#1 is basically the conclusion reached in the original Night of the Living Dead, where the ending strongly suggests that the zombie hordes will be felled by gangs of Pennsylvania rednecks with hunting rifles.  The downside is that if you’re a survivor who happens to be a black guy, you may be equally screwed.

Zombies are often seen as representing fear of the great unwashed tearing down society.  Usually the zombie fantasy ultimately a conservative fantasy, with the zombies representing poor people or minorities or immigrants or whoever the dominant culture fears will get into their gated communities and trash everything.  (It’s no coincidence that the survivors usually get to set up an alternative right-wing anarchic society while acting out libertarian tough-guy fantasies.)  The George Romero movies are kind of interesting in that they usually turn it into a left-wing fantasy, where the zombies represent liberal fears like mindless consumerism (Dawn of the Dead) or the military-industrial complex (Day of the Dead).

I think my friend is still deciding what the more recent fad for fast-moving zombies symbolizes.  They seem to have more of a “plague” fear attached to them.

One of the real creepy moments (for me at least) when I read “The Road” was how when the man flashes back to the night of an ambiguous apocalyptic event, he suddenly and calmly just starts filling all the tubs with water and reflecting how “yep, this is pretty much going to be the last clean water I’ll ever seen in my entire life.”

Anyway, the article is great but it once again leaves out the big nitpick I always have about zombie movies, and my choice for the number one reason the zombie apocalypse would fail: because the distinct characteristic of zombies is they are mindlessly, obsessively ravenous… and in any recorded instance of that occurring with any species in nature, they’ll instinctively try to kill anything that moved.  In other words, even if it means biting into another zombie and immediately realizing it’s unpalatable, dead flesh, they’re still going to try attacking each other before chasing a human two miles down a road if they are uncontrollably starving.  Ravenous wolves eat their own.  Rats eat their own.  Ants eat their own.  Gerbils eat their own.  The Donner Party freaking ate their own. 

If a zombie outbreak starts turning people into creatures with an insatiable desire to each flesh, then we won’t have to worry about fighting zombies as much as we can sit in a lawn chair and watch them fight themselves.

Max Brooks tackled a lot of this in The Zombie Survival Guide and the followup, World War Z. His argument is basically that people as a group are stupid and prone to panic, governments are anxious to hold on to power no matter what, and the very idea of zombies would be so ridiculous many people simply wouldn’t believe it.

Actually, the lack of supplies always bugged me to. I guess writers usually try to deplete the amount of supplies available to survivors in zombie apocalypses or other apockalypses because they want to make things more difficult for the protagonist-survivors. It really seemed like an excersise in poor writing. There would be a supply glut in most apocalypse scenarios and people would be no trouble finding all sorts of canned foods and packaged foods to help them stay alive and feed. Now its true that meat, fruits, and vegetables would rot. Frozen food would be a goner to, once the eletric grid fails. However, canned and packaged food would be available and a ready source of food if not nutrition.

We don’t think about stuff like, “If there weren’t people at the power plant, I couldn’t actually flush my toilet or pump gas.”

Ahem, speak for yourself.  Living on the 4rth floor and being a huge SF geekazoid, I literally think about this several times a week.  Also, how much food I could grow on the roof.

For Olde School apocalypse (submode: calm), try “Earth Abides”.

As someone once put in the local music rag: “Every 7-11 is a wartime food depot, ‘cuz that stuff NEVER spoils.”

Pffft. I’ve already come to the conclusion that when the zombie apocalypse comes, I’ll get eaten within the first three days! And if I do manage to avoid being dinner, dysentery will probably kill me.

While this is all very silly, I do think there is an interesting political observation to pull out of all this.  Zombie stories are a product of a society where most people literally do not think about, much less comprehend, how complex and interconnected everything is.  Or huge.  We have dark fantasies about what it would be like if that infrastructure collapsed, but it is so big and so complicated that even people writing stories where they have to imagine what that would be like struggle to really capture all the details.  We don’t think about stuff like, “If there weren’t people at the power plant, I couldn’t actually flush my toilet or pump gas.” But nor do we consider how much food a grocery store really sells in a day compared to what any individual family’s needs are.  Trying to wrap your mind around all these different cogs and details about even just the way life runs in a mid-sized city is more than most people can really manage.

This was the major theme of James Burke’s Connections.  Shorter episode one of that series:  If society collapses, you’d better figure out how to appropriate some fertile land and defend it.  Oh, and don’t forget your plow.  You’ll need it to start civilization again.

I liked that in Shaun of the Dead, the zombie apocalypse lasted, like, a day before #1 kicked in.

Sure you wouldn’t have much competition for food once the apocalypse was in full swing, but during the initial outbreak I can expect a bunch of people would make a run for the stores, no? I mean, we had an heat wave this year and almost immediatly there were no more ACs available (my friend lives about an hour from Montreal and an hour from Ottawa, and he couldn’t get anything in either his small town, in Montreal or in Ottawa). And this was a minor event in comparison to the zombie outbreak.

Amanda, this post has the coolest subject-heading I’ve seen in many a year.

I mean “title”:  the subject heading, “books; movies,” is not what was exciting me.

I, on the other hand, am uncontrollably aroused by your subject tagging, Amanda, and wish to make sweet love to this post and all other posts tagged ‘books’ and ‘movies’.

In Walking Dead they have to siphon gas out of cars left in parking lots, if I recall correctly. Good books!

True, BlackBloc, but then you start raiding the houses of dead people. 

They do have to siphon gas, but that’s because they’re far from a gas pump.  When they do get to one, they pump gas and I see red.

For Olde School apocalypse (submode: calm), try “Earth Abides”.

Seconded.  Not as much fun as Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead, but more realistic.

Yeah, “fun” was not in the design parameters there.  Still sticks w/me after all these years.

I just finished The Passage (which is fantastic, by the way), and it also got me to thinking about the issues of guns, food, and infrastructure. It’s hard to discuss the book without massive spoilers, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed the way that particular apocalypse plays out and that at least most of these issues are explained fairly well.

