China wasn’t original villain in book ‘predicting’ coronavirus outbreak – it was Russia
- Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness originally contained details of a man-made virus called Gorki-400 from the Russian city of Gorki
- The change to Wuhan came when the book was released in hardback under Koontz’s own name in 1989 – at the end of the Cold War
The 1981 book by US thriller writer Dean Koontz that appeared to predict the coronavirus outbreak in China initially had the virus originating in Russia.
The book appears to have been rewritten after the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the country was no longer seen as a communist bogeyman.
“They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made organisms created at that research centre,” Koontz writes in the book.
However, Wuhan wasn’t even originally mentioned in The Eyes of Darkness. The first edition of the book, written under Koontz’s pseudonym Leigh Nichols, concerns a virus called Gorki-400 that was created by the Russians and emerged from “the city of Gorki”.
