However, the link between science fiction and pandemics is deeper. They are connected through a belief of globality, which sociologist Roland Robertson defines as “the consciousness of the global as a whole.”
Globality in science fiction
In his 1992 review of the history of telecommunications, How the World Was One, Arthur C. Clarke alluded to the lecture of the famous historian Alfred Toynbee entitled “The Unification of the World”. Delivered to the University of London in 1947, Toynbee envisioned a “unique planetary society” and noted how “despite all the linguistic and cultural barriers that still separate nations and divide them into even smaller tribes, the unification of the global has surpassed the point of no return.”
Science fiction writers have, in fact, embraced globality. In interplanetary texts, humans of all nations, races and sexes will have to combine as other people in the face of extraterrestrial invasions. In the face of an interplanetary encounter, nations at war will have to reluctantly avoid political rivalries and collaborate on a global scale, as in Denis Villeneuve’s 2018 film, Arrival.
Globality is at the heart of science fiction. To be known as an Earthling, one will have to go beyond the local and the national, and even the global, adopting a broader planetary consciousness.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. The Guin conceptualizes the Ekumen, which includes 83 habitable planets. The concept of Ekumen borrowed from Le Guin’s father, the celebrated cultural anthropologist Arthur L. Kroeber. Kroeber, in a 1945 article, brought the concept (from Greek oikoumene) to constitute a “historical cultural attaché”. Originally, Kroeber used oikoumene to refer to “everyone inhabited” because he traced human culture back to a people. Guin then followed this concept of a non-unusual origin of shared humanity in his novel.
Globality of the pandemic
Many medical science fiction texts describe diseases that have effects on all of humanity and will have to identify a unified or perishable front. These stories highlight the fluid and transnational histories of diseases, their effect and their imaginable cure. In Amitav Ghosh’s 1995 novel The Chromosome of Calcutta, he weaves an interconnected history of malaria spanning continents for more than a century, while defying Eurocentrism and highlighting the subversive role of indigenous wisdom in malaria research.
The caption quotes a poem by Sir Ronald Ross, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist credited with discovering the mosquito as a vector of malaria:
“In search of his secret acts
With tears and a painful breath
I’m sly your seed,
Oh murderous death. “
Pandemics are, by definition, global. On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic, noting that the andemia was not a word to be used lightly or recklessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause an unreasonable or unjustified concern that the fight is over, leading to suffering and death. “
COVID-19 has forced billions of others into social isolation and continues to wreak havoc on an unprecedented global scale. Strange photographs of masked faces, front-line staff dressed in PPE and abandoned urban centres have emerged from around the world.
However, a pandemic is not only global in its spread, it is obligatory to exploit its globality to counter it and, in the end, defeat it. As the Israeli historian Yuval Harari points out, in the selection between national isolationism and global solidarity, we will have to decide on the latter and adopt a “spirit of cooperation and global trust”: “What an Italian doctor discovers early in the morning in Milan could well save lives in Tehran at night. When the British government doubts among various policies, it can seek the recommendation of Koreans who have already faced a similar dilemma a month ago.”
With respect to Canada’s reaction to the crisis, the researchers noted the immorality and futility of a nationalist “Canada First” approach.