[HN Gopher] Yet another novel I will no longer write
___________________________________________________________________
Yet another novel I will no longer write
Author : ttepasse
Score : 166 points
Date : 2020-04-04 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.antipope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.antipope.org)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _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 constraints
| break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and
| murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit
| belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral,
| and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence.
| 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 is such a salient point. It's something I've noticed when
| someone recommended me The Walking dead years ago. It's
| horrendous how reactionary and borderline fascist that show is in
| its 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.
| At one point I was thinking if the show is actually pushing this
| narrative so hard as to parody it but it certainly doesn't seem
| to be viewed that way.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| The original paper is pretty interesting, and much more nuanced
| than Stross's summary.
|
| "Our claim is most controversial,and tenuous, regarding the
| idea of elite panic.We believe that elites panic just as non-
| elites do. Because the positions they occupy command the power
| to move resources, elite panic is more consequential than
| public panic."
|
| The paper overall references the fact that that historically,
| people in authority assume _the public_ will panic, and most
| data suggests that they don't. And 'elites' in this context
| means those in authority, not "rich and /or privileged people".
|
| They actually discus three possibilities: that 1) elites fear
| panic 2) elites cause panic 3) elites themselves panic
|
| However, the paper certainly doesn't suggest that 'elites' are
| somehow _more_ prone to panic than the rest of society.
|
| "Elites and Panic : more to fear than fear itself" Clarke and
| Chess
|
| Pdf at https://moscow.sci-
| hub.tw/2964/7c0b4f9dec1b897ad09a6565ffbfc...
| biztos wrote:
| "Fear the Walking Dead" deals with these questions very
| explicitly. One of the main characters is what you could call a
| zombie sympathizer.
| coliveira wrote:
| In the US there is the well-known phenomenon that during big
| catastrophes the media will concentrate on looting, as if this
| was a big problem and not the reasonable response to closed
| stores, full of products that people need.
| ilamont wrote:
| "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.
| sigzero wrote:
| The book and the film diverge. It's still a good film. The
| alternate ending is way better.
| the8472 wrote:
| Most of the media zombie scenarios create very hostile
| environments and rapid breakdown of society. They're
| essentially engineered to create this situation. The zombies
| spread the disease actively. Near 100% conversion rate
| (immunities or asymptomatic cases are extremely rare).
| Incubating individuals will turn on those around them. And of
| course there often is a lack of genre awareness, the very
| concept of a zombie apocalypse is unknown.
|
| This converts almost the entire population into hostiles. If
| you don't get all combative you become part of the zombie
| horde. So there's a huge selection bias.
|
| This is hardly comparable to covid where essential functions of
| society are still working and the infected are not going out of
| their way to infect more people. And even now we're already
| seeing countries finger-pointing and adopting an everyone-for-
| themselves attitude around medical equipment.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| _Most_ of the infected aren 't going out of their way and
| infecting people. A small number of the infected are acting
| with, at least, reckless disregard for the possibility of
| infecting others.
| rpiguy wrote:
| 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 panic" is lie. The elite are fine in a
| disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and
| elite simply moved behind walls and continue on. They have ways
| of isolating themselves and maintaining separation from the
| rabble.
|
| The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group,
| because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich,
| their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however
| much you'd like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at
| Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous
| advantage they've built up vanishes.
|
| The truly elite use that fear. They aren't afraid themselves.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The term "elite panic" is a very real thing based in actual
| historical events.
|
| It traces its roots to the French Revolution, Russian
| Revolution, and Maoist Revolution, where the rich/elite were
| slaughtered and imprisoned by mobs of peasants.
|
| By comparison, the middle class didn't exist when these
| revolutions took place. The "middle class" is a very new
| construct that is only a few decades old, dating back to the
| post WWII economic boom.
| Veen wrote:
| Yes. Stross' article is old-fashioned pre-Pomo Marxist
| literary criticism--and is about as insightful as that genre
| usually is.
| rpiguy wrote:
| Exactly.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| 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 people can always come together and
| compromise, share ressources and help each other. The
| foundation for this has to be built in peacetime.
| gwern wrote:
| > 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."
|
| And it's particularly amusing because he just mentioned
| Haiti. What happened in Haiti is precisely why the American
| plantation class was so terrified:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
| coliveira wrote:
| The plantation owners in Haiti knew fully well that the
| revolt was deserved.
