Since Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 there has been a steady stream of zombies.\u00a0 Now that stream has become a raging torrent in the last ten years.\u00a0 It\u2019s been relentless.\u00a0 TV shows, spinoffs, movies, sequels, commercials, comedies, romance novels, you name it.<\/p>\n
But hasn\u2019t it become an enormous bore?\u00a0 First off, how ridiculous is the whole concept?\u00a0 The rotting corpses of the dead are walking around attacking and devouring the living.\u00a0 It\u2019s really incredibly stupid as science fiction.\u00a0 And as horror it\u2019s so played out it\u2019s hard to imagine there are still people willing to pay money to watch any more of this fare.<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t it about time we came up with a more interesting apocalypse?\u00a0 Even the Mad Max dystopia is better than zombies.\u00a0 For instance, the Lord Humungus looks like he might have an interesting back story.\u00a0 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\u2019ve been unleashed.<\/p>\n
After all, this is a big world full of all kinds of interesting people and customs and problems.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I hesitate to play up the bio-weapon genre because that comes too close to the \u201crealistic\u201d school of zombie apocalypse (ala the \u201cI Am Legend\u201d virus plotline).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Maybe we reach peak oil and we get pushed back to steam locomotives and coal fired industry.\u00a0 There could be some havens of modernity with old nuclear power plants limping along using fissile material scavenged from ICBMs.<\/p>\n
And then some genius comes up with a new power source.\u00a0 Or maybe it\u2019s an old power source that he improves.\u00a0 But whatever it is it would cause a ripple of change in this stalled out world.\u00a0 And anyone with a little imagination can spin that into an epic of a bunch of novels.\u00a0 In fact, it\u2019s not that different from the Foundation books.\u00a0 And of course, it\u2019s a variation on the history of Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.<\/p>\n
Of course, there is probably someone reading this who looks at this the other way around and says, \u201cWait a minute!\u00a0 Why not write a zombie apocalypse in Roman Britain?\u201d\u00a0 To which my only answer would be, \u201cDamn you, George Romero!\u00a0 Damn you to hell!!!!!!!!!!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 there has been a steady stream of zombies.\u00a0 Now that stream has become a raging torrent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2510,1263,4],"tags":[354,265,883],"class_list":["post-33517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-sff","tag-horror","tag-science-fiction","tag-zombies"],"yoast_head":"\n