Resonant realities: speculating infection in the postpandemic era

This essay rethinks infection in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic by examining how its imaginaries are reconfigured in contemporary science fiction. While infection has conventionally been understood as a pathological threat to be controlled or eradicated, the pandemic asks us to reconceive it as a paradigmatic condition shaping bodily experience, social relations and ethical responsibility. This study conceptualises infection as a multilayered event that unsettles boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, and human and non-human. By re-examining the paradox of immunity and the ontological shift from clinical intrusion to a ‘communizing’ viral exposure, this essay argues that infection is the very ground of shared existence rather than a pathological accident. To this end, we propose a threefold analytical framework of infection—pathological, affective and ontological—and apply it to a range of science fiction texts. Zombie narratives exemplify pathological infection by staging contagion as an object of fear that justifies exclusion and immunitary violence. In comparison, the science fiction (SF) alien film Arrival reconfigures infection as affective contagion, where linguistic communication transforms perception and temporality, with them ethical orientation. Extending this trajectory, the SF humanoid film After Yang foregrounds ontological infection by depicting how memory and mourning re-embed the human within a web of techno-organic interdependence, destabilising the boundary between human and non-human existence. Ultimately, we suggest that the postpandemic future requires a shift from an immunitary logic of defence and exclusion to an infectious interdependence based on resonance and co-evolution.