Minor spoilers below

The two outstanding quibbles I have with The Passage are: if we are starting with twelve virals in a remote location and they start out killing 9 out of every 10 people and turning the every 10th person then 1) would this outbreak really move fast enough for the military not to be able to contain it and 2) if it does move fast enough to cause everything that happens in the book this quickly, then how is it possible for the virals to survive for 100 years? wouldn’t they run out of people and animals to eat? There are hints in the book that these things will be addressed in the future installments, so I’m hopeful. But, really, that’s my beef with pretty much all speculative fiction that I’ve seen or read that involves vampires and/or zombies. Sure, the survivors can find all the twinkies and canned goods they want, at least for a few years. But who will the vampires and zombies eat?

This reminded me of a few older bits of media.

First was the Star Trek episode “Miri.”  One thing ir did get right:  The children survived for a few hundred years by foraging the grocery stores and the like (Cheetos really do last forever.)

The other was the TV movie “Threads.”  It was the BBC version of nuclear was made back in 1984, and (despite some hokey family storyline at the beginning) it did convey how the hole interconnected system would collapse in a post-apocalypse.  The contrast with “The Day After” was pretty stark. (Running water and electricity on the farm after a full nuclear exchange?)

”This was the major theme of James Burke’s Connections.  Shorter episode one of that series:  If society collapses, you’d better figure out how to appropriate some fertile land and defend it.  Oh, and don’t forget your plow”

Loved that show, (hmmm wonder if I could get it on dvd) but I think the major point was – If society collapses, you’re screwed

Paraphrasing (it were a long time ago and my memory is flawed)

“when you got to fertile land would you even know?  Even the few people who still farm for a living use high tech machinery, would you know how to plough a field by ox plough?  Do you even know what viable wheat seeds look like?”

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder how the Tea Party mindset, that governments shouldn’t cost very much money to run and rugged individuals are the sine qua non of the human condition. At a basic level, there seems to be an assumption that the streets clean themselves, the garbage is taken away by gnomes, and the presence of a police department is negligible when there’s not an officer physically within sight.

But where it gets really bizarre is where it relates to capitalism. The computer I’m typing this on is made of plastic produced in laboratories by highly trained technicians using raw materials gathered from god knows where. The chips themselves are partially metal, which has to be cut from the goddamn ground, very likely from old imperial holdings in Africa, fashioned into a shape determined by the collaborative efforts of the smartest people on earth for generations. The electricity required to run it comes primarily from coal-fired plants some distance away. I’m being vague, because at the end of the day, I know almost nothing about how the things I use every day are really made, at a physical level. It is shocking enough to realize that nearly every object in my sight was made via the collaboration of literally hundreds of human beings. Every designer, every engineer, every lab tech, every factory worker, every factory builder, cops to protect the safety of those involved and the stability of contracts, shippers to move materials, and even more people to make the machines we move them with.

I think of this, and I wonder how any reasonable person can conclude that the social contract, big or small, is an anti-capitalist concept. As the logical and logistical errors in zombie entertainment suggest, not only do we not know whose work and dedication is helping us out in every minute of every day of our privileged first-world lives, we literally cannot imagine what we’d do without them.

It makes me wonder if zombie fiction might provide an interesting place to talk about how economies actually work, if we didn’t insist on all-or-nothing endings within 2 hours of screen time / 400 pages / 20 hours of gameplay.

I have a pretty sophisticate plan for zombie attacks. I currently live on a step hillside overlooking a valley, which is a naturally defensible position. we’d only need to fence in about 3/4 of the property because one side is a sheer dirt cliff. It’s a pain in the ass going up or down the driveway on foot, let alone the ground, which is thick with bramble and other pokey things. We also get our water from a well.

Assuming we could get a fence up around the property in time (I honestly don’t know why there isn’t one now, since deer are such a problem here) all we’d need are a few rifles and goats. We already have a robust vegetable and herb garden, and with goats (oh, and more than the one chicken we have now) we’d have milk, cheese, and eggs, too, as well as the occasional meat, should we need it.

In my more ambitious fantasies, we’d also have solar panels and the fence would be a brick wall lined with walkways—from which armed guards could pick off would be invaders—and a couple of manufactured homes dragged into the orchard (we have about twenty fruit bearing trees on the property, and a handful of walnut trees).

I call it a “compound” and my boyfriend’s mother was so tickled by the idea of a self sustaining community that centered around her home that she inserts it into completely zombie-free conversations.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder how the Tea Party mindset, that governments shouldn’t cost very much money to run and rugged individuals are the sine qua non of the human condition, works. Overlong sentences, my cruelest foe, you thwart me againe!

Oooh Eric_Rom! I loved Earth Abides. And The Road. Both very good, but Earth Abides (if you can forgive the random racism) is a really great meditation on the way societies develop in addition to being excellent post-apocalyptic fiction.

I would recommend David Brin’s “Postman” for apocalyptic fiction that subverts all the tropes

PS
I didn’t think that the movie version sucked as much as most other people do, and lots of key themes from the book got at least a minor mention in it, but if you hated the movie don’t let that put you off from the book – it’s a very different plot

PPS
If you can get your hands on the original 3 short stories that got edited together to make the novel, theyre even better

I liked the crap out of “Earth Abides”. Recommended.

Apocalyptic fiction is my favorite sub-genre of sci-fi, but I could not make it through this book.

I guess writers usually try to deplete the amount of supplies available to survivors in zombie apocalypses or other apockalypses because they want to make things more difficult for the protagonist-survivors. It really seemed like an excersise in poor writing.

That’s one of the things I liked about The Stand (yeah, my apocalypse reading is pretty dated, you wanna make something of it). Food is addressed, but casually; there’s an acknowledgement of how pretty much anything you could want was lying around all over the country in more quantities than the diminished population would use up in an entire generation or so. IIRC Stu even asks Fran why she’s bothering to wash clothes, when they could throw the dirty ones out and get new at any store in town. I agree that this freed King up to write about much more interesting difficulties for the characters.

My problem with #2 is how it interacts with #5, ie, biting being a terrible way to spread a disease.

If they start falling into rivers/lakes/water supplies…won’t that infect us?  Obviously keeping a good stockpile of Brita filters is important for the zombie apocalypse, but if they pile up in the water, or if after dessication their skin/dried jerky guts blow around and are still infectious?

Zombies can be scary, b/c you won’t know where the infection comes from.  Besides the biting.

