Can We Move on from the Zombie Apocalypse?

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Since Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 there has been a steady stream of zombies.  Now that stream has become a raging torrent in the last ten years.  It’s been relentless.  TV shows, spinoffs, movies, sequels, commercials, comedies, romance novels, you name it.

But hasn’t it become an enormous bore?  First off, how ridiculous is the whole concept?  The rotting corpses of the dead are walking around attacking and devouring the living.  It’s really incredibly stupid as science fiction.  And as horror it’s so played out it’s hard to imagine there are still people willing to pay money to watch any more of this fare.

Isn’t it about time we came up with a more interesting apocalypse?  Even the Mad Max dystopia is better than zombies.  For instance, the Lord Humungus looks like he might have an interesting back story.  Maybe he was bullied as Schoolboy Humungus and would have preferred to rule the Wasteland with a more humane and progressive regime but you know how those dogs of war are once they’ve been unleashed.

After all, this is a big world full of all kinds of interesting people and customs and problems.  And with the Global American Empire seemingly winding down, writers and storytellers could concoct any number of fascinating local plot lines involving wars and criminal enterprises and local disasters that would require heroes and villains to give the audience their best efforts.

And of course, with the advent of AI and drones and all the other aspects of high technology leaving the precinct of science fiction and entering reality there really is no end to the possibilities available to a writer looking to thrill his audience with wholesale mayhem.  I hesitate to play up the bio-weapon genre because that comes too close to the “realistic” school of zombie apocalypse (ala the “I Am Legend” virus plotline).  But whatever the angle, the world is full of marvelous dangerous stuff where the most marvelous and dangerous stuff is human beings; live human beings not walking cadavers.

I am drawn to the idea of a future world where technology breaks down over the majority of the planet and has to be reignited by some local renaissance.  Maybe we reach peak oil and we get pushed back to steam locomotives and coal fired industry.  There could be some havens of modernity with old nuclear power plants limping along using fissile material scavenged from ICBMs.

And then some genius comes up with a new power source.  Or maybe it’s an old power source that he improves.  But whatever it is it would cause a ripple of change in this stalled out world.  And anyone with a little imagination can spin that into an epic of a bunch of novels.  In fact, it’s not that different from the Foundation books.  And of course, it’s a variation on the history of Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Of course, there is probably someone reading this who looks at this the other way around and says, “Wait a minute!  Why not write a zombie apocalypse in Roman Britain?”  To which my only answer would be, “Damn you, George Romero!  Damn you to hell!!!!!!!!!!”

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 09JUN2025 – Fate

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It’s interesting when something happens, and you think, “If I had left 5 minutes later”, or “If I hadn’t tossed X-item into the car.” I had one of those in 2018 when I was trying to get a hotel reservation for a hurricane evacuation. We needed a pet-friendly room, and just as I was about to hit the “Confirm key” >BLIP< -room gone! So I scrambled and found an alternate 30 miles further on. While there, we rescued a little tortie cat who had apparently been dumped at the motel. We added her to our clowder and named her Florence, for the storm that brought her to us. She crossed her Rainbow last April due to FIV and Thyroid trouble, but we loved her, and she had a good life with us, and we miss her.

Probably Not Smart

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Apparently random luck rules our lives to an extent that I think is hard to overemphasize.  Back two weeks ago I wrote about a tree that came down across my driveway.  After I finished cutting the top of the tree away, I took a big wrecking bar and rolled it to the side of the driveway.  For the last two weeks I’ve been planning to cut it up into smaller sections and put it aside.  But there it still is three quarters to the side of the lower driveway and one quarter on.  It looks awful and speaks volumes about my lack of organization and discipline.

But the funniest thing happened yesterday.  A guy was driving on the road by my house when something strange happened.  The shoe he was wearing on the foot that he used for working the brake and gas got tangled up with the gas pedal and he couldn’t get it free.  Somehow, he must have panicked and lost control of the steering while attempting to free his foot from the gas and he ended up turning onto my property close to where the driveway was.  He crashed through some small pines without even slowing down but the trunk of the downed tree was perfectly positioned to stop his car dead.  He wasn’t badly hurt and his car only sustained some damage where it hit the tree so it was able to back out of the debris once he got over the shock.  Looking at the line he was making through my yard the next stop was the bottom floor of my house.  That would have been bad.  That would have been a mess for both of us.

