I first heard about coronavirus as most people likely did, through snippets of news and e-mails from friends saying, “Have you seen this? So weird!” For a number of weeks, it felt distant in that way so many foreign news stories do. Something awful and scary but ultimately a disease I would remain personally unaffected by.
Only a few months on from those e-mails and news reports, I’m sitting in my flat in central London in lockdown. I leave the house once a day for exercise, and shop for food and other essentials once a week. I don’t know when I’ll next see my family, my friends or my colleagues. Billions of people around the world are in the same position. I feel immeasurably fortunate to still be employed and to have recovered from suspected coronavirus (I have not been tested but experienced the virus’s telltale cough, breathlessness and extreme fatigue after returning to London from a trip to northern Italy). I know you’re meant to “live your truth” through art and everything, but contracting coronavirus was a step toward authenticity I could have done without.
It’s an understatement to say it feels surreal that I wrote a book about a viral pandemic just as a viral pandemic swept the world. More than one person has half-jokingly called me Cassandra. When I started writing The End of Men in September 2018, it felt like the ultimate thought experiment. How far could I take my imagination? How would a global pandemic with an enormous death rate change the world? What would the world look like without men, or the majority of them? I wrote the first draft of the book in nine months, finishing with a burst of intense writing in June 2019. Now, as I edit the book for my publishers, I find myself testing my imaginary world against the real one. I gauge the distance between what I have written and what is happening. As a writer of speculative fiction, this is not something I ever expected.
Coronavirus doesn’t have a death rate as high as the virus I have imagined in my novel. Nonetheless, we are experiencing in real life the greatest pandemic of our lifetimes, which is more than I ever could have imagined in my wildest nightmares. The world I wrote about was meant to stay safely within the pages of my novel; it is now far more closely reflected by the world than I ever could have expected. I hope that by the time you’re reading this, there is a vaccine. I hope our healthcare systems survive and economies recover. I hope your loved ones are safe and that the world has returned to that wonderful, boring, nostalgic state I now crave: normality.
Christina Sweeney-Baird
April 12, 2020