The key element in any good zombie apocalypse plan is to get a good, sturdy, helmet and gorget strapped on tight before you let yourself get bitten.  Then you can go and feast on all those delicious human brains without the fear of some would be survivor removing your head or destroying your brain with a cricket bat.  A good place to go would be CostCo.  Lots and lots of the survival plans I have heard revolve around holing up at a CostCo, so you have got to figure a fair number of desperate people are going to be stuck out side when they get there and find it sealed from the inside by survivors that were a little quicker.  These people are screaming buffet to you and your fellow walking dead.  Hospitals would also be a good place to look for that tender gray matter, the sick and dying are much slower, and weather they come from arthritic grannies, or abandoned preemies, the brains are just as sweet.

Remember, stick together, rush survivors in groups from multiple angles, and whenever possible, eat your loved ones and family members, they will most likely hesitate to shoot you, and when trying to eat a human armed with a 12 gauge, even a moments hesitation can mean the difference between a tasty meal and a face full of buckshot.

Good luck out there everyone.

As a fan of apocalyptic/shipwrecked stories over the years, this is something I’ve thought about quite a bit.  (Swiss Family Robinson, a good dozen or so generic SF stories of survival, countless SF movies about survival, Lost in Space, The Stand, countless zombie movies, MacGyver, Tremors, StarGate, Resident Evil, etc.)

“when you got to fertile land would you even know?  Even the few people who still farm for a living use high tech machinery, would you know how to plough a field by ox plough?  Do you even know what viable wheat seeds look like?”

Exactly.  Your short-term survival is probably okay, as long as the zombies don’t get you.  There’ll be plenty of food available, at least for a while.  If you locate next to a reservoir or lake, you could get enough water (assuming the water hasn’t been ruined by sewage or other effects of civilization’s collapse).

But long term, things are bad.  Sure, there might be a few rugged Omega Man-types who could pull off living in the city — setting up generators and lights, making some building into a fortress, etc.  But most of the living will need to get out of the cities if they want to have any long-term access to water and food (which they will have to grow, eventually).

Modern cities are too dependent on electricity and other external energy sources to function (see either of the two famous New York blackouts for a glimpse at what happens when the electricity is out in a large city).

Assuming you have access to water, then you have to be able to produce your own food.  Not many of us have the knowledge and/or experience to pull that one off.  And without electricity, how do you preserve food for when there are no ripe crops?  No refrigerators, no freezers.  Know how to can food?  Where do you get the jars/lids?  Know how to smoke, salt, dry food to preserve it?  What do you do to get the vitamins you need?  Where do you get the protein?

What do you do in a world without electricity (right away), without gasoline (eventually), without natural gas or propane?  Where do you get the healthy horses/cows and how do you keep them alive (needing their own water and food just like humans)?  Imagine a camping trip (with no motor homes, no modern amenities) that never ends…

There was an interesting look at a similar situation over here.  The question is: what is the minimum necessary population to maintain the technology and infrastructure that provides the (relatively) advanced, modern lifestyle we know in the Western World?  How far down the ladder of technology would we have to fall if there were relatively few survivors?

Very interesting to think about in a vacuum, when you know you don’t have to actually face those dire circumstances.  The reality would probably be pretty bad…

But what if the apocalypse doesn’t kill off 90% of everybody?

When we were snowed in several years ago, the small grocery we could trudge to was picked clean within two hours.

Aeon Flux, UltraViolet, I am Legend, The Last Man on Earth, Mysterious Island, 2001 A Space Odyssey, the infamous Reichwing wankfest Red Dawn...

If the apocalypse doesn’t kill a significant part of the population it’s not an apocalypse.

10% is bad, but current US population is 310 million and a 10% reduction would leave us around 280 million.

It would be traumatic, emotionally most of all,  but we’d still be functional.

Whether or not supplies are an issue depends on the nature of the zombies. If the zombies are just infected people and not actually the undead, the plague would spread much less quickly because many victims would simply die instead of becoming part of an exponentially expanding army of undead. And that would mean that there would be more people around to eat up all the Twinkies.

If you have a scenario like Earth Abides there would be a lot of supplies just laying around all over. But I think that even canned food and Cheetos would deteriorate faster than people think. The expiration dates listed on medication and food may not be entirely accurate, but those things do expire. And you’d want to plant sooner rather than later, even if you could live off of Cheetos for 100 years, because seed viability decreases over time.

If you want supplies to be a big part of the plot in your post-apocalyptic scenario, you have to pick an apocalypse where infrastructure collapses but a number of people still survive. So, something like Lucifer’s Hammer, Life As We Knew It, or especially Dies the Fire.

The big problem with a 10% apocalypse is that our conservative friends would use it as an excuse for pogroms, which would be much worse than the original problem.  And, because conservatives are stupid and don’t care how things work, the long-term damage to our capitalist system would be enormous.

One of the big things I’ve come to understand about poor countries is that they are generally run by conservatives.  Once a country manages to actually listen to liberal leadership, it generally gets rich and happy very very fast.

A far more credible alternative to teh movie zombie would be the Vang (Christopher Rowley).  An intelligent parasite rebuilding human bodies into sleek war machines and well able to exploit human technology.

It would probably be bastardized into a “Species” ripoff if done by Hollywood, but it was very easy to suspend disbelief when reading the stories.

I enjoyed that rundown too when i saw it, the only problem is that it’s based on the traditional animated corpse model of zombification and not the postmodern disease based model. If the zombie apocalypse comes about through an infection which causes people to insatiably lust after human flesh but still remain fully functional physically, most of that wouldn’t apply.

Of course the important thing to remember is that at least you’ve got a fighting chance in the US. Being in the UK, and London in particular, the close proximity of the cities would allow the virus to spread like wildfire and the lack of wide open spaces mean finding a place to take a stand fro the approaching zombie masses impossible. All that’s before you get on to the gun control laws, and the fact the army’s best resources are all posted overseas right now. I don’t know why there isn’t more of an outcry about this government’s lack of preparation for this likely eventuality.

Well, if the zombies rise up during an ammunition shortage, there could be trouble.

http://www.wnep.com/wnep-ammunition-shortage,0,7644692.story

^for just one example.

Also don’t underestimate how difficult it is to hit a target with a firearm even if that target is slow-moving.  YouTube has plenty of funny videos about people who practically knock themselves out firing a pistol or rifle for the first time. 

Would we run out of food?  Unless you live next to a farm, food is probably brought to your neighborhood by a truck, which is powered by gasoline. . .

