Corona Zona

    In her recent essay The Infinite Sales Bay of the Universe, Amy Ireland laid out a theory of habit and novelty. I used these in my last post, Maximum Sales Bay of Exception as well. A "habit" is a backwards-looking organization of past events, and is then used to "extrapolate those events into the future." Habit is a projection of the past into the future and "organizes reality in every instant." The inverse of a habit, according to Ireland, is "novelty." Novelty is unforeseeable, unimaginable, and is "sometimes catastrophically unpredictable." The truly novel, or creative, is often impersonalized, seen as a force which a person can only hope to fleetingly channel. Freed from the chains of anthromorphism, radical novelty is a force Ireland succinctly describes as "arriving from the future." Alongside novelty, Ireland lays out a trope in science fiction she dubs "The Zone."

    A Zone is a realm of pure novelty, an area which breaks down the greatest habits: linear time and continuity of space. Time may seem to stand still, reverse. A visitor may walk in one direction, then be unable to leave by retracing his steps. Identifying the Zone as portrayed in Stalker, Annihilation, and Nova Swing, Ireland notes some additional elements of a Zone. Typically, a Zone presents some sort of incentive or reward for entering the Zone. The Room at the center of the Zone in  Stalker, which will purportedly grant a person's deepest desire, and the rare artifacts in Nova Swing's Zone each serve as a lure to entice people to cross into the Zone. Entrance into the Zone is often (incompetently) controlled by the military or some governing force. Be it Southern Reach in Annihilation or the Soviet military in Stalker, the danger represented by radical novelty necessitates restricted access to the Zone.

    Finally, the Zone also often functions as a sort of inhuman character, beyond the capability for human understanding. The Stalker, a kind of tour guide in the film of the same name, pleads that his fellow visitors must "respect the Zone" or they will surely meet their doom. Indeed, one of his companions disregards this, and tries to approach the Room head on, only to be dissuaded by a disembodied voice telling him to turn back. The Zone also seems to judge its visitors, sometimes crushing them in the "Meat Grinder" hallway,  always requiring the visitors to be flexible, fluid, and (most importantly) unhappy. 

    Thankfully for humans, the Zone long stayed confined to fiction. There was simply no clear analogue. Around December 2019, however, a Zone started bubbling into existence. Flowing out of China, then across Central Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the Coronavirus pandemic became a reality. The pandemic is a Zone. Like every zone, Coronapocalypse is a realm in which habit breaks down, especially habits of time and space. The daily routines of people have utterly broken down in the pandemic. No longer do people go to work, drop their kids off at day-care, or get weekly drinks with their friends. Memorial Day went by without fanfare, graduation events were held online (if at all) and the Fourth of July went by unnoticed. Family gatherings and wedding are cancelled or postponed, long-planned vacations are abandoned. Without a way or reason to structure the day, sleep schedules drift. The physical space of our shared world has also lost intelligibility, the spaces of work and home have fully merged. Meeting spaces and public places have dissolved. The world seems to have largely shrunken to the boundaries of the house, with these boundaries often enforced by "Stay-at-Home" ordinances and laws closing "non-essential" businesses. All of these effects—the Stay-at-Home orders, the cancellations, the closures, the loss of shared space, dislocation in time—were utterly unprecedented.

    Of course, like any novelty, Coronavirus arrived from the future. It's worth bearing in mind that, yes, scientists warned for years that a pandemic could happen. However, it seems that their warnings were largely unheard. This is evidenced by the incredible unpreparedness of the world, including shortages of PPE for healthcare workers. Even the timeline of the virus hitting America demonstrated this invasion from the future. In early January, Corona was first identified, and just over a week later it had had already jumped into South Korea. Coronavirus continued it's inexorable march towards the rest of the world; within three days it had hit the United States. Slowly, more cases popped up, with the threat of a pandemic barely controlled. Then, on February 26th, the CDC confirmed the first person-to-person transmission of the Coronavirus in the United States. The pandemic had arrived. Of course, the rolling deadlines didn't stop. The CDC laid out estimates for when the United States would hit a thousand, ten-thousand, a hundred-thousand cases as well as similar estimates for deaths. We waited, as Corona washed over America.

    Of course, for a Zone to really be a Zone, it needs to be an inhuman character, a requirement which Coronavirus does not shy away from. Besides the early Corona-chan memes, Coronavirus is often positioned as an adversary rather than any sort of natural disaster. "We can Beat Covid-19," exclaims The Atlantic, The New York Times says that beating Coronavirus is "The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do," meanwhile Medium delivers the "The Most Likely Scenarios to Defeat the Coronavirus." These aren't terms used for responding to a disaster, these are terms of war or for propaganda against an invading army. Of course, Coronavirus must be given a much more inhuman form than simply that of an invading army, as outlined by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh in his recent Principles of Coronademonology. If you have not already read his piece, I highly recommend you do.  As Mohaghegh points out, Coronavirus very clearly fits into the cultural idea of demons, as represented across a wide range of cultures. Most importantly, Coronavirus manipulates through desire, and counts on the subject of it's temptation to make the wrong call. Whether this desire is for knowledge as with Faustus, money as with Porcupine in the Zone's Room, or groceries and social interaction in Quarantine, a zone and a demon both draw their victims into their designs through their desires.

    Like any fictional instance of a Zone, the Coronavirus pandemic is a breaker of habits. The Corona Zone is incompetently administered by the state, though they are far from in control of the goings-on of any would-be Stalker of this Zone. Of course, this Zone seems as difficult to exit as any in Zone in fiction. There are signs that Coronavirus leaves long-term health effects on its victims, as well as projections of long-term effects on politics, the economy, the medical field, and even worries of birth defects. Even once this Zone passes, its effects will be long felt. As Amy Ireland quoted from Nova Swing, "The fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something of it. Then guess what, it starts making something of you."