IVL was released back in 2016, and explores the aftermath of a pandemic which wipes out half of humanity in 2020. Sound familiar? But how accurate was it, and what else did the book predict? Read on to find out more!

All the children knew the story of Bjart Lorentzen. The rat catcher. The piper. Patient zero of the Norwegian Death. The man who killed the world.

Covid-19 vs the Norwegian Death



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The respiratory disease Covid-19 is caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China.

In IVL, the pandemic is caused by a mutated version of the bacteria Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible for the Black Death. It is nicknamed the Norwegian Death, after the first recorded infection.

…the results of the Norwegian Death, a highly contagious and antibiotic-resistant form of pneumonic plague, had been catastrophic.

The Norwegian Death spreads throughout the world



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For question of why I set the pandemic in 2020, I wanted it to be in the near future but it also had to correspond with a major event. In the book, Lorentzen is an international volunteer at the Tokyo Olympics, with access to to crowds and elite athletes alike, creating the first super-spreader event.

Lorentzen had killed the world, and for weeks, no one even knew there was a problem. The infected went through their daily lives, unaware of the bacteria slowly multiplying within them. At first, it caused nothing more than a bad cough and a raised temperature; certainly not anything worth going to the hospital for. But then people started dying, the surgeries and hospitals began to fill with the sick and doctors woke to the horrid realisation that their medicines weren’t going to help.

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For Covid-19, the rapid spread of the disease has been staggeringly fast and successful. In less than a year it’s infected over 55 million people, and that’s despite our best efforts to contain it. The UK alone is reported to have over 1300 separate introduction events up to May 2020, mainly from Europe.

Despite the different causes, the spread of the disease, from the delayed symptoms to the global reach and the panic, is pretty similar.

Death rates



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Covid-19 has, tragically killed over 1.3 million people so far, and probably many more indirectly (lack of hospital capacity for existing conditions etc. In comparison, the Norwegian Death and associated chaos / collapse of society has wiped out approximately half the population of the world by the time a treatment becomes available,

Overwhelming the healthcare system.

In the UK, at least, Covid-19 has been kept within the working capacity of hospitals. Thank you NHS workers! IVL explores what happens when this isn’t the case, a vision of the future grimly inspired by my memories of the UK Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001.

…for when the hastily built incinerators and crematoriums had become overwhelmed, they’d resorted to scooping up the corpses into open top lorries using excavators instead. The bodies were transported to vast wood-lined pits dotted around the countryside, and then finally doused in petrol. The pyres had burned fiercely for days on end, filling the air for miles around with billowing black acrid smoke and threatening to choke anyone who went too close; a final act of the dead seeking revenge on the uncaring living who had cast them aside.

The UK and world response

So how did the world respond to the Norwegian Death?

By the time the governments and United Nations had woken up to the scale of the pandemic it was all too late, as one by one, the nations fell under the scourge.

Although not quite back to the Stone Age, Europe is described as being primarily comprised as a collection of city states, whilst America is a set of independent fragments and Asia has become primary feudal.
But how about the UK? Did IVL mirror the actual response?

Britain had fared better than most, as the Government of the time had been preparing for such an outbreak since several false dawns had woken them up to the possible consequences. They had closed the borders and cleared the airspace to avoid the infection getting in again, whilst they battled to control the spread of the disease and an increasingly panicked populace. The politicians had wisely given the Armed Forces complete control of order, provisions and disposal. To stop the mobs killing each other over scraps of dwindling food, they descended in a fearful spectacle of uniforms, guns and gas masks; society’s last hope against a tsunami of natural selection.

Well, I got that wrong! Whatever you think of the Government’s response before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, it certainly wasn’t that.

Bizarrely, in IVL, New Zealand is mentioned as having escaped the ravages of the virus, echoing its real-life counterpart, although the reasons for it are slightly different.

The cure?



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The search for a vaccine for Covid-19 has a been a remarkable feat of science around the world, propelling the usual development phase from years to months. At the time of writing, Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna have released exciting results on effectiveness of their mRNA-based vaccines, with the Astrazeneca / Oxford Uni data hopefully coming soon. Russia and China have also begun vaccinating the populace at the same time as running phase 3 trials.

In IVL, however, the UK Government take a much more ‘active’ role, basically stealing the cure and cementing their power over the nation and beyond.

… a revolutionary antibiotic created in a small lab in Cambridgeshire. The politicians had annexed it under the guise of national interests and sold it to the rest of the world at a vast price, propelling the country from near bankruptcy to a rich and prosperous nation in a matter of months.

Word of the year, and Trump speeches



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The term ‘lockdown’ was recently declared the Collins Dictionary word of the year, and is also used to describe the restrictions on society in In Vitro Lottery.

Victor Pearson’s (head of the IVF clinics) take on Lockdown:

There was general bad feeling about the continued use of Lockdown, the Act which continued to promote self-sufficiency and keep the borders closed so many years after the Norwegian Death had run its course. It was originally designed to stop the plague getting back in, but now served mainly to keep people out.

In Vitro Lottery is told primarily from the point of view of Kate Adams, who was born in the aftermath of the pandemic. As a product of her time and environment, Kate is fiercely loyal to the far-right Government, although this begins to falter when her sister is killed and her investigation leads her to confront some disturbing truths about the lottery. Kate’s initial opinion on Lockdown differs somewhat from the older and more cynical Victor Pearson:

The main aim of the LockDown was to preserve bio-security and the society they had strived to create; the last thing they wanted was an influx of people with no sense of investment or responsibility, who would just take and not give in return. If they had something to offer then great, let them in and educate them. If not, then they should stay away and try to repair wherever it was they came from.

Interestingly, a review for IVL noted that that reader found the book difficult to read because the political views of the characters were so far opposed from theirs. Good! That’s the point – it’s supposed to challenge our perceptions and affirmation biases.

Make Britain Great Again!

Even though IVL was released in 2016, it took a year or two to write, well before Donald Trump decided to run for President. It therefore came as a bit of a shock to find Trump peddling the same rhetoric that the IVL politician Caden Schoier gives in a speech:

And look at us now, a beacon of hope, peace and security, the envy of the world. Now, as once long ago, Britain is truly great again.”

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IES: the second plague

So, there you go! Although released several years ago, IVL unwittingly predicted many aspects of the 2020 pandemic, and a few other random and linked events.
In the book, however, the Norwegian Death is just the beginning of Humanity’s problems. A bigger threat awaits them, and forms the crux of the story.

The survivors of the plague, struggling to maintain their way of life in the chaos, soon faced a new threat to the continuation of their species; a disease they called Infectious Embryonic Sterility. The virus buried itself secretly in their genome and made their children barren, with complex and expensive fertility treatment the only alternative. Some could pay, but most could not.
Thus in Britain, vigilant and isolated from the fragmented world beyond its shores, the In Vitro Lottery was born.

Read more about In Vitro Lottery here!

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