I guess what I’m saying is LOOK OUT FOR ZOMBIES!

“When we were snowed in several years ago, the small grocery we could trudge to was picked clean within two hours. “

Exactly.  I used to work at a grocery store.  Without *constant* shipments from trucks, it would empty out fast.  And another thing:  canned goods last a long time, but how much of your local store contains canned goods, compared to produce, milk coolers, ice cream freezers, condiments, etc.

Oh, and bullets go bad eventually.

Here’s another great list from Cracked:

http://www.cracked.com/article_15643_5-scientific-reasons-zombie-apocalypse-could-actually-happen.html

And if you liked “Connections” get the companion book.  It’s very interesting.  Weaving led to the computer )

Pffft, “The Stand”.  ALMOST good science fiction/apocalypse, and then The Devil shows up.  Not to even mention “The Magic Negro”.  Aggravating.

Now, for my money, “The Day of the Triffids” really delivered.  Too bad it seems to be screenplay-proof.

Zombies: Rifles?  I thought it HAD to be shotguns.  Don’t rifles just poke holes in sweet sweet zombie-flesh?

++
But, all in all, I’m with Bruce Sterling:  apocalypses/falls of civilization are a cop-out for those who can’t build/imagine complex futures.

James @21,

The contrast with “The Day After” was pretty stark. (Running water and electricity on the farm after a full nuclear exchange?)

Actually, that’s pretty accurate.  As someone who lives in “Day After” country, I can tell you that a lot of farms have their own wells and generators, so they could keep running water and electricity for a little while, even after the cities went dark.  Check out Stephen King’s recent Under The Dome for more.

Of course, “The Day After” was based on the most optimistic scenario of a “limited” nuclear exchange, not the usual full out nuclear war.  The US doesn’t turn into a dead, flaming wasteland; it just turns into a dying, radioactive wasteland.  Even if most of the towns are still standing and most of the people survive the first attack, nothing can grow and the survivors are slowly dying of radiation sickness.  A LNE might not be as initially lethal as a flat out nuclear war, just as an infected cut might not make you bleed as much as a stab wound, but they will both kill you; the former would just be longer and more agonizing. That was the “Day After’s” point.

Interestingly, Garth Ennis’s zombie comic Crossed deals with a lot of these objections. It’s a pretty drastic reinvention of zombies, but if anything it only intensifies the survival horror tropes.

1) Ennis’s “zombies” aren’t dead - they’re alive, just infected with a personality-altering disease that turns them into murderous, raping psychopaths (and possibly increases their physical strength and stamina, though that is left somewhat ambiguous).

2) They aren’t stupid, either - though most of them lack the ability to defer short-term satisfaction for long-term gain. But eventually, some of the infected (or “Crossed”) learn to develop patience and cunning, which makes them much more dangerous and unpredictable than your average Crossed.

3) Because they aren’t stupid, the Crossed can drive cars, shoot guns, use explosives, plant traps, etc.

4) The infection is spread through any bodily fluid—including bullets treated with such.

5) Power and services go out immediately. The government’s first priority, as soon as they learn of the outbreak, is to secure nuclear reactors and weapons. They aren’t 100% successful.

6) Cars quickly become useless due to gridlocked roads, as panicked survivors try to escape, only to be trapped in traffic and attacked/infected by the Crossed.

7) Since the Crossed aren’t dead, they still need to eat. They’d prefer to eat human flesh, but since that’s not always in ready supply they are competing with the non-infected survivors for food and other resources.

8) By far the most valuable commodities are generators (fuel is obviously hard to come by), which are mainly used to charge cell phones that have walkie-talkie functionality. All other cell phones are useless, or course.

Man, thanks Entomologista @37.  The whole stores will have canned food forever isn’t really operable.  Not only is there too much faith in the enternal qualities of a Twinkie, but one has to consider just how perverse people are, especially in high stress situation.  In a zombie apocalypse, “It was a good idea at the time” will be a common refrain, and many of those ideas involve ways of spoiling massive amounts of food.

Eric_RoM, falls of civilization is something that’s too easy for me to imagine, but then I read books about that sort of thing, like the classic Tainter.  Apocalypses are cop outs though, unless you’re talking extreme volcanoes.

Lastly, your stereotypical rednecks are among the most likely to be victimized by a zombie apocalypse.  Rural areas don’t have the kind of resources and professional organizers that cities do, and they’re fairly likely to impulsivly do massively stupid acts, i.e., Bernard Parish president activities around the time of Katrina.  Reading books like Nugent‘s Habits of Empire, in which the early Americans were completely like zombies, only they bred like rabbits instead of biting, are an excellent primer about what not to do in a zombie apocalypse.  Namely, don’t concede territory and force the zombies to go around you instead of through you.  The problems guys like Little Turtle, who was the leader of the Miamis, had in (what was already a post apocalyptic scenario post-pigs of De Soto and end of Mississippi Confederacy) protecting what he and his tribe had was that he had to coordinate with a whole bunch of other principalities who also didn’t have enough people to really patrol borders + manage relations with enemy tribes.

In other words, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, we’re all goners.

The other was the TV movie “Threads.” It was the BBC version of nuclear was made back in 1984, and (despite some hokey family storyline at the beginning) it did convey how the whole interconnected system would collapse in a post-apocalypse.

‘Threads’ was utterly terrifying- and all the more so because it could absolutely have happened. Scarier than a zombie apocalypse.

I’ve always hoped that if even a “limited” nuclear exchange happened, I’d be standing right underneath the bomb when it went off. There is no way I’d want to live in some Randian rugged post-apocalyptic dystopia. Because like every last right-wing blogger, I’d be lucky to be like a stablehand or something. Just kill me. Go ahead and eat me, for that matter.

I grew up in a neighborhood in which every household had a basement filled with supplies to last them at least three months, including water purifiers, generators, preserved food, etc.  Our basement held supplies to last a year, and was often tended and replaced to make sure the food hadn’t been spoiled by insects.  We even had a hand powered wheat grinder.  We spoke often about how society was going to fall soon.  It was not strange or remarkable for people to talk about how to keep out the starving hordes who didn’t plan for the inevitable.  It was a nice, middle class neighborhood, and the men and older boys sometimes had meetings about protecting one’s families when the chaos started.

We were Mormon suburbanites.

