Although there is a long history of plague narratives in literature dating back to classical antiquity, it was following Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) that science fiction emerged as a mode for exploring the relationship between science and society. Shelley was a pioneer of scientific fiction that understood science ‘as an intensely practical activity inextricably productive of new technologies’ rather than a fantastical genre (34: 9). The Last Man (1826) was her second science fictional novel, and it was set in the late twentyfirst century as a plague razed the Earth and devastated humanity with a near-extinction event. In this novel, Shelley approached science from an almost opposite stance than she had in Frankenstein. Where Frankenstein critiqued scientists for over-confidently playing God, The Last Man lambasted medical science for doing too little too late. Now recognised as the mother of modern science fiction, Shelley’s science fictional imagination was reviewed by her peers as evidence of a ‘diseased’ mind that offered morbid ‘lecture in anatomy’ rather than literary entertainment [2]: 335). Imagined futures of the end of humanity due to an infectious outbreak are not new, indeed they are foundational, but take on a renewed relevance in the ongoing pandemic where popular culture became not only a valuable source of distraction but also information. They offer fictional scenarios that can ‘contextualise public and governmental responses’ and site for potentially ‘educating the public about unfamiliar concepts like ‘social distancing’ and ‘R0’([25•]: 90–91).

The widespread access to digital viewing platforms, a growing market for video-on-demand productions (that Songbird responded to), and the wide use of social media platforms offered numerous entry points to communicate with broad publics about pandemics using familiar, publicly accessible language and imagery.

Outbreak and Contagion have both seen rises in viewing figures during actual epidemiological crises. Outbreak is a medical disaster film based on an article in The New Yorker and a later book by Richard about the first isolationof Ebola virus in the US,the outbreak came from imported primates in Reston, Virginia in 1989 [5]. Outbreak is about an Ebola-like virus that breaks out in Zaire and then a small Californian town due to the import of an infected monkey. The film speculates on how local, national, and global institutions would respond to such a threat. Outbreak was released in March 1995 just a few months before a new outbreak of the virus occurred in Zaire [4]. Contagion is set in a fictional global pandemic of the Meningoencephalitic virus/MEV–1 that is modelled on the bat-borne Nipah virus (NiV) that was identified in 1999 after killing around 100 people in Malaysia [30]: online). Contagion’s release coincided with a CDC campaign in 2011 that used the popularity of zombie and deadly infection narrative ‘phenomenon’ across film, TV, and gaming to garner ‘publicity for disaster preparedness’ [3]: 41). Contagion and Outbreak ‘capture a postmillennial structure of feeling, including the fear and helplessness that accompanies the paralysis of risk-managing institutions’ (ibid: 41). In this context, risk aesthetics can be defined as the visual and linguistic rhetoric that communicates what might happen in an emergency as established via media representations of anthropogenic and natural disasters including pandemics. The power of and public familiarity with the ‘aesthetics of risk’ popularised through and embedded into popular fiction, influence how real-world disasters have been reported and understood [3]: 41). The popularity of contagion narratives perhaps also helped to manage expectations during the early stages of COVID-19, thus avoiding ‘magical thinking’ [13]: online) and the belief that the pandemic would suddenly just end and that institutions would be able to seamlessly manage the situation and rapidly develop a vaccine. Contagion offered a walk-through of a global pandemic that speculated upon where world leaders and leading institutions might struggle but offered also ‘comfort’ and hope that a vaccine could be found [23]: online). The interest in Contagion peaked 8 months prior to the rollout of the first vaccination programmes, and the speculative fiction of the movie allowed people, as Kevin S. Moore ([35]: 2) argues ‘to recognise and process reality’ in a time of great uncertainty.

Uncertainty became a recurrent experience for Western audiences accustomed to pandemics being part of a distant land or distant past. Viruses that could reach pandemic levels were considered the purview of Asia; this had been established as an accepted view that was underpinned by and perpetuated through the idea that uncontrollable diseases only happened to the foreign Other [14]. This racialising of pandemics led to ‘many individuals of East or Southeast Asian descent’ being ‘lumped together as “Chinese” and shunned as contagious ‘suspicious bio-political subjects’ [10]: 629, [16]: 472). The threat of contagion has often given ‘rise to discrimination and scapegoating “others”’ but since the COVID-19 infections began in 2019 ‘anti‐Asian discrimination has been on the rise’ ([39]: 2,5). Compounded by the fact that the ‘leader of the free world’ President Trump tried to give the pandemic the colloquialism ‘kung flu’ [28]. The anti-Asian sentiment that has been part of the COVID-19 reporting and responses to the pandemic was not anticipated in the mildly utopian playing out of the virus in Contagion.

