Would it take months, years, decades? Would it, maybe, not happen at all? My editor and I had the bizarre job of reviewing my manuscript in which a pandemic spreads across the world, as a pandemic spread across the world As I wrote about fictional scientists trying to find a cure in my fictional 2020s, I wondered if a vaccine being discovered quickly would be dismissed as silly. The drive for a vaccine throughout 20 has been, arguably, one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements. My editor and I removed the pangolin from the final draft of the book because, as she told me: “People will think you’ve stolen it from the real world.” Other elements of the story that I worried would seem far-fetched have been mirrored by reality. For her, a late flight and cramped plane seat seem both exotic and nostalgic after years of closed borders. I imagined Dawn – a character who rises quickly up the higher ranks of the civil service partly by dint of remaining alive – being excited to travel again.

Some things I wrote about, for instance how characters would feel after years of a pandemic, now feel unnerving. Photograph: APīut as a writer of speculative fiction, I never expected to gauge the distance between my novel and the world I was living in. The 2010 film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I wanted to explore what the world would look like without men – what would parliament and hospitals and dating and childcare look like? What would change? What would stay the same? What would it feel like to live in a world so affected by loss and which needed to be rebuilt around, and by, women? A pandemic was the most realistic way of writing that world a reverse-engineered thought experiment. I didn’t actually set out to write a “pandemic” novel. The End of Men is set between 20 and shows a world in which a virus to which women are immune kills 90% of the world’s men. Sound familiar? I’m describing 2020, of course, but all of those things are also present in my novel, The End of Men, which I wrote between September 2018 and December 2019. A plague that starts with a pangolin, doctors sounding the alarm but not being listened to, countries slow to close their borders, a virus spreading until it’s too late to contain it, a cruise ship of passengers stranded with nowhere to dock.

The end of men sweeney