The Sword and Laser discussion

Again, sorry for the delay. I was terminally ill for a very long time and am now just starting to recover. I knew the consequences of having a pulmonary embolism which produced multiple clots in both lungs. But, shit, nobody warned me about being crippled or nearly bed-ridden. I even have memory loss and have to re-learn the keyboard. I'm making godawful mistakes with words and key positions. So, I'm typing this real slow.

Anyway;

Since 2001 the amount of Zombie books and films has doubled. It's still going incredibly strong with no letup. I can't help thinking that this trend will continue or morph into something very similar. Plagues, bugs, viruses, strains, more of the same--pandemics. I guess we owe it all to Romero, although it was alive in culture thousands of years before that. I know some of the self-publishers who got on this trope years ago and are still profiting from it. Me? never wrote one. I just can't ascribe a thorough characterization to a foe/protag that is either fast or slow and eats flesh. Oh, and many of them need head-shots, fire or complete dismemberment.

Zombies are so ill-struck, deteriorated, limited in agility and function, it's a wonder they're alive at all. They attack in shear numbers and are usually brought down by gunfire or other instruments of mayhem and destruction. For the life of me I can't see a complex plot in any of these movies. I'm sure some of the books (I haven't read yet) have a semblance of motivation and diversity--but I wonder what, other than wiping the hoard out, surviving or finding a cure, is the statement or solution to this. I mean, how much better could one Z flick be from the next? Do we add sparkles or really smart zombies who can mask their identities? Shape-shifting zombies--really pretty or handsome ones. We've got them in ships/boats, grocery stores, in the forest and in desolate cities, in enclosures and barricades and townships. They just keep changing the environments and locations?

I'm agog at running through the TV listings and finding Z movies in the droves. The science and nature channels are running series and special programs. I think the only Z movie that made me laugh and pay attention was Zombieland. That one had some personality.

What say you? Is this Zombie thing a tiresome, worked over trope or trend, or are we headed for more of this for the next couple years? I wish I had a crystal ball--As far as trends go--this one's got me stymied and a little bit fed up.

I had two editors tell me that Michael Crichtonish type strain and plague books were as dead as ever. This was four years ago. I'd like to ask them about that now and see what they're buying. Also, I don't think you're likely to see more excessive gore than in any other type of movie, sans a B-rated slasher.

I'm not slamming. Just doing some worrisome pondering and literary reflection.

Chris

I've been sick of zombies for a while now. I haven't read the Mira Grant books due to zombies being so overused in movies and tv. Really the only zombie book I've read was the first Resident Evil book. Movies and TV have wrecked zombies for me.

People love zombies. One of my coworkers basically reads nothing else. He reads a lot of self-published books, too, because he doesn't get enough zombies out of normal books. They've never really interested me--I never grew up watching Romero movies or whatever.

If a book has zombies, I won't read it. I did a purge of my "books to read" list several months ago and made sure to remove any books that had zombies prominent, haha.

I don't really see an end to zombies anytime soon unfortunately--Walking Dead is still going strong and they'll be a TV spinoff I thought I heard.

The only zombie work I know I liked is "Shaun of the Dead," but that's more because it's a comedy with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

I with you, I'm sick of zombies, and like David, won't add any books to my TBR list if it even remotely fits into the zombie book pandemic.

As for movies and TV shows, I also liked "Shaun of the Dead" for the humor. I HATED (I don't have caps large enough for that word) World War Z (both the book and the movie). I think that's the one that pushed me over the edge and into boycotting anything to do with zombies.

And just like the YA movie/book pandemic (don't get me started on that one), I don't think the zombie thing is going to go away anytime soon. Unfortunately.

I was never into any of the fantasy horror tropes. Far too predictable.

You start the movie or book with a checklist. Oh, it's zombies? Well this and that will happen, and then this and that, and then this person gets offed, and then that one person survives, yay. Snooze.

Original treatments of classic tropes exist and can of course be made, but the vast majority are not doing this. They're playing off the checklist.

Movies and TV I can't speak to because I'm not a gore flick guy.

Books-wise I think you're POTENTIALLY robbing yourself of some great fiction.

Both The Walking Dead (comic) and World War Z (book) have nothing to do with zombies the movie/TV tropes. TWD is just about dealing with a world where all the support structures are gone and everyone's always under high stress. It can be compared to any apocalyptic distopia and you'd have more or less the same story. Replace zombie with disease or radiation and you more or less could have the same story. World War Z is about the decay of society, the rebuilding of society, PTSD, and doing the unthinkable. Again, could have been aliens just the same and would have mostly been the same story.

