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From Wuhan-400, the deadly virus invented by Dean Koontz in 1981, to the plague unleashed in Margaret Atwoods Oryx and Crake, novelists have long been fascinated by pandemics

According to an online conspiracy theory, the American author Dean Koontz predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 1981. His novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called Wuhan-400 eerily predicting the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge. But the similarities end there: Wuhan-400 is described as having a killrate of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the perfect biological weapon. An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe.

But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease, from contemporary science fiction all the way back to Homers Iliad. Even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance. Angry gods are better than no gods at all.

In Homers Iliad, the Greeks disrespect one of Apollos priests. The god manifests his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp. The plague lasts nine days, brief by modern epidemiological standards. When the Greeks make amends and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured.

Seven centuries later a plague struck Periclean Athens, killing a quarter of the citys population and setting the city-state on a path to military defeat at the hands of Sparta. Thucydides, the Athenian historian, has a simple explanation for the epidemic: Apollo. The Spartans had cannily supplicated the god and he in return had promised victory. Soon afterwards, Spartas enemies started dying of the plague. Hindsight suggests that Athens, under siege its population swollen with refugees, everyone living in unsanitary conditions was at risk of contagion in a way the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, clearly wasnt. But this thought doesnt occur to Thucydides. It can only be the god.

Between then and now there have been prodigious advances in medical science. We understand contagious disease vastly better, and have a greater arsenal of medicine and hygiene to fight it. But in one respect we havent advanced at all. We still tend to see agency in our pandemics.

Disease has no agency. Bacteria and viruses spread blindly where they can, their pathways facilitated by our globalised world. We, meanwhile, bring to the struggle our ever-improving drugs and hygiene. With Covid-19, experts insist, your two best bets are: wash your hands often, touch your face never. But people do not warm to the existential arbitrariness of this. Just as the Peloponnesian plague was seen as evidence that the gods were angry with Athens, so HIV was seen by a deluded minority as Gods judgment on homosexuals. Of course, HIV spreads wherever it can and cares nothing for your morals or sexual orientation.

This attribution of agency is clearest in the many imaginary plagues science-fiction writers have inflicted on humanity. In place of gods we have aliens, like those in Alice Sheldons chilling and brilliant short story The Screwfly Solution (1977). A new disease provokes men to begin murdering women en masse. At the storys end we discover an alien species had introduced a brain infection so that the human race will destroy itself and the aliens can inherit the emptied planet. Its a story about what we now call toxic masculinity and it says: its not gods we have angered, but goddesses.

Sometimes the alien plague is less picky. In HP Lovecrafts The Colour Out of Space (1927; recently filmed, starring Nicolas Cage) an alien infection arrives via meteorite, wastes the land and drives people mad. In Michael Crichtons The Andromeda Strain (1969) potentially world-ending contagion falls from outer space. This bug repeatedly mutates as Earths scientists try to combat it. Were doomed or would be, if it werent for the tales germus ex machina ending, in which the alien spontaneously mutates into a benign form.

If its not aliens behind our world-threatening plague, then it is probably that other SF stalwart, the mad scientist. Dozens of zombie franchises start with a rogue scientist infecting the population with a genetically engineered bioweapon virus. In Frank Herberts The White Plague (1982) a geneticist, pushed into insanity by the murder of his family, creates a pathogen that kills all humanitys females. A cure is eventually found, but not before the worlds population balance has been shifted to leave thousands of men to every woman.

In Joanna Russs feminist masterpiece The Female Man (1975), Whileaway, a gender-specific virus has wiped out all the men, creating an effective utopia for women left behind, procreating by parthenogenesis and living in harmony. By the novels end it is hinted that the man-destroying plague was actually engineered by a female scientist. Never mind the antibacterial handwash: it is patriarchy that we need to scrub out.

So characteristic is assigning agency to pandemics in todays culture that a video game such as Plague Inc (Ndemic Creations 2012) styles its players not as doctors attempting to stop the spread of a pandemic, but as the sickness itself. The players mission is to help their plagues spread and exterminate the human race. In HG Wellss seminal War of the Worlds (1898) and in its various modern retellings, including Independence Day (1996), the virus is on our side, destroying alien invaders that lack our acquired immunity.

One of the most striking twists on this conceit is Greg Bears novel Blood Music (1985). A scientist, angry at being sacked by his lab, smuggles a virus out into the world in his own body. It infects everybody, becomes self-aware, and assimilates everybody and everything to itself: human beings and their infrastructure melt down into a planetwide sea of hyperintelligent grey goo. It sounds unpleasant, but its actually a liberation: the accumulation of concentrated consciousness, our own included, punches through a transcendent new realm. The plague becomes a kind of secular Rapture.

If on some level we still think of contagion as the gods anger, these stories become about how we have angered the god about, in other words, our guilt. When Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver planned their reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise, they decided an agent, a neuroenhancer spliced into simian flu, would both raise the apes level of intelligence and prove fatal to humans. The resulting movie trilogy (2011-17) was more than just a commercial hit; it proved an eloquent articulation of broader environmental concerns. The few surviving humans move through the films lush rejuvenated forestscapes, compelled to confront avatars of humanitys generational contempt for the natural world.

The plague that has destroyed us has uplifted these animals, given them wisdom, and they are angry with us why wouldnt they be? Its a common genre trope. The scientist in Alistair MacLeans The Satan Bug (1965) is an environmental fundamentalist who hopes his germ will wipe out humanity. The mad scientists from Channel 4s TV drama Utopia (201314) and Margaret Atwoods Oryx and Crake trilogy are both driven by the same animus.

Having invested ourselves with the crown of all creation, coronavirus arrives to puncture our hubris. Think of the computer intelligence Agent Smith inThe Matrix (1999), played with sneering panache by Hugo Weaving: humans, he tells Laurence Fishburnes Morpheus, are incapable of developing a natural equilibrium with their environment: You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. In this telling, we are the virus.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/05/theres-something-out-there-spread-of-disease