Fwd: How can science fiction guide us in understanding the Corona virus pandemic?

[Victor V. Motti]

How can science fiction help us/guide us in dealing with and understanding the present pandemic?

The main idea is that we should attempt to understand what is happening and living through it as if we are in a science fiction novel.

Watch the video here : https://youtu.be/6WAUBNtWsUE

In this dialogue between Victor Motti and Tom Lombardo, we address the question of how science fiction can help us to understand and deal with the growing corona pandemic. Tom proposes that we should see ourselves as living through a science fiction novel (or narrative). Science fiction has dramatically envisioned numerous types of global disasters, involving chaos, destruction, and transformation, and created many stories of heroic figures who have met such challenges.

We are now in a similar kind of drama, living it, with each of us as a character within the story. This drama has many dimensions, economic, psychological, social, environmental, and medical. It is both personal and global. As in any realistic narrative there are diverse characters and voices, both competing and collaborating, both facing and denying, both trying to preserve and maintain the status quo versus adapting and transforming. Who will be the leaders and heroes? Can we be heroes for ourselves in this unfolding dramatic narrative? 

With uncertainty, risk, and change, can we individually as well as collectively, not just survive but “embrace the novelty” and transform for the better in the process. How do we determine what is essential and important in human life, as more constraints and deprivations emerge, now and into the future? Can we live wisdom narratives through the disaster? 

Science fiction stories such as The Andromeda Strain, Earth Abides, Darkness and Dawn, and The Machine Stops are discussed, as well as Gould and Eldredge’s scientific evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibria. As in a science fiction novel, the world around us and the characters within the story, which includes each of us individually, are going to change. We have been shocked out of our complacency and narrow-mindedness, which is what science fiction frequently achieves.  

Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/6WAUBNtWsUE