| mcguire wrote:
| Did you miss the rest of that comment: " _Even the term
| "elite panic" is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and
| they know it._ "
| Baeocystin wrote:
| >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.
|
| My father was a high-ranking US diplomat stationed in Taiwan
| during the early White Terror years. You have _no idea_ how
| hard the people on the ground were working to _stop_ Taiwan
| from tipping over in to a full dictatorship. It may seem hard
| to believe nowadays, but this was the era of the Marshall
| Plan and the rebuilding of Japan- US foreign policy was
| strongly focused on building allies ' infrastructure, both
| civil and legal.
| rumanator wrote:
| > Even the term "elite panic" is lie. The elite are fine in a
| disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and
| elite simply moved behind walls and continue on.
|
| Sounds to me that the need to move behind walls is a pretty
| strong indicator of the elite panic concept you are
| criticizing.
|
| After all, if they didn't panicked then why did they felt the
| need to coward behind those walls and man them with armed
| minions?
|
| And by the way, "fear the walking dead" is packed with
| seasons where the protagonists find themselves in a gated
| community where armed guards and passive protection measures
| are extensively used to keep the menacing zombies at Bay
| while living a pretty comfy life. Sounds a bit like
| Venezuela, doesn't it?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Because lots of people actually do want to kill them, and
| the walls keep those people out. It's the same phenomenon
| you see in South Africa - everyone who can afford it builds
| high walls and private security, because everyone who can
| afford it is a target.
| rumanator wrote:
| That's pretty much a definition of "elite panick".
| the8472 wrote:
| Are reasonable defensive measures a panic?
| rumanator wrote:
| Why do you even assume that cowarding behind a castle
| with armed guards to keep neighbors at Bay are
| "reasonable defensive measures"?
|
| Sounds to me you're exhibiting "elite panick" while being
| completely oblivious to it.
| stcredzero wrote:
| No. Sociopaths and opportunists exist. Everyone should be
| prepared for that remote possibility, because the
| consequences are potentially large.
|
| Almost no one buckles their seatbelt fully expecting to
| crash in the next 5 minutes. That doesn't invalidate
| taking the precautions.
| mcguire wrote:
| Therefore, the sane person lives inside a secured
| enclosure with military-grade defenses, with the
| potential threats making of their important decisions for
| them.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The article defines elite panic as a _false_ panic; a
| "cognitive disorder", caused by elites who look down on
| the rest of us and think we're all violent hooligans. If
| people really are trying to kill them, I don't think
| "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them for
| taking steps to avoid being murdered.
| rumanator wrote:
| > The article defines elite panic as a false panic; a
| "cognitive disorder", caused by elites who look down on
| the rest of us and think we're all violent hooligans.
|
| Yes. It's a belief based on pseudo-morality, where those
| who are not privileged are portrayed as being rude
| uncultured barbarians who, without resorting to extreme
| violence and oppression, would represent a threat to
| their pure and pristine existence and social order.
|
| It's the same argument that slave owners used to justify
| beating slaves to death.
|
| >If people really are trying to kill them, I don't think
| "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them for
| taking steps to avoid being murdered.
|
| You somehow left out the part where these elites resort
| to extreme violence and oppression to deprive their
| neighbors from fulfilling basic needs and instead of
| helping the community they outright represent a very real
| and very violent threat to them.
|
| And then, as a feat of cognitive dissonance, these elites
| cowarding behind their castle walls try to fabricate a
| moral basis for the violence and oppression they inflict
| on the very society that permitted their life of
| privilege.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| History strongly suggests that, in periods of disorder,
| even elites who did not resort to extreme violence and
| oppression will get murdered. ISIS didn't grant any
| leniency to nice elites who were well-loved by their
| local community.
| [deleted]
| mcguire wrote:
| You are making the same mistake as the elites who are
| panicking: _someone_ is trying to kill them (Or, more
| likely, use the capabilities they have in order to
| improve their situation, at the expense of the elites.
| Killing people is usually less an end goal than
| kidnapping or theft.), therefore _everyone_ who is not a
| similar elite is a "violent hooligan".
| coliveira wrote:
| Those people inside closed gates are just another symptom
| of the disease itself.
