While it’s a book on a topic that was bound to emerge in the COVID era, I was secretly curious about two things: ‘When exactly did the author start writing this book?’ and ‘How entertaining can a novel about a virus really be?’ The novel opens with a scene at Incheon Airport where one arriving passenger refuses quarantine and causes a disturbance. This is followed by a chain of small incidents surrounding the virus, like the mysterious deaths of sheep in Himalayan pastures, unfolding with cinematic scene transitions and pacing that was truly thrilling.

Particularly compelling was the solution: to wage war against the virus externally rather than internally, implanting virus data onto semiconductors and detecting it using IoT and laser technology. This felt like a quite plausible solution. If Samsung Electronics produced such chips as suggested in the novel, their stock price would surely rise, and my children and I could become happy ‘stock millionaires’. Furthermore, the prediction that a super virus called ‘Virus X’ will emerge in mutated forms, following SARS, MERS, Ebola, and COVID-19, felt less like mere fiction and more like a plausible scenario. If this novel gets adapted into a movie next year, I’d definitely want to invest in that project. Is it going to be on a crowdfunding platform like Wadiz?