I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic science fiction stories.* They are about a new world, where everything has been thrown up in the air and has come down differently.
I was reading an article this morning, about unrest in Ecuador, Chile and Columbia, and suddenly it occurred to me that our new world, the post-COVID world I've been speculating about for six months, could actually turn out to be a post-apocalyptic world.
The unrest in Latin America - some of it violent - preceded COVID and was about "inequality, corruption and government austerity policies." The article - a short one - was about how COVID could just make all these things worse. Do you think? "Coming out of the pandemic, we will have a level of economic activity and employment that will be much lower than before, a level of poverty and income distribution that is worse," noted Alejandro Werner, the IMF's director for the Western Hemisphere.
Widespread economic devastation, with the added factor of widespread anger at governments perceived to have mishandled the pandemic and made things worse. Desperation reaches an unbearable level, and things get out of hand. Post-apocalyptic worlds have been created from less.
So, there's that to consider. I suggest you choose from the wide variety of novels available, many of them about a worldwide, apocalyptic pandemic similar to our own. And if it doesn't happen, at least you've read a good book.
* - As always, I'm only a fan of the well-written ones, and, for the most part, not of the movie or TV variety, although the movie version of "The Road" wasn't bad (it helped that the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name won the Pulitzer)(it also helped that I'm a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy).
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