| jfim wrote:
| > The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it.
|
| Not all the time, though. For example, Bloomberg reported a
| few days ago that Nigeria's elite, which normally flies out
| of the country for healthcare, can't do it now due to the
| travel restrictions across countries [0].
|
| > The panic strikes the middle class more than any other
| group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike
| the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their
| lifestyle, however much you'd like to mock trips to
| Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that -
| it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they've built up
| vanishes.
|
| Makes sense.
|
| [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/trappe
| d-b...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Not all the time, though._
|
| And to drive the point home even more: many high-status
| politicians in Western countries have contracted COVID-19
| and it's uncertain how many more will, and how many will
| die. Also: uncertainty creates a panic of its own.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Even the term "elite panic" is lie.
|
| FYI, there is at least one book written on the subject based
| on research of real-world disasters
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6444492-a-paradise-
| built...
|
| Cory Doctorow writes about it as well:
|
| https://boingboing.net/2013/04/14/elite-panic-why-rich-
| peopl...
|
| https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-
| features/articles/cor...
|
| It is hardly Mr Stross's own idea, and I would not dismiss it
| so glibly after a minute's thought and a very shallow
| understanding.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _The panic strikes the middle class more than any other
| group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike
| the rich, their power goes away with their jobs._
|
| Also note, that many (though not all) of the "aristos"
| executed in the French Revolution were people lower down on
| the hierarchy. These were the people more easily visible and
| accessible to the mob.
|
| The panic strikes the middle group the most, because the
| danger is the most real for them!
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs
| take over.
|
| Such gangs are the basic form of government. They have
| command structure, and a population base they exploit. Over
| time, as gang grows, it comes into conflict with other gangs
| and one eventually emerges as the dominant. Once in command
| over a big chunk of population, it either splits into many
| smaller bands, repeating the cycle, or it evolves to be more
| structured, and rules appear, which regulate how gang members
| operate and what they are allowed to do. You may know these
| rules as 'laws'.
|
| This happens because every gang eventually understands that
| in the long term, taxing a prosperous population is far more
| profitable and stable than unlimited plundering.
| setgree wrote:
| Walking Dead starts out Rick-against-everyone but veers towards
| a story about scrappy, regular folk coming together to more or
| less form a democracy, against a backdrop of total chaos. I
| read this as retelling a certain story of America, with the
| zombies standing in for brutal nature (and Native Americans!)
| and the protagonists the Europeans, creating a few different
| outposts of "civilization". I wrote about this reading here:
| https://blogtarkin.wordpress.com/tag/walking-dead/
| yeahthi999 wrote:
| All media should be viewed as satire
|
| It's so emotionally compressed into one vibe and hyper stylized
| visually how anyone can sit down with the intent of making real
| sense of it is bizarre.
|
| It's highly customized to satisfy a target audience. Not
| generalized like so much other media.
|
| Go interact with real people, or create your own.
|
| I've been curating a space opera for a decade. 3,000+ typed
| pages.
|
| I have no desire to give it up to the public and find it almost
| meditative. Haven't seen any of the new SW movies, or sci fi in
| the last decade. I borrow ideas as Lucas, etc did. It all just
| flows.
|
| I don't really owe society a financial return on my endeavors
| either.
|
| Grew up this way though. I honestly don't care if anyone ever
| finds value in my efforts.
|
| Putting in work to satisfy others isn't why I get up in the
| morning.
|
| Let go of market economics and free yourself to be a multi
| disciplinarian.
| hpliferaft wrote:
| Yesterday I read an article that claims an opposite of elite
| panic -- working class denial? -- of the virus is happening in
| my city [0].
|
| The thesis is that a community (euphemistically termed a
| "subculture") of older African Americans in Philadelphia refuse
| to participate in the quarantine due to their skepticism of the
| federal government's public health directives due to previous
| medical conspiracies, namely the Tuskegee Experiments.
|
| 0: https://6abc.com/health/expert-says-subculture-still-
| thinks-...