Dammit, now I want a twinkie.

Earth Abides is astonishingly good (and the end of civilization sounds actually fairly pleasant for the survivors), and quite moving at the end.

Threads made Day After look like a happy walk through a flower-filled meadow. Unremittingly bleak.

Testament, the 3rd of the mid-1980s nuclear war movies, was another good look at society gradually falling apart. It’s not as scary as Threads, but it’s unbearably sad.

All the suggestions for further reading are great, I might as well add one more.

One of the U.S.’ most renowned real-life doom n gloomer, James Howard Kunstler, even has a series about what happens after the more realistic decline caused by peak oil’s effect on suburban living. The first is The World Made By Hand, and its sequel is coming out this fall. Simple agrarian lifestyles, with traveling specialists in carpentry, optometry, dentistry, etc.

It reminded me of my favorite under-the-radar post-apocalpytic novel, Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick. In that an accidental nuclear winter brought on by the title character (a mixture of Einstein, Kissinger, and Dr. Strangelove) reduces the U.S. to scattered farmsteads, with plantation lifestyles re-emerging (though no color lines). The cities are scarred wrecks, where gangs thrive and mutated animals vie with humans for food. The only nationwide communication network is a satellite inhabited by a single, witty man who is doomed for the rest of his life to orbit the planet alone, giving out technical advice and keeping humanity’s spirits alive with music and banter. A firesides chat made more tragic by his wife’s suicide from loneliness.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Philip K. Dick-ian w/o more radioactive-born powers, including very frightening ones given to a sad little quadripalegic kid (like many others from an earlier nuclear test gone wrong) with an understandably large chip on his… well, shoulder.

I kept in mind not wanting to ruin anything, and if you think any of this is spoiler-ish, it’s really just the setup. Hell, when it comes to various ways of Sci-Fi looking at apocalyptic scenarios, Dick has it down every which way. Want to see what he thinks of global warming? Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

@Roethke: You may be interested in a collection of short stories called Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card. Society goes to shit, but the Mormons thrive.

My only problem with the list is #5, dealing with bites as a disease vector. I’m a Romero purist when it comes to my zombie apocalypse, and the bites weren’t spreading the plague. You’d die of infection from the bite, but you’d also turn if you’ve never been anywhere near a zombie but dropped dead of a heart attack. If a virus was causing the undead to walk, it had already infected everyone on the planet before the first corpse started looking for food.

There are enough versions of the zombie apocalypse that I can’t discount #5 entirely, though.

I’m writing a zombie novel for fun right now, and I’m feeling kinda smug that I’ve dome ok with most of the pitfalls listed here. There are a couple things I’ve hardly ever seen survivalist movies or books throw in: Having the survivors raid the nearest travel clinic for vaccinations, hit up a pharmacy for a medicine stockpile, raiding the library or bookstore for how-to books. And then do a terrible job of teaching themselves how to use all that stuff.

The food issue really comes down to how many people die how fast. I’d expect the grocery stores to get picked clean unless everyone dies or becomes a zombie at once, but unless there are a lot of survivors or a really slow decline, you could loot houses for at least a couple of years. And if you survive a zombie apocalypse for a couple of years, you can probably start a vegetable garden.

Bah, screw the zombie apocalypse. I’m voting on the Grey Goo scenario.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

@BlackBloc

That’s almost as preposterous as saying that our creator was a white-bearded old man! Heresy!

felagund@49:  I’m with you.  I read On the Beach at a young age, and the it-wasn’t-our-fault-but-we’re-going-to-die-anyways fatalism haunts me still (the movie was good, but read the book. [shudder]).  That may be why I enjoy Earth Abides so much; they have the same lack of chaos regarding the end of the world.  I’m still not sure I want to be around for it.

Roethke@50: sounds like my upbringing, but we were small-town Christian Identity survivalists.  They plan on surviving the apocalypse, with or without zombies.

I’ve always hoped that if even a “limited” nuclear exchange happened, I’d be standing right underneath the bomb when it went off.

Felagund, that was my retirement plan!!!  Stinkin’ Ruuskis messed that one up, now I gotta die in some horrible old folks home, if I’m lucky.

“The Day of the Triffids”—every version I’ve seen wimps out on the blinding aspect: in the book, it’s strongly hinted that the blinding was a function of a mis-firing satellite weapon that was SUPPOSED to blind you.  Substituting a comet (a <u>comet</u>??? wtf??) fails on so many levels.  Wusses.

The angry little girl in the book was great.  The Brits retreat to .... the Isle of Man?... to regroup and someday take back the world.

BTW, read “DotT” in “A John Wyndham Omnibus”, three long novelettes, recommended.

Pat Frank, who wrote an American counterpart to On the Beach, also wrote How to Survive the H-Bomb—and Why. It was not sufficient for you to be well supplied, you also had to be well-armed to keep the less foresighted from killing you for your supplies.

“Anyway, the article is great but it once again leaves out the big nitpick I always have about zombie movies, and my choice for the number one reason the zombie apocalypse would fail: because the distinct characteristic of zombies is they are mindlessly, obsessively ravenous… and in any recorded instance of that occurring with any species in nature, they’ll instinctively try to kill anything that moved.  “
I can’t agree more with you Pollak.
I really like this article.
To tell the truth is not easy.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I think I’d just die of fear.  Just watching zombie movies has been known to freak me out for weeks, if not months (28 Days Later - shudder), so the idea of having to be constantly looking over my shoulder for zombies trying to bite/eat me? No, I’d go of a stress-induced heart attack before I ever got to starvation.

I had to read Pat Frank’s novel “Alas, Babylon” in my 8th Grade English class, gotta love the Reagan era and semi-official indocrination into the idea of shooting Others. Years later when I found out he’d written proto-survivalist nonfiction I can’t say I was surprised. I hadn’t thought about the classroom discussion of how the Russians might kill us with “yellow rain” in ages until just now.

I’m not fully convinced that the supply chain for modern retail outlets keeps enough in the store that running out of goods might not still happen. I know some people who’ve needed to special order ammo, actually. Not a big deal if the warehouse can have it there Friday, but in a zombocalypse that just won’t work.

@#22 jefft452

Paraphrasing (it were a long time ago and my memory is flawed)

“when you got to fertile land would you even know?  Even the few people who still farm for a living use high tech machinery, would you know how to plough a field by ox plough?  Do you even know what viable wheat seeds look like?”

