Pandemic, prophecy, and politics in Mary Shelley and Emily St John Mandel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, readers and scholars turn to previous pandemic writing. Among the older accounts of past pandemics, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) stands out for its female author and futuristic, dystopian mode. Among contemporary plague narratives, Station Eleven (2014), by the Canadian writer Emily St John Mandel, offers an eerie echo of Shelley’s plague-infested Europe in the devastated Great Lakes region during a 21st-century pandemic. This article explores the coincident motifs of the two narratives, while focusing on their parallel predictions about the social and political fallout of a pandemic in ways that echo the global experience of coronavirus reaction over the last few years, specifically, the ideological polarization created by anti-pandemic measures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".