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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

#131

Post by perl4ever »

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…

I was surprised when a lot of people started expressing concerns about lawlessness recently, because it wasn't obvious to me why this crisis should lead to that.

But are they wrong?

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#132

Post by lmm »

reificator wrote: post #50
WalterBright wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zombie epidemics are over because the genre has been done to death (!), and is now simply boring. I was very disappointed that Game of Thrones veered into just another zombie show.

> I was very disappointed that Game of Thrones veered into just another zombie show. It wasn't a veer. The show was always about the seven kingdoms bickering among themselves instead of facing the actual threat that they could have unified against. (Or at least it was until the last few seasons were written by someone other than the original author, said author having not even come close to finishing the book series.…

FTR the author was heavily involved in the show.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#133

Post by icebraining »

invertY wrote: post #98

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…

Why would you assume we didn't notice it?

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#134

Post by xapata »

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…

> In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over.

Not all. Read some anthropology and you'll find interesting examples of large non-hierarchical societies.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#135

Post by dang »

Veen wrote: post #26
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…

[flagged]

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Especially not name-calling ones.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#136

Post by behindsight »

lmm wrote: post #132
reificator wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was very disappointed that Game of Thrones veered into just another zombie show. It wasn't a veer. The show was always about the seven kingdoms bickering among themselves instead of facing the actual threat that they could have unified against. (Or at least it was until the last few seasons were written by someone other than the original author, said author having not even come close to finishing the book series.…

FTR the author was heavily involved in the show.

FTR the show runners and the author had a lot of creative differences throughout the show (and especially in the later seasons) [1]

> "It can be... traumatic. Because sometimes their creative vision and your creative vision don't match, and you get the famous creative differences thing — that leads to a lot of conflict," he told Fast Company.

1: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/10034023/george-rr-mar...

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#137

Post by yellow_postit »

sigzero wrote: post #19
ilamont wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I am Legend" not only portrayed surviving humans as more sympathetic toward each other, but even humanized the infected zombies (to a degree). The zombies had a leader, and he was motivated not by a desire to kill humans, but by what appeared to be desperate love of someone taken from him. I won't give any more details, but if you haven't seen it, it's a great film.

The book and the film diverge. It's still a good film. The alternate ending is way better.

The alternate ending better lines up with the book.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#138

Post by Ericson2314 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #118
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does your hypothesis apply to, for example, Mexico? Seems that "eventually" may mean decades, if not longer.

It seems to apply pretty well to Mexico. Every time the cartels reach an equilibrium of violence where there’s a clear chain of command and territories violence drops. Then the Mexican state decides that having para-states on its territory is unacceptable, smashes them and violence increases. You see the same dynamic though not on the same scale in US organized crime history; the Mafia were brutal thugs just like the…

> the Mafia were brutal thugs just like the brutal thugs who are criminals in US inner cities now.

Hello? It's not 1990. Look at the crime stats. There's plenty wrong with today, but there isn't much organized or disorganized crime.

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#139

Post by philwelch »

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…

While I've never seen The Walking Dead, I'm a little puzzled why someone would balk at a post-apocalyptic "nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out". Without civilization and culture this is what human beings are like. It's the "state of nature" Hobbes wrote about, and much of it fits with observed behavior of hunter-gatherers as well as chimpanzees.

I'm not saying you and me and all the nice friendly people you know are like this, deep down. I mean, some of us probably are and are just good at hiding it, but many of us aren't. But in a Malthusian scenario where survival is at a premium and the material abundance of modern civilization is no longer here, who do you think is going to survive?

Re: Yet another novel I will no longer write

#140

Post by XorNot »

bhaak wrote: post #17

> And then COVID-19 came along and basically rendered the whole thing unneccessary because we are all getting a real world crash-course in how we deal with people suffering from a viral pandemic, and we do /not/ generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us. But that's not the standard zombie scenario. Having 1% of the population being somehow sick…

Person 151 is not a non-person, they're just a member of another group, who's leadership will include the other groups within the 150 monkey-sphere hence the basis of hierarchical human societies.

The dumbest thing about most "preppers" is that they invariably develop absurd ideas about how their fortress will beat back the hordes they imagine to descend (sound familiar?) yet pay basically no attention to their local council, who would be the nearest level of organization and planning continuance which would allow a practical response if the larger systems failed.

This isn't even speculative: the current the COVID-19 response in America has required local councils and city boards to coordinate, particularly in the absence of any clear direction at a Federal and frequently State level.

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