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| > _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. This seems to be their worldview:
| without the threat of cop (with superior firepower than any
| random person), that society will devolve into this
| immediately, every fender bender or bit of road rage turning
| into life or death conflict.
|
| It's plainly wrong on its face, even without invoking the
| reality that there are many peaceful and prosperous places in
| the US wherein the private arms significantly outnumber those
| of the state.
|
| I have tried for a long time to understand this view, and
| Charlie just dropped in the missing puzzle piece. This almost
| makes up for how wrong he's been about bitcoin.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The easy access to arms doesn't destabilise, if anything it
| stabilises. It does, however, result in a constant tick-over
| of domestic murders, suicides, accidents, people shot dead by
| toddlers, and (in the US) seemingly purposeless mass murder-
| suicides.
|
| Coronavirus has only just overtaken the US's normal firearms
| death toll.
| [deleted]
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > ... 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 amount to "civilization-breakdown", but whether
| it's a level that's worth worrying about is something
| different people will feel differently about. I suspect it is
| a higher number of cases (per capita) than many other
| countries with stricter gun laws.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Any idea what the driver (pun not intended) is on that
| increase? Were more guns sold? Did people abruptly start
| driving more?
| sneak wrote:
| How many of those were would-be fistfights that were de-
| escalated to nonviolence by brandishing (literally: holding
| a weapon) by a victim? A lot of casually violent people
| become a lot more polite when they realize they don't get
| to punch or beat whomever they like. That's a good outcome,
| to me, but that figure lumps it in with violence where
| people get shot, mixing good gun-related outcomes with bad
| ones, as if brandishing is an end in itself to be
| prevented.
|
| You can't really stop road ragers from getting out of their
| car with the intent to hit someone. You can indeed convince
| them that attacking armed strangers is a bad idea--without
| anyone being hurt.
|
| Providing context means, well, providing context, not just
| tossing out a composite figure without background or
| breakdown. A good actual context for that would be the not-
| gun-related road rage assault figures before and after, and
| what percentage of that increase is brandished (no one
| injured) vs shot/shot at (violence that should be
| prevented/reduced).
| DuskStar wrote:
| Yeah, gun brandishing incidents is a really weird thing
| to get worked up about. Gun homicides, sure - but those
| have been going down in the US since the 90s. (Despite
| the assault weapons ban expiring. Funny, that)
| avip wrote:
| Should have adopted the strategy of assuming the book exists and
| write a review. Used so effectively by Borjes it won him a Nobel.
| danidiaz wrote:
| Also used by Stanislaw Lem in "A Perfect Vacuum"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum The last review
| in that book anticipates much of the premise of Cixin Liu's
| "Remembrance of Earth's Past".
| d_burfoot wrote:
| > Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged
| people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints
| break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and
| murder them... It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed
| pre-Enlightenment aristocrats... It's also fundamentally wrong.
|
| This statement is so profoundly ignorant and offensive that it's
| hard to reply to it. It's almost literally equivalent to
| Holocaust denial - the Holocaust was very much about the poor
| German masses rising up to murder the wealthy Jewish elites.
| History is replete with other examples of poor people
| overthrowing and then murdering the rich: the French revolution,
| the Russian revolution, the Cuban revolution, etc etc. In
| rhetoric, the revolutionary slogan is "we're going to take money
| from the rich", but what happens in reality is more like "we're
| going to take the money from the rich and then murder them".
| stcredzero wrote:
| _In rhetoric, the revolutionary slogan is "we're going to take
| money from the rich", but what happens in reality is more like
| "we're going to take the money from the rich and then murder
| them"._
|
| Also: The Kulaks in the Ukraine. Various persons during various
| Maoist upheavals in China.
|
| Everyone has the same illusions to different degrees: "Our side
| doesn't do these bad things." Then, when the facts come out,
| "It was justified!"
| bsanr wrote:
| The issue is that this behavior doesn't come out of some
| inborn bloodthirst, but rather a scenario akin to,
|
| "We're taking you're stuff."
|
| "I'll kill you if you try."
|
| "Well then we must defend ourselves."
|
| Inevitably, stuff is appropriated and the mob, in its losses,
| learns to pull the trigger first.
|
| "Society" is this but both sides knowing when to stop before
| the shooting begins.
| pjc50 wrote:
| You're accusing a Jewish writer of Holocaust denial, which
| should be a bannable offence.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Pet peeve: An expatriate isn't like an ex-skier, it comes from
| "to expatriate", ie to drive out of one's country, like
| "excommunicate" or "excise". Something that has been excised
| wasn't formerly cised.
