Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/17/wuhan-virus-appeared-in-1981-t.html
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OMG!!!1 Revelation of the method!1!!
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I mean, the Wuhan metro area has a human population of 19 million people. Starting a biothriller there is no more remarkable than starting one in New York, London, Mexico City or Tokyo. Just because most Americans never heard of Wuhan until a couple of months ago doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. All this tells me is that Dean Koontz is less provincialist than than the average American.
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Is this the reason I started seeing people claiming the virus was created in a lab? They’re mixing fiction and reality? Or are they just idiots?
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1981 it was around 4 million.
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Nope.
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Also, Wuhan is a major university city in China, so having advanced biolabs there just makes sense.
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So just plain ol’ idiocy, then. (And apparently a more complex form of idiocy than I realized… they managed to bring Canada into it?!)
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Yeah, and Tom Clancy predicted the use of airliners as suicide weapons.
At least if you leave out a whole lot of details, anyway.
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The first rule of time travelers is to not
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Many years ago, I was on my way to work, reading that Tom Clancy book where someone flies a jumbo jet into the white house (or is it the senate building? Something like that.)
When I got off the tram I noticed that all the newspaper kiosks had headlines about some big disaster in America - and yes, that was 9/11. The blurring between my book and reality felt very odd.
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Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) got there first.
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Hasn’t Dean Koontz written like 500 books? I mean, he has to be right sometimes. Even if it was only in that it was a virus that originated in Wuhan and literally nothing else.
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This reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson’s “Schrodinger’s Cat,” which has a subchapter that could easily be said–but never provem–to anticipate Bush II’s NSA spying programs.
“GWB-666
He knows when you are sleeping
He knows when you’re awake”
That shit stopped me in my tracks reading it years ago.
Paranoid.
Fair enough. Still a huge city whether then or now.
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The source of all words is a mysterious place indeed!
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Oh, so THAT’S where Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Paranoid) got that theory, which he keeps spouting all over the place.
Importantly, the original version of this novel published in 1981 called the virus “Gorki-400” and was from The Soviet Union. It wasn’t until the 1996 revision where Mr. Koontz changed it to “Wuhan-400” and moved it to China. Kinda makes sense seeing that by 1996 the Soviet Union was no longer and China was seen as more of a threat.
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