‘Viral science fiction’ became a ‘primary locus for speculation about COVID-19’ [34]: 8). Fictional versions of pandemics often follow a similar pattern that Priscilla Wald ([52•]: 2) identifies as having three stages: “the identification of an emerging infection”, the global spread of the identified contagion; and finally the “epidemiological work” that often results in its containment. Contagion maintains an almost utopian ‘solution-driven competence’ that results in an eventual return to normal [36]: online), but the reality of failures in international collaboration are still explored in the film. It highlights the impact that our increasingly ‘globalised and technologized network society’ has upon the rapid spread of contagions including unrestricted international travel and the unsustainable consumption systems that cause sudden shortages and public panic [47]:17). Many of the US/Hollywood narratives I refer to in this article focus on the rapid collapse of infrastructure in the West, we are increasingly interconnected and global but to manage global threats like this and the ongoing climate crisis countries must work together and ‘transcend the old binaries’ that centred the scientific knowledge and thus the solution firmly with ‘heroic epidemiologists and other medical professionals in the Global North (who) draw on their expertise and the technologies of scientific medicine to save the species’ [30]: online,[52•]: xv). The seemingly prophetic nature of Contagion, Outbreak and other popular pandemic plotlines offered some comfort and certainty. But their apparent accuracy and authenticity was because of the scientists – the labcoats in Hollywood [27] – involved in advising on and developing the narratives of contemporary science-based fictions. Understanding the connection between science and popular culture has become increasingly important and relevant as COVID-19 becomes part of the everyday to be lived with rather than played out.

Contagion and Outbreak rocketed up watch lists during the COVID-19 lockdowns of the 2020s, but texts on other media platforms have also gained pandemic popularity. For example, during the H1N1 influenza virus pandemic of 2009 (commonly referred to as “swine flu”), the Flash game Pandemic 2 (Dark Realm Studios, 2008) grew in popularity [48]. Then during the early epidemic phase of COVID-19, Pandemic’s rival/descendant Plague Inc. (Ndemic Creations, 2012) became the number one selling game on the Apple App Store in China and later in places like the UK and the US ([20]: online). As an Ndemic Creations spokesperson explained in November 2020:

Plague Inc. has been out for eight years now and whenever there is an outbreak of disease we see an increase in players, as people seek to find out more about how diseases spread and to understand the complexities of viral outbreaks… We specifically designed the game to be realistic and informative while not sensationalising serious real-world issues (ibid).

The game creators had already partnered with British charity Full Fact for an expansion to the scenarios menu to include a ‘Fake News’ mode. Released in December 2019, this option allowed users to infect the world not only with an epidemic but also misinformation [49]. Although initially intended to coincide with the 2019 British parliamentary election in the wake of the US ‘fake news election’ and the rise of populist Donald Trump [44]: 140), the game expansion became part of the popular culture surrounding the pandemic where fake news mutated into a ‘deadly infodemic’ [19]. The game has been host to a variety of extensions that link Plague Inc to fictional pathogens including the Simian Flu in 2014 as marketing for the sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes where users play as both the virus and the ape with ‘pursuing independent but complementary objectives: escape from, and destruction of, humanity’ ([49]: 240–241). Media products from film and TV to apps and games have been recognised as sites where public understanding of COVID-19 and pandemic responses were developed and consolidated.

Pandemic 2 (2008) ‘character’ selection screen

The value of Plague Inc. as a form of science communication was discussed in a post on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Public Health Matters Blog [24] about the app game, which explained that from a CDC perspective Plague Inc.

uses a non-traditional route to raise public awareness on epidemiology, disease transmission, and diseases/pandemic information. The game creates a compelling world that engages the public on serious public health topics.

Game users interact with scenarios and take on a role akin to public health policymakers—although ‘winning’ the game involves wiping out the human population, the processes by which contagion spreads draw upon real medical scenarios and advice. As Marius Hans Raab, Niklas Alexander Döbler, and Claus-Christian Carbon ([43•]: 4) show in their article on the ludification of the pandemic, games like Plague Inc. and Pandemic 2 parallel and perhaps even inspired the statistical and visual communication style that would become part of the real COVID-19 monitoring dashboards. Visual parallels are unavoidable between dashboards for the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University and the mapping and monitoring of contagions presented in storyworlds like Plague Inc. Infection counters, R-value and growth rate statistics, daily death tolls, and global rankings are a familiar sight in fiction and gameplay, and with ‘the absence of established societal standards for dealing with a pandemic in North America and Europe, rather generic established patterns–game elements–(were) applied to make sense of the very real and dangerous threat’ [43•]: 4–5). When major international Anglo-American broadcasters like the BBC and CNN used live trackers that were present on screen regardless of the news item being reported, viewers could check in on the ‘score’ and progress of the pandemic in a way that framed humans as losing the game against the contagion (Ibid).