| fhars wrote:
| I think you missed a joke at the expense of the toothsome
| nightmare of apres ski culture.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Maybe, but I don't think I did, mainly because "expatriate"
| isn't spelled with a hyphen.
| IndrekR wrote:
| I was just browsing/reading his old Linux articles. May be
| interest for others as well:
| http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/linux/index.html
| auntienomen wrote:
| Still hoping for a 3rd novel in the Freyaverse. It doesn't have
| to be named Uranus's Spawn.
| setgree wrote:
| 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 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_.
|
| Contrast this to Christian Thorne [0], who writes:
|
| > _Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds. People-in-
| groups are the genre's single motivating concern. Other classic
| movie monsters are like malign superheroes, possessed of special
| powers, great reserves of speed and strength. What's peculiar
| about zombies, when put alongside vampires or werewolves or
| aliens, is that they are actually weaker than ordinary human
| beings. They are really easy to kill for a start, because their
| bodies are already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off.
| They go down by the dozen. You're in no danger of being
| outwitted. They can kill only because they have the numbers, and
| so that's the menace that zombie movies are always trying to
| clarify: The threat of multitudes_.
|
| I've watched/read a fair bit of zombie stuff, and I think Thorne
| is more on the mark about modern zombie movies. -- lots of scenes
| of zombies breaking down barricades or tearing people out of
| their cars (America's favorite refuge against crowds!). But
| movies that try harder to have a point, like the original Day of
| the Dead, lay it on pretty thick that _we_ are the zombies (who,
| even after death, return to the mall to amble around). Which is,
| I think, more in-keeping with a 'zombies are slaves doomed to
| eternal toil' reading.
|
| Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' flips the slave/master dynamic by
| having a mediocre black protagonist advance in post-zombie
| society way more than he was ever going to pre-outbreak, because
| the C student who survives in a low-effort way is more resilient
| than traditional high-achievers.
|
| 0: https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running-
| of-t...
| xrd wrote:
| That is a fantastic write-up of those movies. Thank you for
| offering this in this thread.
| bsanr wrote:
| The "faceless horde" angle is still in line with the "other
| uprising" allegory. Day of the Dead's predecessor, and the
| origin of the modern zombie in pop culture, had fairly overt
| racial undertones, and its sequel, in its concern with barrier-
| breaching ghouls, made plain the nationalistic undercurrents by
| setting the action in a military bunker.
|
| There's really no getting around the influence of real-world
| race and class attitudes in shaping zombie fiction.
| bhaak wrote:
| > 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 and dying or a strain on the
| medical resources doesn't make society collapse.
|
| The zombie scenario is that only 1% of the population is
| unaffected and society breaks down and disappears and modern
| humans, humans living after the Enlightement, have to survive in
| a hostile environment.
|
| I agree with Charles Stross that people don't just bash their
| heads in a crisis but that they start to look after their own
| community. But this probably stops after we reach the magical
| number of 150 people.
|
| After that, other people are not friends anymore and how we deal
| with them when resources are scarce, well, I'm not as optimistic
| as he is. Just look at the current mediterranean situation and
| that's when resources aren't actually scarce.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I just don't get the multiple people saying "Zombie epidemics as
| a topic are over because of COVID-19". They might be over just
| because there's been a glut of them, but in no way, shape, or
| form does the current pandemic resemble a zombie pandemic.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| reificator wrote:
| > _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.)_
|
| Just look at the first episode. It doesn't start in
| Winterfell or King's Landing. It starts north of the wall.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| It started out as a zombie show, in the very first scene you
| had a Nightswatch patrol being killed by Zombies. The reason
| the Wildlings massed and marched on the wall was because they
| were being savaged by zombies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know. But it wasn't necessary to drop everything else but
| that storyline.
| dhosek wrote:
| He's not saying that zombie epidemics as a topic are over, just
| that his take on it has been rendered obsolete by current
| events. It's sort of like a short short (either written by or
| edited by Isaac Asimov, I don't remember--I read it forty years
| ago) that proposed that Everest would never be summited because
| it had been colonized by Martians. Between acceptance and
| publication, Everest was summited.
