THE SATAN BUG ... CORONA SERIES [2]
It's a war against a virus.
Long ago when I was 19, I had read Alistair MacLean's 'The Satan Bug' and had been so taken in by the author's graphic representation of the bug and its power to annihilate the entire population of the world that I remember having prayed each night to God for a stretch of 18 long months to prevent its leakage into the world. How I could have in my innocence so related the novel to reality had always baffled me till the other day when it turned into a reality in the shape of the Novel Coronavirus that causes COVID-19, both names significant in terms of my earlier association with MacLean's work.
Now the bug has been released during my lifetime to prove that science fiction very often precedes scientific happening in real. Let us now read the novel in real terms and come to grips with its ending which for sure is not in the novelist's hands but in the hands of his readers who he had forewarned about its consequences 58 years ago when 'The Satan Bug' was fist published by him under the pseudonym Ian Stuart.
It is a satanic bug, indeed, and deserves a divine deliverance. Let humanity, the intermediary between the dark and the bright forces, duck this dreaded virus in the Jordan or the Ganga of recuperative redemption.
May God be with you all and save you from this Satan bug !
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo : courtesy, Washington Post
It's a war against a virus.
Long ago when I was 19, I had read Alistair MacLean's 'The Satan Bug' and had been so taken in by the author's graphic representation of the bug and its power to annihilate the entire population of the world that I remember having prayed each night to God for a stretch of 18 long months to prevent its leakage into the world. How I could have in my innocence so related the novel to reality had always baffled me till the other day when it turned into a reality in the shape of the Novel Coronavirus that causes COVID-19, both names significant in terms of my earlier association with MacLean's work.
Now the bug has been released during my lifetime to prove that science fiction very often precedes scientific happening in real. Let us now read the novel in real terms and come to grips with its ending which for sure is not in the novelist's hands but in the hands of his readers who he had forewarned about its consequences 58 years ago when 'The Satan Bug' was fist published by him under the pseudonym Ian Stuart.
It is a satanic bug, indeed, and deserves a divine deliverance. Let humanity, the intermediary between the dark and the bright forces, duck this dreaded virus in the Jordan or the Ganga of recuperative redemption.
May God be with you all and save you from this Satan bug !
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo : courtesy, Washington Post
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