Olivia Manning wrote, of middle-class functionaries
and retirees :
'These people were the devourers, the enemy.
They made a ruthless demand on life. For them
the world was being squandered, is resources used up,
its wildlife decimated, it seas polluted,
the sea-life destroyed and the seabirds in their thousands
killed by their accursed oil tankers.'
'...If those people were guilty, was he not guilty, too ?
'...he was the most guilty because, more often than not,
he chose to put the destruction out of his mind.'
from The Rain Forest.
Olivia Manning was also the author of The Balkan Trilogy
and The Levant Trilogy.
Later in the book another character predicts:
'We could be due for another killer as all-pervasive as the plague...
'It could be hibernating in some unexplored corner of the earth,
some fragment of primitive forest, and carried by a creature so small that no-one has noticed it...
'Not necessarily a virus, but probably: a disease as contagious as smallpox,
as virulent as plague, coming newly into a world without inherited immunity
and no present knowledge. It would take time to isolate. Before being isolated, it could bring human numbers down at a very satisfactory speed.'
This sounds partly like HIV and partly like Coronavirus.
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