Good paraphrase (I have the series on my hard drive and I watched that section again).

I like the questions he asks right before he starts talking about city folk attempting to become farmers. 

Okay, so it’s a farm, so you decide to stop.  Has anybody got there first?  Or, are the owners still here?  Because you’re going to need shelter, and people don’t give their homes away.  They barricade themselves in.  So, sooner or later, exhausted and desperate you may have to make the decision to give up and die.  Or, to make somebody else give up and die, because they won’t accept you in their home voluntarily. 

And what, in your comfortable, urban life has ever prepared you for that decision?

Really, the whole sequence is a sharp pin in the balloon of every office dwelling right-wing survivalist you’ve ever met.  The truth is, if society were to collapse, there would be a massive die-off, because most of us would give up and die, or be made to do so.

Fuck Romero Zombies and fuck the zombie apocalypse. It’s pathetic how people can got through every plague narrative cliche but think it’s edgy and new because what? There’s a virus? The big baddie can jump really high? Shaun of the dead was the last really original Plague Zombie flick and even then for only about five minutes at the end. Once you drop all the masturbatory exercises in survivalism (as though a rifle and bottled water immediately turn you into the spiritual progeny of Macgyver and Danial Boone) you’re left with a /fill in the blank/ apocalypse narrative. It could be zombies, or mutants, or disease, or evil plants, or really anything because it always the same story. I have nothing against a good plague or survivalist narrative but neither of those concepts become something more with the addition of the undead.  And the undead are poorly used in those narratives
Zombieism allows the living to interact with the dead and instead of exploring all the complicated baggage that entails we reduce them to a virus. A monolithic, one-dimensional enemy requiring not deeper thought or reflection beyond loading the next round and aiming. No one has brought up the end of days raising of the dead (or Ghost busters.) No one has mentioned Rami and what a thinking insatiable flesh eat corpse would entail. Did no one else read Marvel Zombies? because Walking Dead is a solid work with a decent story but Marvel Zombies was fucking brilliant.  There is so much that you can do, that has been done with the concept of the undead and there is something really obnoxious about how all people want to focus on it “what would it mean to me if everyone else died.”

I liked the movie “Fido” myself.  The zombie apocalypse would be the mass unemployment caused by cheap zombie labor.

I suppose if I’m going to have a suspension of disbelief that the dead have risen again and taken over, I could suspend disbelief that gas is plentiful but Twinkies are scarce. Although I do admit that latter one is harder to believe than the former. :D

I don’t think of zombie movies as expressing any sort of political zeitgeist. There are deeper ways of exploring alienation, isolation, and fear of abandonment/betrayal than through walking dead flicks. But if you don’t want to write a particularly deep movie, and want to touch on those concepts, you could do worse than getting a bunch of extras loaded up with makeup and tell them to stagger around moaning. But the whole “what do zombie movies mean?” / “what do vampire movies mean?” journalistic pieces I see popping up every time a new monster movie is released annoy me. NPR doesn’t devote whole segments to Dance Competition movies, Salon doesn’t wax philosophic about Kung Fu movies. The reason people like zombie movies is because of the suspension of disbelief, not because we’re exploring latent fears of sexuality or terrorism or political malaise.

Most large and many small, end-of-grid gas stations have generator back ups.  The stories leave out the need to find, start and run the generator or set up a vacuum syphon, but gas would be less an issue than food.  We might not be competing with the missing people for doritos, but rodents and birds like them just fine and don’t usually get wiped out by the Zombie disaster.

helen w. h.—gas still needs to be delivered, though, and the backup generators typically run on the very resource they’re trying to keep going (not to mention—why is it that all the windows are smashed and the cars are overturned in a zombie apocalypse, but the gas pumps remain pristine?) So while you might have gas for a few days after a zombie apocalypse, you’re not going to be able to rely on it for long. And while there may be pristine outposts with full fuel and working electricity, it’s probably not a good idea to push your suburban around in search of one.

And unless rodents and birds learn how to operate can openers, the scores of spaghetti-o’s and beefaroni and canned green beans will keep you fed.

BlackBloc @ 9:
Every major (or even threat of major) winter storm in New England empties the stores of bread and toilet paper (?), and tends to hit hard most of the rest of the shelves.  People who lived here in the 70s remember being trapped for days in ‘78 and know they are being unreasonable, but do it anyway.

Again, having lived in places that could be cut off by blizzards and lose power as a regular thing during storms, I think about what we are dependant on and have most of my life.

Helen @ 71,

Good point. I left my car window open a few months ago and a raccoon ate the bag of chips I had in there. (yes, my car is a pig sty)

But a zombie apocalypse is closer to a nuclear attack than to a winter storm. For a New England Winter Storm, upwards of 90% (and that’s being conservative) of the population will have advanced warning of several days and *know* from experience to stock up. If a big snowstorm is forecast for Friday, it’s all everyone can talk about on Wednesday.

For a zombie apocalypse, by the time you realize what is happening, at least half the population is wiped out, (and that’s just when you realize the shit’s hit the fan, within a day or so you’ll be down to like 10%), so they won’t be fighting you for spaghetti-o’s. Plus, you’re also going to have people who want to keep moving vs. hunker down, these are people who will not be cleaning out store shelves because they don’t want to be weighed down.

Fatman @ 31, I’m pretty sure my motorcycle gear would work fine, and I’ve already got it in the right size.  It would get awefully warm though.

BlueJean @ 45:
Yep, been there.

Roethke @ 50:
Guessed your last sentance before you said it.  The Mormons are going to know how to do all those things - grow food, dry/can/salt - as a group, though not every individual, due to all those ward centered pretty much manditory activities.

DupinTM @ 54:
I remeber that story.  A lot of Dick’s stuff is dark.

MP @ 72:  You do know how big those tanks are.  If no one is around to eat the food, no one will be using that gas either.  Also, Prius and a motorcycle, no suburban.  I would have to get a lot more adept on the motorcycle as the roads would most likely be gridlocked with abandoned cars.
@75: No, they rush the store day of storm usually.  And clearly you have never spent a winter in New England.  I’d be one of those moving, fast as possible, far west as possible, in hopes of making the family places in rural Montana, Idaho and eastern WA or north to friends in rural upstate NH and ME.  Being people with mechanical, food production and food preservation talents would make us more likely to be welcome there.  Or surive elsewhere.  That said, survival would be unlikely and it would be a horror, hence the horror genre.

