Plague

[Stuart Dren]

I love a good disease [in fiction], especially a trending one.

It gives a lot for a story to latch onto. Provides immediate tension, distrust, superstition, exploitation, exile. Ruins the flow of resources. Great way to thin the cast. Might be an easy path to reinvigorating the setting for a sequel.

The plague may be mystical, or have a more realistic origin like a cave or river or thaw of some kind, or man made ("Don't Fear the Reaper" kicks in while panning across dead scientists). Perhaps it's a computer virus in a cybernetic world.

If the illness leads to zombies, well, it seems like it becomes a different kind of story (not sure I can explain why, but it feels that way).

Oddly enough, none of my stories have featured a prominent disease. I'm sure a few will in the future, though.

Any thoughts on fictional plagues? Love them, find them boring, put them in every single story?

 

[Trish]

I love stories with diseases and plagues in them, though I haven't written any that feature them. Zombie and vampire plagues are fine if there's some kind of fascinating orginal twist, though I haven't had much luck finding those (while acknowledging I haven't really looked either, lol). I like plagues that destroy the land and force the characters to adapt more than I like plagues that directly threaten the characters, but I'll read either. Medical thrillers are the exception probably, though I haven't read one in ages. (I went through a phase when I was a kid where I read every Robin Cook book I could find, lol.)

 

[Madman Starryteller]

In one of my stories, there has been a plague or virus spread via digital super computers, that could alter the atoms around them to also spread into humans.

I call it Nerve Fire, because it feels like one is slowly burning when caught with the plague. The pain gets more intense and spreads throughout the body over time until one feels like they are burning up and then they die after a few weeks.

Their problem was that every citizen basically had one of these super computers on their wrists. They had to develop an anti-virus that stopped the plague via similar means as how it spread.

 

[Homer Potvin]

The plague mechanic is useful in that it creates a post-apocalyptic setting without the massive destruction of war, nukes, or invading aliens. In The Stand, Stephen King mentioned several times that what made Captain Trips unique was that the world ended but nothing was broken. The characters keep saying things like, "Everything is still laying around, waiting to be picked up." Given that the book came out in the early 1980s at the height of the Reagan area, that might have been to draw a distinction between the nuclear war apocalypse, which would have been topical at the time. I'm not sure, but I think they plague is mechanic is fairly modern. I know there were stories before The Stand--I am Legend comes to mind--but it's been done to absolute death in the last 20 years, I feel. I remember a period in the late 2010s after The Hunger Games had petered out where the publishers had called a moratorium on dystopian/post-apoc stories. I know that doesn't scale exactly with plague stories, but it's certainly adjacent.