Modelling pandemics in speculative fabulations : Michael Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain" (1969) and Daniel H. Wilson's "The Andromeda's Evolution" (2019)

Tekst powstał w ramach projektu badawczego "Epidemie i wspólnoty w krytycznych teoriach, artystycznych praktykach i spekulatywnych fabulacjach ostatnich dekad"

Covid-19 pandemic has brought public attention to digital methods of modeling contagion, which have been used not only to predict the future of the infection, but also assess its scope of impact on population and the chances for achieving herd immunity. As a result new outbreak narratives come into being in which algorithmic data processing gains agency in shaping the dynamics of contagion. His unprecedented reliance on modeling tools has decidedly changed the way we think about epidemic, conceptualized now as a phenomenon which to an equal extent is shaped by natural, cultural and technological factors. He paper argues that the major outlet for these new metaphors of contagion, which Milton Singer termed syndemic, are speculative narratives combining fiction with scientific and medical data as well as insights into the functioning of the digital modeling apparatus. His aspect of the current pandemic provides a good vantage point for taking a closer look at a handful of speculative narratives which bring to the foreground the relationship between modeling and social impact of contagion. By reading Michael Crichton’s technothriller The Andromeda Strain (1969) and its sequel, Daniel H. Wilson’s The Andromeda Evolution (2019), I intend to demonstrate how speculative fabulations engages and contests methods of contagion modeling, bringing into play other forms of non-scientiIc knowledge and practices of survival.