Epidemics and plagues have stalked humanity for centuries, inspiring literature and other forms of art stretching back to before we even had the germ theory of disease.
In books like Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Richard Preston's The Hot Zone (1994) and Albert Camus' The Plague (1947) the human toll of epidemics are explored.
Viruses and other diseases have also become a popular topic for movies and television, kicking off zombie pandemics in The Omega Man (1971) or falling from space in The Andromeda Strain (1971, based on the first novel Michael Crichton wrote under his own name). Some artists find meaning in plague and its rippling effects through society, others see only useless death.
But while many fictional pandemics are too implausible to be readily believed, sometimes a movie or book hews surprisingly close to life. When it comes to the novel coronavirus COVID-19, there are a handful of fictional stories with enough overlap with real events for us to wonder, did the author somehow predict the current pandemic?
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