| teraflop wrote:
| Sounds like the story was "Everest", which was indeed written
| by Asimov.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_(short_story)
| dhosek wrote:
| That's the one. Thanks.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited.
|
| That's obviously what they want you to think!
| dhosek wrote:
| Another similar instance just popped into my brain--in
| college a friend wrote a piece for the college paper in
| which, writing about political changes in Eastern Europe, he
| wrote, "but don't expect the Berlin Wall to come down any
| time soon."
|
| As you might have guessed, the Berlin Wall came down between
| the writing and the publication.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I recall a book in the bookstore in 1989 about how IBM was
| inevitably going to grow and take over the world. Wish I'd
| bought it. :-)
| macintux wrote:
| I stumbled upon a paper I wrote in high school in 1987
| about European unification. I came to the same conclusion;
| thankfully no one but my teacher ever read it, and I doubt
| she remembered it 2 years later.
| teucris wrote:
| He states in the article that the themes he wanted to explore
| in this novel aren't worth exploring now that COVID-19 is
| making us deal with them right now. I wouldn't say this is a
| "all zombie literature is over" post as much as a "my zombie
| literature project is over" post.
| rapind wrote:
| What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to
| figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy.
|
| I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a
| potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they
| never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for
| a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be
| taught to perform complex tasks through reward / punishment?
|
| Seems like the next logical distopian step to take, and brings up
| all sorts of complicated mechanics, economics, and morality
| questions.
| misnome wrote:
| "Day of the Dead" (1985) has a scientist trying to do this...
| stcredzero wrote:
| _What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems
| to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total
| anarchy._
|
| Not true for _Shaun of the Dead!_
| Talanes wrote:
| Zombies also seem to just keep moving without any energy input.
| Figure out how to keep them moving where you want them and you
| have a generator that runs as long as the zombie is solid
| enough to move it. If you're dealing with Walking Dead rules
| where everyone turns after death, and it's a renewing resource.
| hyperpallium wrote:
| Includes first draft of first chapter.
| Igelau wrote:
| > 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
| 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
|
| I think it's a pretty fair to say the modern zombie story starts
| with Night of the Living Dead, and this viewpoint couldn't
| possibly be any further from how Romero handles themes of race,
| class, and authority.
|
| I mean, maybe it's because I don't watch Walking Dead, but I've
| never seen a zombie film where I thought I was supposed to
| empathize with the protagonists. Except maybe Shaun of the Dead!
| pacman128 wrote:
| One of my favorite authors. Listening to his novel, Glasshouse,
| right now. If you're looking for something to read right now,
| check him out.
| plerpin wrote:
| I read Neptune's Brood and was hooked. It's a fun surreal sci-
| fi adventure/romp with a heck of a lot of really interesting,
| geeky tech interludes. Who knew a novel about futuristic
| accountancy and forex could be so intriguing?
| shoo wrote:
| > The theory of interstellar trade is a well-understood
| topic, with an extensive literature consisting of one paper
| (pdf) I wrote in 1978. Interstellar finance, however, is less
| well covered.
|
| > That's all about to change, however. I'm reading an advance
| copy of Charlie Stross's Neptune's Brood. (Hey, I have
| connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the
| subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the
| only thing written on the subject to date.
|
| > It's also a fantastic novel.
|
| https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-
| of-i...
|
| > This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an
| interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the
| following question: how should interest charges on goods in
| transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the
| speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in
| transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the
| goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived
| from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are
| derived.
|
| https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
| egypturnash wrote:
| It even has zombies!
| shoo wrote:
| Glasshouse is great. I've enjoyed every Stross novel I've read,
| and Glasshouse was the first one, after stumbling across a
| newspaper review when it was released.
|
| Both the Laundry Files & Merchant Princes / Empire games series
| are also great fun.
|
| You can get a feel for Stross' Laundry Files series from:
|
| "A Colder War"
| http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm (not
| Laundry Files, but in the ballpark)
|
| "Equoid" https://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/
|
| For the longest time I didn't try reading the Merchant Princes
| series because it _appeared_ to be too much of a fantasy series
| for my tastes -- boy was I mistaken. It's less "Narnia" and
| more "what do you reckon would actually happen if a paranoid US
| administration discovered Narnia" with healthy doses of feuding
| and economics.
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