Youth solving pandemics: hopeful futures in Maths Claesson’s novel Pandemic

Are representations of pandemics in fiction always bleak dystopian tales understood as nature’s revenge on the modern Faustian man, or could they also express hope and expand our imagination in a time of environmental crisis? In this article, we analyse the young adult novel Pandemic (Swedish title: Pandemi, 2018) by Swedish author Maths Claesson. Pandemic is the third novel in a trilogy (2013–2018) with 15-year-old astronaut-trainee Linux as the main protagonist. During his astronaut program on a space station, a pandemic breaks out on Earth. While scientists on Earth struggle to isolate the virus and find a vaccine, Linux and his fellow astronaut-trainees are asked by the WHO to try out a simulation, a computer game aimed at isolating a pandemic outbreak and finding a vaccine. Their simulation is successful and eventually becomes decisive for the solution of the current pandemic crisis on Earth. Departing from Critical Future Studies (Goode and Godhe, Cult Unbound J Curr Cul Res 9(1):108–129, 2017), we focus on the figures of hope (cf. Moylan, Demand the impossible: Science fiction and the utopian imagination, Methuen, pp. 1–2, 1986) for a sustainable future and analyse how the novel is widening the scopes of possible futures. We show how the computer simulation and the successful solution of the crisis serves as a vehicle for a broader discussion about what kind of future we want, a future where the conquest of space offers new opportunities, e.g. for solving the environmental crisis. While normally in Y/A speculative fiction, technology is almost exclusively depicted as ostensibly serving human needs, in Pandemic it is thanks to technology, and the younger generation’s particular skills, that the disease is conquered. In this sense, the novel is hopeful since it depicts the younger generation as being capable of developing different thinking patterns from those of the adult society.