CAUTION: SPOILERS! I originally read ‘The Maze Runner’ during the Covid-19 pandemic. After finding this book on my book shelf two weeks ago, I re-read the entire series. I remembered the odd speculation that I’d formulated when I’d first read the series. James Dashner had predicted some future events.
The Maze Runner Series’ Setting VS Covid 19 Setting: In the first book, we meet Thomas and find he is trapped in a maze. After he escapes, we learn that the world is riddled with a virus which runs people insane. Those people are slowly dying and harming the Munies, people who are immune to the virus, with reckless abandon. Thomas learns that the maze that they were trapped in was a part of a series of tests that an organization named WCKD was using to find a cure to the deadly virus.
Though there were no insane organizations taking children from their homes and families, there was a deadly virus running around with people still searching for a cure, Many people were hospitalized and others and to be quarantined for prolonged periods of time, some people going crazy because of the mind-shattering isolation. A study showed that in 2017, 9,406,000 adults in the U.S had serious thoughts about suicide. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, 12,100,000 people had serious thoughts of suicide, having the 2017 result increase by around 2,694,000. Though Covid-19 has died down for the most part, the affects that have weighed on people’s minds with lost loved ones and being so cut off from the rest of the world as 11,434,000 people had serious thoughts of suicide in 2022. This was after Covid’s peak.
My first connection made was about the isolation that people in the book had to endure as well as people in real life. This was things like only going out for necessities like food and water. (And occasionally raiding stores for toilet paper.) People in this book would have whole cities full of safe, sane people just to isolate themselves from people that happened to be sick. They would find anyone with the virus and put them into a special place managed by the government called a Crank Palace. It’s bordering on Hell there and the further into the facility you go, the crazier the Cranks get. These people in the isolated city only have small groups of people go out into the world to get resources like food and water that are needed. They are all rashly tested, just to make sure they don’t have the Flare, which is what the deadly man-made virus was called. People both in the Maze Runner and in real life were stressing to an almost frenzied amount about whether or not people had the virus.
The second was that the people in the Maze Runner Universe used medical masks as a way to prevent the disease from spreading from person to person. Although in any situation with a disease or virus going around, they would probably still have medical masks in use, I thought that it was the fact that this was the best connection due to how quick the government in both universes had gone to use the medical masks as their quick solution, quickly adapting the cloth masks. As both viruses spread, people got more cautious and began to avoid others at all costs. This was the 6 feet apart and the isolation of cities.
Writer’s Review: Over all, this book series was an enticing read, and kept me on the edge of my seat. I came to sympathize with a lot of the characters, and was sad to see some of them go throughout the series. The last two books, which were prequals, were really enticing and made the rest of the nooks make more sense that gave me new insights about the characters in the following books. I think that James Dashner could not have tied in the different stories together any better and these stories are definitely recommended!