I, Zombie uses zombies as an allegory for lock-in diseases (like Scalzi's Lock In) as well as exploring a few other themes.

I guess my point is that while you're within your rights to exclude any genre you want, you're limiting yourself because there are writers deconstructing and reconstructing zombie tropes and doing pretty awesome stuff with it.

If you still want nothing to do with it, don't worry - it'll pass. We're like on the fourth or fifth vampire cycle now. Before Twilight it was Interview with a Vampire and Blade. And before that? I'm sure between the 90s and the 30s films there are a few revivals. And I'm sure between the 30s films and Dracula there are other periods where there were vampires everywhere.

Vampires are awesome though, zombies tend to be the boring cannon fodder in the supernatural/horror army. The biggest problem I have with Zombies is that Zombies arn't characters. If they can be characters then that's awesome but that's not what people normally think of when they think of Zombies.

Aaron wrote: "Vampires are awesome though, zombies tend to be the boring cannon fodder in the supernatural/horror army. The biggest problem I have with Zombies is that Zombies arn't characters. If they can be ..."

If you want zombie characters, then check out the I, Zombie that I linked (because there are other books with similar titles)

Aaron wrote: "Vampires are awesome though, zombies tend to be the boring cannon fodder in the supernatural/horror army. The biggest problem I have with Zombies is that Zombies arn't characters. If they can be ..."

Also, Vampires CAN BE awesome. They can also be lame.

I was just going to say that, Eric.

No trope is immune from this problem.

I disagree that zombies would be improved by giving them character.
Their mindless free roaming nature is what makes them a threat. We don't want to connect with them. De-humanising them is the point.

It would be like someone saying that making vampires into sparkling emos who don't drink human blood would improve the vampire genre. ;-)

As Eric says, in the best zombie books/TV/Movies etc, the zombies are really not the stars of the story. They are stories about humanity. Zombies are just the threat that needs to be overcome.

I'll agree that the dystopian and rebuilding/survival of humanity is really what makes Zombie flicks/books much more revealing and satisfying. I'm all about how the characters react and plan their ultimate survival.

chris

Veronica gave us two zombies-with-personalities books over at Vaginal Fantasy last year, for anyone who's interested:
My Life as a White Trash Zombie and Dearly Departed

There have been plenty of good zombie books among the drivel, but Sturgeon's Law and all that.

I recently read the fun action book XOM-B which had an original take o the genre that I quite enjoyed. It was just different enough to distinguish itself from the pack.

But even using the typical tropes, a good writer can entice me to read a genre that seems otherwise played out. I'm more bored by dystopias than by zombies, but there have been plenty of decent dystopia novels released.

I simply can not bring myself to watch zombie movies unless there is some humour or original twist to it. Because the concept bore me to death(pun intended) I just can not buy slow, discoordinated half-rotten walking corpses becoming a apocalyptic threat to humanity, bringing down society in a manner of months. Even new "runner"zombies would be easy to defeat for even a half trained militia, after the initial shock wears down. As a threat, zombies are a joke. And becase of that the best examples usually either turn it into a comedy(Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland) or forget about zombies after a while and turn it into a human vs. human post-apocalyptic fighting trope(28 Days Later, and Walking Dead does that right now I believe; I don't watch it).

Other than that, there is so little that can be done with this genre.

I don't mind post-apocalyptic novels per se (I loved Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, for example), but I don't like too much out there (I read The Hunger Games trilogy and that was enough for me on the YA dystopia front).

I read the first trade paperback volume of The Walking Dead, but I ended up getting bored and uninterested in it in continuing the series.

Some people's tastes just don't align with zombies as they currently are. Heck, I barely touch vampire stuff, let alone werewolf. I know all of these touch people's book-itches for various reasons, but my interests lay elsewhere . . .

I have personally been done with zombies for years now...I think WWZ (the book) was the last Zombie story I enjoyed. There may still be good stuff being made, but I have zero interest.

Post-apoc in general, without zombies, is a bit more interesting, but really I am patiently waiting for popular interest to move on to the Next Thing. Until it does I will happily ignore my co-workers who are obsessed with TWD.

Personally, I want to see 1960s/70s trippy weirdness come back into style. I heard they're remaking Barbarella, so it may happen! Maybe next they could reboot Zardoz.