One more suggestion on the apocalypse fiction front. “Still Life” by Carl Grindley. No zombies, but instead a flu wipes out almost all of the population. The whole story takes place some time after the apocalypse and there are maybe 12 people left in New Haven, CT. The narrator spends quite a bit of time on the logistics of day to day life in a post-apocalyptic city. Good story, but even for the genre it is pretty unrelentingly bleak.

And clearly you have never spent a winter in New England.

LOL at you.

helen w.h. @73 good point on the blizzards! I remember “78, primarily for no school but still forced to do homework by the light of a propane camp lamp. The parental home also had a wood stove and lots of candles, so we were all right. We had our neighbors come over for shared dinners and despite the shoveling it wasn’t so bad to be a kid in the Blizzard of “78.

It always amuses me that there are runs on bread, milk, and eggs—but not maple syrup. How can you make a weeks worth of French Toast without maple syrup?

I love this thread.

Mighty Ponygirl, I have to disagree with you a little on what zombie movies “mean.”  I’m a little irritated at trite radio and online commentary, but really, there’s no reason you can’t enjoy horror stories on both the suspension of disbelief level *and* the thematic level.  The reason vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and now Romero style ghouls are so resonant is that they’re especially suited to exploration various fears that crawl along under the skin of society.  The lack of good critical commentary isn’t a reason to dismiss all of it.

Having lived in New England, the northern midwest, and the mid-atlantic, my experience has been that places used to snow (northern midwest and new england), people don’t wait until the last minute. When I was living in Philly, I used to watch the news in amusement the day before a big storm as they would interview people walking out of the home depot with literally half a dozen snow shovels. Really? You need that many snow shovels? They don’t go bad, you know.

People who live in areas that actually experience winter tend to, IME, do a big “canned goods stock-up” around thanksgiving. You go, you get three or four shopping cards filled with canned goods, and plenty of rock salt, and that way you can just hunker down for the winter if need be. If there’s a big snow storm coming, you might go to the store at the last minute for milk and bread and juice. But you’re not desperately running down the aisles trying to stock up on supplies to last you for a week or more the day before the shit hits the fan unless you’re a noob to the region.

And we don’t need to go as far back as ‘78 for a crazy snowstorm. Two years ago an ice storm hit the region at the beginning of December and there were some remote parts of New Hampshire that didn’t have power restored until after Christmas. My husband worked to the end of June making up the snow days.

I’ve always hoped that if even a “limited” nuclear exchange happened, I’d be standing right underneath the bomb when it went off.

In college in 1980, we formed a “Ground Zero Club.”  The idea was that if the siren sounded, we’d hurry to the closest expected ground zero, and party until we were incinerated.

We had regular drills…

The Discovery channel has a series, The Colony, where people have to survive after a disaster wipes out most the US.  I’m going to have to check it out now.

Mighty Ponygirl!  Grrrr! 

Are you trying to tell me that my education at a top tier university was worthless?!!?!  I have an English degree where I focused on the relationship between the Victorian novel and 20th Century film.

I had to read Dracula three times!  Frankenstein (another zombie-type) twice!

As if the depth and layers of meaning there could even be approached by a “Dance Competition” movie!

If there weren’t deeper layers, stories wouldn’t resonate.  Sure, you can have a mindless flick, but to throw out a whole genre?!?!!!  What else are we supposed to do in the large amount of down time during the zombie apocalypse if not puzzle over the deeper meanings of it all?

I bite my thumb at you!  Fie!

And I’m not sharing my twinkies.

Saw Night of the Living Dead with some college friends one night and ended up cracking up at the lumbering zombies and the movie’s effects. 

When they asked me to watch myself when I left their apt at 2 am, I said that if anything happens, I can butcher all the Buddy Holly, Modern Lovers, Ramones, etc songs with the telecaster electric guitar I had with me that night….and it can double up as an effective 8 pound club if needed. 

Out of curiosity, do zombies have any particular musical likes/dislikes? Hearing sensitivities? :D

“The Stand” has a nice scene about the difficulty of gas siphoning from underground tanks.

Growing up in upper michigan, we didn’t really do stock ups for blizzards, as a I recall. There were a.) a lot of blizzards and b.) the infastructure in place get the roads plowed before too long after. And also a lot fewer roads than in New England.

exholt,

I assume if they had seen Shaun of the Dead while still living, they might be a bit afraid of any music played on a record.  If I were a zombie, I would also be afraid of anyone playing music on an eight-track or boom box.  Those things can get pretty heavy and they have a convenient handle for bashing in undead skulls.

Thinking about it (and the technology in genre fic post from a bit ago), headphones have really been good to the horror genre.  I bet minimally aware zombies would try and attack those with iPods first.

helen w.h. @ 76:  Gasoline has a shelf life though as all the flammable volatile components evaporate pretty rapidly.  Within a year at most, all those big tanks at the gas stations will be filled with brown turpentine-like goo that you’d be lucky to burn in a lamp.  Until it won’t burn at all, it’s flammability will gradually decrease so your vehicles will run more poorly, injectors and filters clog more frequently, until finally it won’t run an engine at all. 

Diesel will last longer but not that much I think. 

So, there’s no reason to conserve it: use as much as you can before it’s all useless sludge.  Forget the Prius- go for the big-engined, armored, 4wd Suburban after all.  And don’t forget your chainsaws!

As for a non-zombie apocalypse, has anyone else here seen “Ever Since The World Ended?”  It’s an extremely low budget documentary-style film of the survivors of a plague that wipes out virtually everybody.  The premise is that 2 guys are shooting the doc 10 years after the event, introducing us to some of the roughly 200 people who now populate San Francisco.

See, that’s something that I think 28 Days Later did really well.  No elevators; had to climb a pile of shopping carts to a fire escape ladder.  Processed food, yes, if you’re brave enough to journey to the grocery store.  No running water; Only the barest hint that maybe an artificial light was on somewhere.  If you want petrol, you have to suck it out of the supply truck.  About the only place that had electricity was the Military Base from Hell, since those places are designed to be self-sufficient and highly fortified.

