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Yet another novel I will no longer write

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Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#91

Post by mcguire »

Hmm.

There are some science fiction tropes that become really obvious when you start looking for them. For one, check out Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Heinlein's Puppet Masters: that's "the Commies are among us", and it's not surprising that it became a significant thing in the 1950s. Although the idea that there are a group of people out there who look and act completely normal but who are actually out to destroy everything that decent people hold dear is a pretty common fear; demonic possession and all.

The Zombie 'Pocalypse is another. Charlie's right, it is the same fear as that of the owners of an antebellum Southern plantation at the mention of a slave uprising. The idea that all of the people you live with every day might suddenly turn into degenerate, savage monsters yearning to snack on your favorite nervous system is pretty scary, though. But it doesn't really have anything to do with infection or disease, and he is wrong to try to tie the two together. The infection isn't the important part.

Oh, and let's wait until the next time something like the current pandemic happens before we pass too much judgement on how people react. Consider the difference between the Northeast blackout of 1965 and the New York City blackout of 1977.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#92

Post by lonelappde »

WalterBright wrote: post #41
Barrin92 wrote: post #9

> The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social…

You don't have to guess at what happens when governments collapse. Just look at what happened to Europe in 1945. https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-Wor... It's very ugly, but not what you describe.

That book describes the same civil wars that happened for the hundreds of years before 1945 too.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#93

Post by lonelappde »

dane-pgp wrote: post #42
sneak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite. This really hit home for me. It has always struck me as supremely odd, the civilization-breakdown fantasies that people have when I suggest that everyone in a society, not just the police, have easy and unrestrained access to arms, as advocated by many throughout history. Th…

> ... that society will devolve into this immediately, every fender bender or bit of road rage turning into life or death conflict. To provide context, here is some data on that: "cases of road rage involving a firearm — where someone brandished a gun or fired one at a driver or passenger — more than doubled to 620 in 2016, from 247 in 2014." https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/us/road-rage-guns.html That doesn't amou…

I can't comprehend a 1 in a million per year event (brandishing, not even necessarily firing) being anywhere the top of anyone's list of things to worry about.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#94

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #65
rpiguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.” Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy. Even the term “elite pa…

Many societies with turmoil have managed to resolve the situation and went back to normal. Surely that depends on the attitudes of people, and especially leadership, on how to deal with the situation. Zombie television presents violence as the only option and the enemy as an incurable and unsavable evil. If the only option shown is to kill and build walls, then that's what they are programmed to do. In the real world…

> "In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other."

That's starkly contradicted by the absence of toilet paper and other staples on store shelves at the individual level and the ongoing profiteering on and commandeering of medical protective gear and other medical supplies at the international level.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#95

Post by ableal »

avip wrote: post #10

Should have adopted the strategy of assuming the book exists and write a review. Used so effectively by Borjes it won him a Nobel.

If you mean Jorge Luis Borges, sadly no Nobel for him.

P.S. Local press had an item about an "International Writers Committee" naming Borges for the 2018 prize posthumously: https://www.dn.pt/lusa/comite-internacional-de-escritores-at...

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#96

Post by tachyonbeam »

setgree wrote: post #15

This is an interesting take on what zombie fiction is about: > The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the…

I would say it's possible that the zombie myth has been independently reinvented in multiple places. I don't think it's necessarily been "appropriated". Though there is an obvious parallel in that both myths are about lack of freedom.

IMO, zombie movies symbolize a desire that people have to be free from the usual norms of society. More broadly, there is some part of us that desires chaos, and sees it as freeing. In a post-apocalyptic zombie world, there are no jobs, no rent to pay, no worrying about grooming yourself or fancy clothes, etc. Zombies are irredeemable, unsalvageable enemies. It's kill or be killed. In some ways, you could say that's simpler than modern society, with its many parallel games, hierarchies and rigid structures. In zombieland, there are no rules.

Beyond that, zombie movies are also an outlet for people to channel that pent up rage. They like to fantasize that they would be the badass survivor, shooting zombies in the head with a shotgun and chopping them up with axes, in some kind of ultimate "fuck you" to society. But hey, it's okay to kill people now, in that world, it's completely legit, they're no longer people.

Personally, I don't watch zombie movies because I feel like there's enough real drama in the world that I don't need to worry about gross imaginary drama. I also don't think it's the healthiest thing to cultivate violent fantasies where you kill everyone. Your life, your real life, may have its share of problems, but this definitely isn't how you're going to escape them.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#97

Post by andreilys »

rpiguy wrote: post #20
Barrin92 wrote: post #9

> The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social…

His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.” Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy. Even the term “elite pa…

Thank you for this response, I was about to answer the same but you've done a much better job of expressing my sentiment.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#98

Post by invertY »

92 comments no-one noticed that Cstross' Zombies weren't actually zombies qua zombies & the entire twist was that 'finding and feeding a zombie before it became truly dead' was his 1st chapter. i.e. If you find and feed a "zombie" chicken nuggets, its brain ceases to degrade.[1]

It's a riff on Metaphysical P-Zombies and Cognition hidden in his usual "here's the guff that gets you a sale pitch in modern media" coupled with a "What if Mind [i]thought[/i] it was a zombie, but wasn't, and Humans did not act like the movies, but as if they were plague victims".

92 comments: no-one spotted the philosophy. Or the kinda obvious morality hit-you-with-a-sledge-hammer meta-tale.

As a note: HackerNews seems to not have noticed this at all or read the entire piece.

OH, and it's probably not going to be published because the entire Western world just proved that in a Capitalist system, they're going to back-stab each other over contracts, run prices past gouging and into actual piracy between NATO states and the like.

But. 92 comments, and none of you spotted even the basics.

[1] Mr Stross might be aware of the "Chicken Tendies" meme. He probably is, seems clued up about Frogs and Alt-Right memeology these days.

(Won't get upvotes, but edited because formatting was wrong)

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#100

Post by [deleted] »

lonelappde wrote: post #92
WalterBright wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to guess at what happens when governments collapse. Just look at what happened to Europe in 1945. https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-Wor... It's very ugly, but not what you describe.

That book describes the same civil wars that happened for the hundreds of years before 1945 too.

[deleted]
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