Bring on the zombies!

Last yer I read God Decays and I quite enjoyed it. The zombie apocalypse has occurred and it was knowingly unleashed by an NSA cryptanalyst. A group of survivors attemps to make their way through the zombie hordes to NSA headquarters to try to figure out why. The answer to the question is quite awesome and unlike anything I have come across in other zombie stories.

As with anything, really, there's nothing about the zombie that can't be done well, but a lot of the popular tropes capitalize on the worst aspects of the genre.

Not unlike vampires, which work best when they're terrifying, when they're myth, when they allow for metaphor with things like perceived sexual deviance, seem to be most popular right now without any of those characteristics.

The worst things about the zombie genre tend to have to do with the impulse to make the zombie deaths as awesome as possible, to emphasize the gore, and the use them as a vehicle for making humans fight other humans. That stuff is stupid, and we're rightly sick of it.

There is some stuff I like. I haven't read World War Z in a good while, but I liked it a lot at the time. Colson Whitehead, the brilliant writer behind The Intuitionist, wrote Zone One (which I was lukewarm on at the time, but enjoy more and more the more I think about it, which is a good thing). Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant does interesting and fun things in the Newsflesh books. Hers are different because she's actively engaging with popular horror/zombie tropes that I usually hate. She's not even inverting them so much as she's providing the reader with reasons to be invested in them. I kept reading Feed thinking, "I should hate this. This is everything I hate." But then loving every minute of it because she does such a good job of creating a sense of investment in the characters and the story.

Shaun of the Dead, as movies go, is obviously just a perfect film. I don't know that I've ever enjoyed a zombie movie -- even the classic ones -- except that one.

Here's a list of why zombie genre is overrated and has no future:

1-Zombies don't pose a credibile threat. They have zero intellect, coordination or even fullo access to five senses. Most can't even open a door, klet alone using weapons. And they are very easy to kill. Slow or fast, Even a smallest paramilitary group with ranged weapons and minimal training can easily clean a city. Even without any fighting, lack of food will cause them to eventually fade away. Most zombie stories rely on the idea that initial shock and disbelief will be too fast and strong that humanity won't to be able to react fast enough which is really hard to buy.

2-Zombies are boring: walking corpses that want to feed from humans is the oldest and least interesting of monster concepts. Humanity moved on to much more interesting monsters looong ago.

3-Zombie genre don't provide much of an interesting subtext, metaphors or allegories to feed the imagination. Originally it was invented as allegory of consumerism but today that theme is never used. Fear of pleague, fear of corpses, gore and post-apocalyptic near future are the only four elements all contemporary zombie stories stands on. And all the variatons of these themes have been used extensively again and again and again. I doubt new zombie stories will be able to add anything new.

Rasnac wrote: "Here's a list of why zombie genre is overrated and has no future:

1-Zombies don't pose a credibile threat. They have zero intellect, coordination or even fullo access to five senses. Most can't ev..."

These points miss the important aspects of zombies. (And no, they weren't originally allegories of consumerism. Zombies existed before the 1980s, you know.)

Zombies are terrifying because they are everywhere. Individually they can be easily overcome, but en masse they are overwhelming. There is no way to "win" against a zombie horde; the best you can hope for is to survive. Zombies are, therefore, the perfect stand-in for the fears that we feel most powerless against.

In the 1980s and 90s vampires were the mot popular monster because they're all about sex and blood. By far one of the biggest fears of the 1980s was AIDS. It was terrifying and it was inside us, contaminating our blood, and was spread primarily by sex.

Once we got a handle on that, our attention turned to other dangers. The rise of religious extremism, epidemics, climate disasters and, increasingly, global warming. Global warming is terrifying because it feels like an unsolvable problem and, worst of all, it's one we've brought down on ourselves. That's why we've seen zombies change from supernatural creatures ("When Hell is full the dead will walk the Earth") to monsters that are created in a lab.

Almost every single zombie story these days has its basis in disease of some kind rather than magic. We created something that's going to destroy us. Zombies are the perfect metaphor for us being the architects of our own undoing. We can run but we can't hide.

The original zombie vision Romero gave us wasn't a commentary on consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, 1978). It was a commentary on racism (Night of the Living Dead, 1968). As I understand it, the current popular zombie myth comes pretty directly from Romero and owes only a little to older visions, but Romero's use of zombies as metaphor has been pretty flexible (he's done class commentary and social media, too, with varying degrees of success).