Wired has an article on science fiction novels involving plagues, and over at the New Yorker is a long article from the more literary genre (Steven King appears to have breached this category!).

Wired mentions:

• three Neal Stephenson novels: Seveneaves, Anathem, and The Fall, or, Dodge in Hell
• The Expanse (which I have heard great things about but probably won’t read because the show has spoiled it for me)
• Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (who I recently learned is a dude. I read the first book, and liked it, but didn’t love it enough to read the other two. It is one of those books I find myself thinking about though.)
• Ender’s Game (big fan)
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I’ve been burned out just a bit on Heinlein, but maybe I’ll give this one a chance at some point.)
• William Gibson. No specific books, just William Gibson. (I like that I have read William Gibson, but I don’t )

The New Yorker mentions:

• A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, 1722. (Yes, it’s about that plague. Also know as the plague.)
• The Last Man by Mary Shelley, 1826.
• Oedipus Rex (mentions the plague apparently)
• Angels in America (yes, AIDS counts as a plague, complete with a long incubation time, asymptomatic transmission, initial government denial and botched response, and eventual development of more effective treatments, although there is still no vaccine or absolute cure.)
• The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, 1842.
• The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, 1912. (sort of a sequel to the Poe story, apparently)
• The Plague by Albert Camus, 1947. (I didn’t realize Camus was that recent, but that is just me being ignorant.)
• Blindness by Jose Saramago, 1995. (“brilliant” according to the New Yorker, but just sounds too depressing for right now.)
• And of course, The Stand.

The science fiction book I keep thinking about though, which is not on either list, is Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. In Robots of Dawn, life on Earth is nasty, brutish and short. But there is a race (of humans) who have moved to space, and they live hundreds of years in part by avoiding virtually all physical contact with each other. They can do this because the human population is very low on a large planet, robots do all the work, and they have excellent video conferencing facilities. Humans basically never come into close physical proximity, with the one exception that husbands and wives get together only for the purpose of making babies, which is surprising because you would think a futuristic civilization where robots do all the work would have discovered in vitro fertilization. At the very least, you could send a robot over to your wife’s place with a turkey baster full of…well, you get the idea.

I’m thinking about a 2020 summer reading theme. I don’t think I want a plague theme! I could do worse than dig into some Neal Stephenson novels I’ve missed. I could always go back and read some Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve never read The Stand, so maybe.