We’re in the middle of experiencing COVID-19 and we’re not sure how it will end. In the face of this deep uncertainty, we seek indications about how things might turn out. The powers and limitations of fiction, especially fiction about pandemics, are on full display today. Fiction about past outbreaks, with completed story arcs and rounded out finishes, show us endings when we are still in the middle of an outbreak. Even fiction about a pandemic that is published into the teeth of a pandemic can’t show us whether it will...
