In a post on the SFWA blog, Ashley Deng offers advice for writing about fictional pandemics and avoiding the cliche of the dramatically-timed cure.
First, Deng notes that a disease is more than the presence of a pathogen, but a series of symptoms arising from our bodies’ reaction to that invader. “When writing about disease and subsequently their treatments, you can’t just remove the pathogen because even in its absence, our bodies must deal with its reverberating effects,” she says. Further, most treatments don’t “cure” disease, but merely alleviate symptoms and help our bodies cope.
Deng urges writers to consider the framework of health and medicine, which includes diagnosis, scientific process, and ongoing care. “Rather than treating medicine as a single field in search of a cure, it might be useful to look at the different disciplines involved in diagnostics,” she writes. “Research toward treatments can be a complex and nebulous endeavor, but science fiction should also be a place to explore what said research might look like with different resources or newer, more advanced technologies.”
