Abstract: A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker and The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi anticipated corporate exploitation of the COVID pandemic that Naomi Klein theorizes as shock doctrine disaster capitalism and that Lawrence Wright describes. In conversation with wider Anglophone plague fiction, this essay argues that science fiction techniques such as character-level narration, scaling from global to local reorienting the human relative to Earth, as well as transitional ecologies and cyborg characters present readers with an uncanny cognitive space in which to viscerally understand how disaster capitalism embraces hybridity to consolidate power and shape new realities.
Lilith Acadia (Mon,) studied this question.