Can "Disease" be the Cure?: Bio-Weapons in Population Control, Demodystopia, and the Question of Consent in Dan Brown's Inferno (original) (raw)

2020, "The Golden Line, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2020. Special issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder in Arts, Literature and Culture"

In the current global scenario, we fi nd ourselves approaching rapidly-escalating paranoia about survival,enmeshed in heated, increasingly frantic discussions about long-term consequences once the madnessrecedes. Trapped in the inescapable periodicity of historic recurrence of pandemics, there is a hike inreadership of postmodern SF and contagion dystopia, where fantasies awaiting manifestation seem far less impracticable. In this paper, my objective is to examine how Dan Brown’s Inferno , the highly-acclaimed science fiction – meets art history thriller represents the calamitous event of a terrifyingly infectious virus outbreak,which takes an incalculably unpredictable peripatetic turn at the end where the supposedly deadly virus is revealed to be an airborne contraceptive, thus effectively staging potential moral and ethical pitfalls for the protagonist and the readers who are left to question the legitimacy of socially constructed paradigms of humane principles disintegrating in the face of their polluted, overpopulated, dying home planet. Keywords: pandemic, infertility, sterilization, demodystopia, demografiction, vaccine, eugenics