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Originally Posted by DNSB
I've read a couple of books set during the pandemic. To me, it's more a matter of how the author addresses the pandemic. Do they dwell on it and make it the star of the book or do they have it as part of the background. The latter I can live with, the former, well, I've lived through it and really don't need to revisit it in glowing details (one of the books read like it was torn from the pages of a governmental Covid-19 update site and ended up being added to my rather short DNF list).
To completely disregard the pandemic in a book set in the last couple of years? Takes me back to Dallas and the it was all a dream season.
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Perfect comment.
It's also very strange to read a book written in 1940s to 1950s set during WWII that makes no mention of it. Some well known authors, mostly for younger readers.
But few books mention the so called "Spanish Flu" of about 1918 to 1920, which was actually brought to Europe by US soldiers. Cities in USA that locked down and closed theaters, sport and churches had low death rate and places in USA that ignored it had massive death rates.
Also some places used masks which dramatically reduced the spread.
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The earliest documented case was March 1918 in Kansas, United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it the second deadliest pandemic in human history after the Black Death bubonic plague of 1346–1353.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
So it depends on the book and audience as to if the Covid-19 is mentioned. But i agree it shouldn't be central. Nor should people promote "conspiracy theory" books about it.
I agree that anything clearly set in the time period of Covid-19 that is a realistic kind of fiction rather than some kind of alternate reality Naomi Novak, Michael Moorcock, P.K. Dick) or floating timeline (Famous Five, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew) should have it as the background. Also perhaps (but not always) various wars & conflicts in period (Korea, Suez, many Middle East, Gulf, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Falklands, Northern Ireland, Balkans and Ukraine). Conflicts, civil wars, independence: Irish, Mexican, US, Indian, maybe 4 English civil wars.
Jane Austen hardly mentions the Napoleonic Wars, yet Heyer writing RomComs set in the same period sometimes has them central. Tolstoy's "special operations and peace" is a different kind of epic.
So depends on the book: audience, genre, location etc. But certainly Covid ought not to be central or the start, not for many years or decades.