What starts with just a little tickle in the throat soon becomes a deep cough. Before you know it, children and grandmothers and otherwise healthy adults are hacking blood into their waste bins. Take one last deep breath, and then prepare for a pandemic. Whether a terrorist cell stole vials of biological weaponry from a secret military lab, a rhesus monkey infected an unsuspecting scientist with a demonic bite, or an unwitting explorer churned a forgotten virus from the soil of some rediscovered tropical enclave . . . a pandemic is doubly dangerous. By the minuteness of pathogens, it is an apocalypse rendered invisible; by the inevitability of human contact, it is rendered omnipresent. In addition to the bodily afflictions of a skin-eating virus or wicked strain of influenza, a pandemic prevents us from working together with our friends and neighbors. Instead, we fear them. First, the body breaks down, and then the body politic follows. And no, that surgical mask won’t protect you or spare your family. A real pandemic is nothing to sneeze at.
Originally published in 1965, Dino Buzzati’s short fiction collection Catastrophe and Other Stories has been republished for our calamitous times. The Italian author’s tales of everyday collapse resonated with the post-Mussolini, post-WWII readers, but their odd and foreboding stories still bite.
Spoiler alerts ahead! After more than 1,000 years of ironclad rule, the Roman Empire fell on its own sword. Long a topic of debate, new research portrays the Roman collapse as a far more natural affair than previously supposed.
Almost everyone dies in The Last Man, but it’s fair to say that in Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel the extinction of mankind is an afterthought.