This is a test, kind of. Read the following paragraph and see what it reminds you of.

"It was the Chinese government's unwillingness to admit they were faced with a problem they couldn't master that's got them in the worst of this mess.' Ann said: 'How did they possibly imagine they could keep it a secret?' John shrugged. 'They had abolished famine by statute – remember? And then, things looked easy at the beginning. They isolated the virus within a month of it hitting the rice-fields. They had it neatly labelled – the Chung-Li virus. All they had to do was to find a way of killing it which didn't kill the plant. Alternatively, they could breed a virus-resistant strain. And finally, they had no reason to expect the virus would spread so fast."

Sounds familiar, right? You might think those lines refer to the 2020 COVID pandemic. In reality, that paragraph was taken from the first chapter of John Christopher's 1956 novel, The Death of Grass.

I remember reading this novel when I was a teenager and feeling how real it seemed, not just in its portrayal of the pandemic's spread but also in the way people responded to it, both at the governmental level and personally. I reread it now, and its impact has increased significantly. The main character, John Custance, is a genuinely decent person—a middle-class civil servant and father of two children. By the end of the novel, however, he has committed murder and executed several people in quite gruesome ways.

Confronted with the pandemic, the English government also loses its cool. I won't include a spoiler here, but I can say its actions are outrageous; yet on another level, they make a disturbing kind of sense.

COVID mandates, anyone?

I have argued before that science fiction novels often serve as warnings about future events, and that the ideas behind them are somehow leaked to the author, unbeknownst to him or her, from the future (for a full discussion of this topic, see The Science of Premonition on this blog). The examples are too numerous to ignore, and The Death of Grass is a compelling illustration. Unfortunately, those warnings are so vague and unfocused that they are completely useless.

There's an ancient tradition of giving useless advice. In ancient Greco-Roman times, the Sibyls were oracles who made predictions using mysterious and poetic language that could be hard to understand. They usually spoke in a type of poetry called hexameter, and their prophecies were recorded in collections known as the "Sibylline Books." They intended for their messages to be unclear on purpose; this preserved the oracle's mysterious reputation and allowed people to interpret them in various ways depending on the situation and time. The reason for this vagueness stemmed from the belief that divine knowledge is beyond human grasp, so they wrapped their predictions in symbols and stories. In doing so, they could protect important truths and avoid being proven wrong. Due to this uncertainty, their prophecies could be interpreted in many ways, helping the oracle maintain its reputation regardless of how things actually turned out.

I cannot help but wonder whether the origin of the myth of the Sibyls could be rooted in similar experiences—storytelling that predicted a disaster but described it in unclear terms, only to be understood after it was too late for the warning. 

Back to Christopher. He couldn't know that the idea behind his novel would turn it into a sibylline prediction. He also didn't realize in 1956 that by the 1990s, concerns about the safety of our crops—without which we cannot survive—would become painfully real with the rise of genetically modified crops, the spread of monoculture, and other issues. Reading the novel now, with all that knowledge at hand, makes the drastic collapse of the supply chain it predicts and his depiction of a devastated world feel uncomfortably plausible.

If there is one conclusion we can draw from all this, it is that we should probably reread the classics of science fiction regularly to prepare for real threats looming over us.