Dean or Don? | Birthday Ruminations
Truth or Fiction?
Or - Is truth stranger than fiction or
fiction stranger than truth?
Byron, through his Don Juan would cheerfully say, ‘Truth is always strange! Stranger than fiction!’
But Dean seems to have proved the Don quite wrong!
Come! Let’s together delight ourselves on a Dean delight today - on his birthday – 9th July 2022!
Koontz, as connoisseurs of literature would have us believe, had predicted the corona virus even forty-one years ago, in his novel – The Eyes of Darkness (1981).
Dean Koontz here describes “Wuhan-400” as “China’s most important and dangerous: new biological weapon in a decade… developed by labs outside of the city of Wuhan”.
Here goes, snippets from the book –
Tina removed an electrode from Danny’s neck, carefully peeling the tape off his skin.
The child still clung to her, but his deeply sunken eyes were riveted on Dombey.
“To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous: new biological weapon in a decade.
They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center.
“Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other living creature can carry it”.
And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a living human body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do you see the advantage of all this?”
Tina was too busy with Danny to think about what Carl Dombey had said, but Elliot knew what the scientist meant.
“If I understand you, the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.”
“Exactly,” Dombey said.
“And Wuhan-400 has other, equally important advantages over most biological agents. For one thing, you can become an infectious carrier only four hours after coming into contact with the virus”.
“That’s an incredibly short incubation period. Once infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. It’s worse than the Ebola virus in Africa - infinitely worse”.
“Wuhan-400’s kill-rate is one hundred percent. No one is supposed to survive. The Chinese tested it on God knows how many political prisoners. They were never able to find an antibody or an antibiotic that was effective against it”.
“The virus migrates to the brain stem, and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats away brain tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth. It destroys the part of the brain that controls all of the body’s automatic functions. The victim simply ceases to have a pulse, functioning organs, or any urge to breathe”.
“And that’s the disease Danny survived,” Elliot said.
“Yes,” Dombey said. “As far as we know, he’s the only one who ever has.”
Quite apocalyptic in its import, and quite as scary, ain’t it?
Reminds me of a beautiful line that I quote quite often in my classes – and write it on the white marker board for my students as well!
Here goes the maxim! This lovely lively maxim by Oscar Wilde –
“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it but moulds it to its purpose”.
How true proves the ‘Dean’ on this ‘Wilde’ maxim, ain’t it?
Dean Koontz gave one of his most vivacious interviews ever to the Harvard Business Review, where the legend gives us all – literary beings – some lovely takeaways!
HBR: Where do you find your creative energy and stamina?
Koontz: It goes back to what books meant to me when I was young. I came from a very poor family. My dad was a violent alcoholic. Books were both an escape and a lesson that other lives were different. They showed me the level of success the world offered. And that was plenty of motivation to change my destiny. I realized that you can make what you want of life, and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped feeling that way. I’ve never stopped being excited about books and the potential of them.
Books were his greatest solace and refuge, says the legendary writer, and hence confesses that -
he has devoted his life - 6:30 AM to dinnertime, six days a week, for the past five decades - to creating fictional worlds across a range of genres for his devoted readers!
PS: You may want to read yet another similar read by Stephen King titled, The Stand (1978), which describes with such intense detailing, the survivors of an epidemic of a human-made virus which eventually wiped out the majority of the population of North America.
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