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I've been reading more dystopian fiction than ever during the corona crisis. Here's why

<span>Photograph: Sophie Giraud/AP</span>
Photograph: Sophie Giraud/AP

For the first time in my life, I am living with curtailed liberties. Living in the midst of a pandemic has left me with a disturbing sense of unreality, where everything that was once familiar and comforting – like going to a nice restaurant or browsing in a bookstore – has morphed into a potential death threat. I once found my home a respite, but being forced to stay inside all day has increasingly turned it into a source of anxiety.

Perversely, I have found that the best way to cope with this experience is to delve into dystopian fiction. My usual diet of light, escapist literature has been replaced by books featuring bleak futures, where people are forced to grapple with new devastating realities wrought by climate change, biowarfare, pandemics, totalitarian governments or technology – choose your own misadventure. Other kinds of novels now seem irrelevant: why would I read about a bunch of friends who go on a holiday together when no one knows when they will next be allowed to leave their home, let alone the country?

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I have always been fascinated by dystopian fiction and the way it aims to examine society’s problems and inequalities through a (usually) catastrophic lens. In many cases, dystopian stories are cautionary tales that force us to re-examine and ponder our own actions and place in the wider world. Now, though, I reach for them because I want to see how characters behave when their freedoms are taken away from them. I want to know what choices they make when they lose their jobs, their livelihoods, their families and friends. Dystopian fiction helps us think through what reality could be like, and shows us how people might cope with adversity.

People tend to divide into two camps when it comes to reading novels right now: they either immerse themselves in happy books and movies that reflect the life we once lived so thoughtlessly; or they devour apocalyptic, dystopian fiction, searching for solutions and meaning at a time when the only thing left to do is wait until this all passes and life can resume again.

The protagonist’s gumption gives me hope: if she can survive the worst of all situations, surely we can, too?

As Katherine Schwetz from the University of Toronto writes: “The social upheaval caused by Covid-19 evokes many popular dystopian or post-apocalyptic books and movies … and has sent many people rushing to fiction and movies about contagious diseases.”

Last week, I picked up The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison, about a woman trying to survive in a world devastated by a sudden plague that kills most of humanity but leaves male survivors outnumbering female by a ratio of 10 to one. Those women left behind are forced to choose between hiding to avoid violent rape by the surviving men, or trying to bargain with them. As far as dystopias go, this one is positively apocalyptic, yet I can’t put it down. The characters exist in an entirely lawless world, and there seems no point to life other than survival. Yet the protagonist’s gumption gives me hope: if she can survive the worst of all situations, surely we can too?

While I know that our current reality is not this dire (the coronavirus may reproduce rapidly but it’s not as deadly as this fictional disease), reading about a pandemic-based dystopia is allowing me to explore the non-medical dimensions of the fears associated with contagious disease.

I’m particularly drawn to dystopias featuring characters navigating a ruined world that still holds fundamental, patriarchal values. I’ve also recently read Vox, in which women are fitted with electronic counters that electrocute them if they say more than 100 words a day; Red Clocks, in which abortion is once again illegal, in vitro fertilisation banned, and embryos are granted rights of life, liberty and property; and The Power, a novel that explores women’s rebellion after they develop the ability to inflict pain or death on other people with their hands.

Related: Julia Baird on finding light in the dark: 'Coronavirus will leave a massive psychic scar'

Dystopian fiction is at once an escape from reality and a lesson-learning exercise: what kind of society do we want to emerge from this, and what individual and collective action must be taken in order to achieve that?

These novels do not make me feel hopeless, despite much of the genre’s current manifestation being, as Harvard history professor Jill Lepore points out, “a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen 21st century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness”.

Despite narratives centring around catastrophic events, dystopian fiction does not offer readers a prophetic look into the future. It exists, we should remember, to show us a way out.