So, this is apropos of nothing.  It’s just kind of crazy how two random acts of fate can interact with each other to some almost purposeful end.  If that tree hadn’t fallen, he would have hit it square on and his car would have been totaled.  If I had cut it up as I had planned in a timely manner he would have landed in my house and we both would be having a very bad month.

It’s funny.  Even when I have bad luck it seems to turn into good luck for me.  For a long time, I’ve had this theory.  I feel like I’ve been borrowing good luck from an account and one day it’s all going to come due and I’m going to have a phenomenally bad day.  But maybe I’m wrong.  The exact mechanism of luck is not apparent to me.  And I think there are different kinds of luck.  For instance, I never win at games of chance.  I’ve never made a fortune investing in stocks.  All my luck runs to bad things not happening to me.  And almost all of my luck involves escaping the consequences of my own poor judgement; sometimes by mere fractions of a second or sixteenths of an inch.  And it’s been going on since I was a child.  And over the course of a lifetime, I’ve become convinced that there really is something called luck.  And some people actually have it significantly in their lives.

Anyway, it’s just something that seems to happen to me from time to time.  Maybe I really do have a guardian angel.  I guess it would be the height of ingratitude to ask him to let me hit the mega-millions just once.  Probably not smart.

Everybody’s Gotta Eat

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The circle of life.  Despite the claim in the song, Disney never shows us the predators, including his highness the King, chowing down on the herbivores that provide the carnivores with their sustenance.  Theoretically Mufasa is the apex of the food chain but all of his meals are “off-camera.”

But Camera Girl claims to be a wildlife realist and the hawks and vultures, the foxes and coyotes according to her “gotta eat.”  So, when a rabbit or a squirrel ends up as a meal somewhere on the property, she shrugs it off, “everyboody’s gotta eat.”

Today one of the local hawks performed its patented power dive a couple of feet away from Camera Girl’s bird feeders and the bird (we think it was a catbird) never knew what hit it.  Oh well.

But there is a more gruesome aspect than just the kill.  The hawk eats the entire bird while plucking the feathers as it goes.  Camera Girl watched this from her kitchen window and I could tell she wasn’t shrugging it off.  She has a soft heart.  And since she feeds the birds and attracts them to the location, she feels that she was responsible in a way for the predation.

And all things considered that is true.  That hawk would not have caught that catbird today if she didn’t feed those birds every day.  But I tried to cheer her up.  I said, “Well, you’ve been feeding these birds for years.  And all those free meals have contributed to the health and longevity of all these birds.  With all that extra food they’ve probably produced double the number of hatchlings they would have raised if they were thin and weak.  Maybe that very catbird would never have been born if his parents hadn’t eaten the seeds you provided.”

So, I threw that out there.  Hopefully it helped a bit.  And I’m sure she’ll bounce back tomorrow when she goes out early to feed Moe and Flo the crows and Poe the raven.  And she’s been watching this skunk (of course, it’s Pepé Le Pew) that appears at dusk and scratches around where Moe’s food was earlier in the day.  He’s almost all white and kind of wide and flat to the ground.  He looks like a giant Tribble or a furry version of the Horta.  But so far, I’ve managed to avoid it while I’m doing my late afternoon watering.  The last thing I need is getting skunked in my own yard.

Of course, the flipside of all this is the fact that the bird feeders also occasionally attract black bears to the property.  The last time the bear used its weight to bend a very substantial steel tube all the way over.  I guess it’s within the realm of possibility that one day the circle of life might mean I could be on the menu for Yogi Bear.  So, there is that to consider.  I’ll mention this to Camera Girl and see if that changes the whole risk to reward ratio for her bird feeding hobby.  I tend to doubt it.  She really likes those birds.