According to futurologists, a baby born today will live to 100. But what do they know? In her Plague Times trilogy, Louise Welsh trashes such blithe predictions, setting the grim reaper to work in a not unlikely near-future scenario: a flu-like epidemic ravaging the world’s population and leaving survivors plunged into chaos.
If the landscape is familiar, it’s because fiction has been conjuring disasters ever since The Epic of Gilgamesh. Welsh, who belongs to the generation scared witless by the threat of nuclear war, acknowledges her debt to Terry Nation’s iconic 1970s TV series Survivors, the solid Lego-base on which many a contemporary future-set drama has been constructed. The tidal wave of apoca-lit, led by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and TV dramas such as The Walking Dead, has added new bricks to the edifice, further honing our certain anticipation of food scarcity, gibbets, feudalism, child brides, rabid dogs, creepy population drives, religious maniacs and cannibalism.
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