it’s just unlike anything on TV and more people need to see it.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:02] Yeah, and part of what I love about Legends of Tomorrow is how gleefully ridiculous its time travel is.
Annalee: [00:37:08] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:09] And how, there’s this whole thing that in some time travel stories, where it’s like, we have to take it very seriously and there have to be rules and you can’t do blah blah blah. And Legends of Tomorrow just leans into the ridiculousness of it in a way that few other time travel stories are able to.
[00:37:25] And obviously, you’re a time travel expert, so maybe you can speak to that a little bit.
Mike: [00:37:28] Annalee is the time travel expert. I just make shit up.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:30] I think you’re both time travel experts.
Annalee: [00:37:31] Yeah, actually, we both have time travel books, it’s true. And I think we both struggled with trying to have a pretty coherent system for time travel that would feel plausible. So maybe that’s part of why Legends of Tomorrow is so great. Because it’s just like, yeah, whatever.
[00:37:46] I think the thing that I like most about it is that there’s so much kind of like, pseudo-ethical handwringing in time travel stories about not changing history, which I find to be just kind of cynical, because of course, we’re constantly changing history. We’re learning new things about it, we’re changing our opinions about it. History books written now are very different from ones written a hundred years ago. So even if they’re about the same thing, like history books about the Roman Empire totally different in the 19th century than they are now. And so, I love in Legends of Tomorrow, they’re like, fuck it. We’re going to change history. We don’t care.
[00:38:24] I mean, they do care, and they have moments where they’re like, oh my gosh, wow, I created a daughter, whoops. Suddenly I have another daughter in my timeline. But there, ultimately a lot of changes they make are great and they’re trying to make things better. They rescue people, and I love that.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:42] There’s a turning point on the show where they have an episode where they’re like, Helen of Troy has to die in order for the timeline to be saved, and then they’re like, you know what, fuck it. We’re just going to take Helen of Troy and let her go live with the Amazons, and she can just spend the rest of her life being an Amazon.
Annalee: [00:38:57] There’s this great episode in the second season where they go back to the antebellum south and rescue some slaves who also were kind of destined to die. And I was like, yeah. Let’s just—
Charlie Jane: [00:39:08] Hell, yeah.
Annalee: [00:39:08] It’s just, our modern sensibilities are going to come back into history and change things and that’s okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:14] That’s good. And that’s…
Annalee: [00:39:15] There’s no. Why do we have to preserve the old history. The old history sucked in a lot of ways, so I like that. It’s very cheerful.
Mike: [00:39:23] I also appreciate how, even in ways that you wouldn’t expect, like this week’s most recent episode had them going into a version of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood—
Charlie Jane: [00:39:35] I know. It was insane.
Mike: [00:39:35] [crosstalk]
Charlie Jane: [00:39:38] It was insane.
Mike: [00:39:40] I’m like, how do you even come up with that? So not only are they playing with time travel, but they always have something like that, like we mentioned Beebo. For the uninitiated, Beebo is a talking plushie, kind of like Teddy Ruxpin from the ‘80s that gets misinterpreted and turned into a god and then becomes a god. And—
Charlie Jane: [00:40:00] It’s amazing.
Mike: [00:40:00] —the fact that they’re—they’re playing with these anachronisms, but then using them as really smart narrative devices and so it’s like, it’s funny and amazing and ridiculous. There’s also a really cool story about it in, and I really appreciate how they’re letting their characters have these really natural reactions to seeing giant Teddy Ruxpin—
Charlie Jane: [00:40:22] It’s awesome.
Mike: [00:40:24] I saw this—someone on Twitter posted that clip, and I guess they had never seen the show before. And the person’s comment was, I can’t believe something like this made it on TV, like in a disparaging way. And then all of the comments are like, this is Legends of Tomorrow, you do not fuck with that.
Annalee: [00:40:39] Good.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:39] You do not fuck with Legends of Tomorrow. It has a posse. So, that’s our show. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you so much for joining us, Mike. Mike, where can people find you online?
Mike: [00:40:49] I am mostly on Twitter at @MikeChenWriter. You have to distinguish between Mike Chen the food guy who has way more followers than me and I sometimes get his fan email. And also Mike Chen the tech start-up guy. I also get pinged for him sometimes. But @MikeChenWriter. My website is MikeChenBooks.com. My books are A Beginning at the End, the pandemic with hope book and then Here and Now and Then, the time travel father-daughter story with hope.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:19] That’s awesome.
Annalee: [00:41:20] They’re both fantastic. Highly recommended.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:22] Yay. So you’ve been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us where all the podcasts are found, and please, if you like our podcast, please, please, please leave a review on Apple or any place else, or just go into the bathroom and shout about how much you love our podcast. Whatever you do—
Annalee: [00:41:36] Leave some grafitti.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:38] —it really helps. Graffiti is awesome. We love pro-podcast graffiti. We have a Patreon at patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect and you can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. And thanks so much to Veronica Simonetti for being the greatest audio producer in the universe. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and thanks again to you for listening. We’ll be back in two weeks.
Annalee: [00:41:56] All right. Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:41:56] Bye!
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