John Updike invents the future.

2021, somewhere near Boston. Ben Turnbull lives in a big old house with a number of empty rooms and attics with creaking pipes. His wife is busy with committees. Ben Turnbull survived the Sino-American war. Many didn’t. This is the aftermath. The west coast is unreachable; wiped out. Entrepreneurs are making brave talk about reinhabiting China’s radioactive wastelands. Parts of New York lie in ruins. China's bombs didn't reach that far: Chinese Americans, sympathetic to China, were responsible. (This book - for it is a novel - was written four years before 2001.) Local thugs ransom Ben Turnbull for property protection. He pays. There are no police. Ben lapses in and out of time-warp consciousness; becoming at one point a monk in 793 Britain during a Viking attack on their territorially-valuable island during which the other monks are slaughtered. He sees the head monk depart along with the invaders. Traitor? No, when they pass a fence, he perceives the monk’s head is on a pike.

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2021, somewhere near Melbourne. Six million people are locked up. There is a fight between two States and others join in. It is a matter of pride whose population has the lowest covid infection rate. The death toll is irrelevant. Hospitalisation is irrelevant. Infections are all that matter. Everything else is collateral damage. Scorched earth is necessary for State egos to outdo each other. The states have clanged shut, one by one. The Australian Capital territory shut down last week: one infection. Were leaders to move their entire populations to the moon by Elon Musk rocket, the virus would find its own spacecraft and beat them there to lie in wait. 

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John Updike's novel received mixed reviews but its Updikean stream of consciousness worked sporadically and his grasp and regurgitation of the minutiae of life holds a morbid fascination for the reader. Criticisms centred around his obsessions that border on a kind of writer's OCD. Alright, you write like Updike and I'll find something to criticise. Hemingway had his detractors. 

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Tuesday. Mothers anxious to remove their younger children from the house while their older ones 'study' from home go to the playground. Red and white tape flutters around them like a medieval decorated maypole. Closed yesterday in a blaze of press-conference melodrama. The police chief, on radio, talked a big game against children. These people love the microphone. The pussy who roared, same as that other police chief last month. The next morning I saw a mother pushing a pram, small child's neck craning, past a verboten playground, across an intersection. A car braked just in time. Adolescents have lost two years of their lives. For many, solitary confinement is their life. No prospect of release, no end in sight. Solitary confinement contravenes the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The leaders are chasing the infection numbers, their media henchmen, non-gender specific of course, are scouring their thesauruses for language that is even more horror-laden. I heard someone comment on the lack of 'social distancing' - that phrase of the commissar - on that mercy flight out of Kabul where they fell like flies.

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The dystopian world of John Updike's Toward the End of Time (1997, Knopf) is a far less frightening story than the other story in this post. After all, it was fiction.