4min chapter

Fiction Science cover image

Sci-fi master Ted Chiang on AI, time travel and more

Fiction Science

CHAPTER

The Importance of Resistance to Pandemics

I hope people will take away from this is that we've not immediately descended into a kind of every man for himself, melee. It has not been sort of like the end of civil society, which I think is a fairly common scenario in fiction and movie depictions of almost any disaster. Maybe that's an indication of the fact that this pandemic did not have the swift dramatic severity that a lot of movie pandemics do. But it's worth thinking about that traditional depictions of pandemics don't spend much time on people sort of coming together and trying to survive. That is not typically a theme in stories about disaster or enormous crisis. And so it may be that people's resistance to

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