A year before Stephen King’s The Stand, a novel that imagines humanity decimated by a superflu called Captain Trips, hit the stands, Chennai-based author Timeri N Murari wrote The Oblivion Tapes. The book was published in 1978 across the UK, the US and Germany, and is the story of American TV reporter Piers Shatner who discovers the horrifying truth behind a plague that paralyses and kills millions. But the truth has Shatner running for his life.

In a strange twist of fate, Murari, a prolific writer — of novels, young adult books, non-fiction, plays, films and television scripts — especially of things past, found The Oblivion Tapes eerily reminiscent of the present. In an email interview, he says, “London publisher Lume Books has re-published the book online on April 12. It is out under a new title — The Final Contagion — with some updating of the original text.”

Modernising the plot

Murari, whose recent Empress of the Taj, melds the story of a fabled queen with travels across India, says, “When the novel was first published, we used to use ‘tape’ for filming. Today we use digital cameras, so I wanted Shatner to use modern technology to record his reporting on the plague in a South American country. Also, I decided to give him a cell phone and a laptop. Apart from those technological updates, the rest of the novel’s theme, character and story line remain the same as the original. As tapes are obsolete now, we needed to change the title.”

The idea for the book originated in 1976, when Murari read a study Population Resources Environment by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich. “It was a massive study, complex and thoroughly researched which warned about the possibility of a conflict between the rich and poor nations for diminishing natural resources. I met up with a scientist friend and we discussed climate change. When I began working on the novel, the theme became darker, a warning about what could happen,” says Murari, who was living in New York at that time. “I met a few scientists who guided me with the technological terms, suggested the graphs and drawings in the novel and even gave me alternative plots to work on. Apart from that there was, of course, the New York Library.”

With e-books on pandemics registering an extraordinary spike in sales, the world’s reading list swings between Albert Camus’ The Plague, Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness and Homer’s Iliad, which has Apollo firing arrows of contagion on those who anger him. Even Jane Eyre survived a school epidemic before she fell in love with the brooding Mr Rochester.

Lume Books, UK, plans to run a print edition soon and Murari says the plot still holds good. “Populist forces are taking control and those countries are all drawing up the bridge, building walls and using their economic power to control the progress of developing nations. Leading nations are using the power of sanction, acts of piracy for scarce resources and withdrawing from international agreements.”

The Oblivion Tapes was written as a ‘break’ between Murari’s first novel The Marriage, on Indian immigrants, followed by a non-fiction work on racial conflicts in Liverpool.

“I wanted to try my hand at writing a political thriller. To be honest, I had forgotten about that novel until the Coronavirus struck. I do not see the virus as fulfilling my prescient thoughts back then. We are all reaching a tipping point in our survival.”

Available on Amazon and Kindle