There are probably some flaws I’m missing, since it’s been a while since I’ve seen 28 Days.  Overall, though, it’s one of the more believable zombie movies I’ve ever seen.  That vast emptiness and silence of the landscape was what made it so freaky.

Caren—it wouldn’t be so bad if every time a new zombie movie wasn’t released they had to unearth the “what does it all mean?” corpse to once again dissect.

Angrymob and I were talking about it as we walked downtown for Twinkies and a can of gasoline during lunch hour, and he had as good a mention as any:

Back in the 50’s and 60’s, where monster movies were definitely mining allegories for what is happening in culture (Red Scare, cold war, civil/women’s rights, etc), dissecting the deeper cultural meanings of monster movies had legitimacy. But these days I don’t know that we can declare that the movies are mining some deep-seated cultural fears and tropes so much as we can declare that the movies are mining the fads that were generated by movies that did legitimately mine deep-seated cultural fears and tropes.

This is why Dracula is culturally relevant, but Zombieland not so much.

So here’s the other thing: until the disease gets recognized, doctors, nurses and EMTs are going to be on the front lines of infection. So you’d better stock the hell up on antibiotics and suturing equipment, because we’ll be back to the situation where even minor gashes can kill you. (This is the power of statistics: even if going out into the zombieworld has only a 1% chance of getting you killed, if you go out once a day the odds of being dead in a year are about 97%.)

@Mighty Ponygirl

Zombieland, as a horror/zombie-comedy certainly occupies a different cultural space than Dracula, but it certainly speaks to (and reveals) our culture.  In many ways, Zombieland is a reaction/response to all of the zombie movies that have come before.  From Shaenon in comment #1:

Zombies are often seen as representing fear of the great unwashed tearing down society.  Usually the zombie fantasy ultimately a conservative fantasy, with the zombies representing poor people or minorities or immigrants or whoever the dominant culture fears will get into their gated communities and trash everything.  (It’s no coincidence that the survivors usually get to set up an alternative right-wing anarchic society while acting out libertarian tough-guy fantasies.) The George Romero movies are kind of interesting in that they usually turn it into a left-wing fantasy, where the zombies represent liberal fears like mindless consumerism (Dawn of the Dead) or the military-industrial complex (Day of the Dead).

Zombieland subverts both of the above with its non-tough guys (Woody Harrelson’s character plays with masculinity while projecting a tough guy exterior) and the sisters they meet up with, while also reveling in mindless consumerism (Twinkies, amusement park, Bill Murray).  If the earlier films say something about how we were/are, then the response to that similarly must say something about how we are or how we have changed.

Thinking about it a bit more, it would be entirely within reason to claim that Zombieland itself makes your argument for zombies as just mindless entertainment (Zombie Kill of the Week, Bill Murray in make-up, etc.).

There is an interesting, but incredibly poorly written, series by S.M. Stirling about what would happen to society if modern technology stopped working.

Atheist, Shaun of the Dead was a reaction to the zombie movies that came before. Zombieland is a reaction to a reaction. It’s just cashing in on the success of SotD. Don’t get me wrong, I liked ZL, but it’s definitely Scary Movie to Shaun of the Dead‘s Scream.

reason #1 goes well with rule #1…  always doubletap

One of the U.S.’ most renowned real-life doom n gloomer, James Howard Kunstler, even has a series about what happens after the more realistic decline caused by peak oil’s effect on suburban living. The first is The World Made By Hand, and its sequel is coming out this fall. Simple agrarian lifestyles, with traveling specialists in carpentry, optometry, dentistry, etc.

Ah yes, another bullshit fantasy where petroleum apparently not only powers engines but the human brain so that people immediately forget about all the other sources of energy we potentially have(1).  This year’s Nebula winner The Windup Girl also lived within said stupidity.

(1)  As an example, we have two real-world examples of where nations cut off from petroleum made it.  It was expensive, but doable.

<blcokquote>There is an interesting, but incredibly poorly written, series by S.M. Stirling about what would happen to society if modern technology stopped working. </blockquote>

Yeah, but the series (it starts with Dies the Fire) depends on a magical MacGuffin to make the premise work: the rules of the universe change so that things like electricity, gunpowder, and other high-energy technologies simply can’t function.  So it can’t really be used as a basis for any realistic assumptions.

@Mighty Ponygirl

While I am sure that Zombieland was able to be produced because of SotD and possibly was somewhat inspired by it, I completely disagree that 1) means it contributes nothing new or 2) is less valuable culturally than the “original.”  The fact that society doesn’t really fall apart at all (long-term) in SotD, while Zombieland picks up after everything has been destroyed is an important difference between the tone and underlying meaning of each.

I think it is also worth noting that British and American societies and cultures are not identical or interchangeable.  I think SotD works reasonably well (although not completely) as a depiction of both/either, but Zombieland is pretty definitively American and conveys a distinctly American ethos.  I don’t see it as a reaction to a reaction so much as a different reaction to more traditional zombie films.  Fido, which was mentioned earlier and which I loved, is also a post-SotD zombie film and it probably also owes its existence in some way to SotD, but it is certainly not a Scary Movie-style parody of the zombie-response genre.

@KeithM:

You are completely right, but as a thought experiment it doesn’t seem much different from a zombie invasion.

Suppose a zombie infection happened now. Here would be the series of events: after people figure out this is real, Obama would declare a state of emergency; Tea Party types freak out convinced it’s made up so Obama can take over; a civil war ensues (even seeing zombies in person would not convince some people it wasn’t a plot); certain groups start to defend zombies against the government plot; ...

@KeithM: The MacGuffin is the same one that sends the town of (Nantucket, IIRC) back in time in his other books. I have not read World Made by Hand or Windup Girl because the reviews I’ve read make them sound like anti-technology screeds.

has anyone else here seen “Ever Since The World Ended?”

I have. Did I mention that I’m slightly obsessed with this sub-genre

Continuing from one of last week’s threads, how would zombies fare if they came across mummies?

Would they be natural allies or enemies? If the former, are we in even deeper trouble? If the latter, who would win the confrontation?

Okay, MP, you’ve never spent a winter in the Boston suburbs surrounded by people who were young adults in ‘78 who still freak out the day of a storm and empty the store shelves of bread, milk and toilet paper, even if they already have it at home. 
My husband had to cut his way out our road during the ice storm two years ago; we were without power for a week.  I just stayed at my work site in NYC.