Weirdly enough, I agree with you.

Seeing new movies such as Zombieland coming out make me shudder, mostly because of the glorification of slaughter and the comedic de-sensitization that the preview gives us. One thing zombies are good for is violence without consequence, for a heroic scenario where your protagonist can commit cool and interesting acts of butchery on human-like objects that are no longer considered persons. Whether virally infected or necropotently-animated, they stop being people (except when a scene can milk that for a few seconds for some sort of “poignancy”) and become animate punching bags. Sometimes there’s a message behind this, but not often.

Zombies have sometimes been used for a level of social commentary, but that’s often a gloss over a core of horror or scifi-ish action. In some stories they are a part of the changed world’s environment (I’m thinking off Kirkman’s The Walking Dead here), and function less as objects to be shot or cudgled than as obstacles to the restoration of order and comfort. They are still de-humanized, but serve a somewhat more interesting story function.

I think there is some potential left in zombies, for two reasons. One is the topic discussed earlier, the fact that, if I wrote a detailed environmental catastrophe story that was too realistic, people might not read it. But if instead it’s rendered more fantastical, in this case a shift in the global ecosystem that among other problems turns sick and dying humans into predators on the rest of the human poopulation, I can use a lot of the points made by writers like Diamond in a more allegorical fashion, using a familiar trope that gets turned on its head.

What you can do with that is the second reason I find zombies potentially compelling. Once you start to establish the ground rules (and all zombie stories have ground rules), there is a lot of space for subversion. Because they are so easy to use, so recognizable as a trope, I believe they have a lot of potential to shake a reader’s expectations if you come up with a consistent, developing subversion of accepted ideas about them. What if people infected with zombism eventually recover? What if they develop into something worse? If they are one sign of a changed ecosystem, what other changes are there? Is there more to worry about than shambling corpses? And what can you say about people’s perceptions, motivations, and actions through that? Properly done, it could be a rich territory to explore.

I agree that SF, particularly in cinema and TV, has been greatly reduced by backgrounding “big ideas” as contexts for gunfights and brawls. I think that we have more of an opportunity to recapture SF in fiction, although given current conditions that is sadly becoming more difficult.

I’m not trying to say that Science Fiction is escapist literature, or that it must only be that. *Not at all.* That’s not why I write it, and it’s not why I love it.

What I am trying to say is that the way certain disaster concepts are contrived is inherently escapist (robots/zombies/random apocalypse takes over) either because of the fanciful scenario or because the “big idea” component becomes a reduced tool for the purpose of fulfilling cliche action plots. This is particularly true in cinema, where you see a lot of “big idea” stories actually turn out to be small on ideas, but big on explosions.

This is not what SF does, but what it’s been reduced to, in many cases. And I see this all the time with environmental topics. Once they get turned into story, they also get turned into vapid entertainments.

Again, I don’t mean to disparage Science Fiction, or the many excellent writers who use its tools. But please, save me from the zombies.

I think Paolo has hit the mark with his observation that the closer to relevance a catastrophe is, the more unsettling it is to the reader. What makes movies like The Day After Tomorrow work (and I use that term loosely), is that the disaster is fairly far-fetched and functions as a context for adventure, making it as probable in a movie-goer’s mind as a quest for the Ark of the Covenant. There are a number of story and character elements that, when added to that, make disaster movies a form of escape, rather than a cautionary tale. They aren’t really about environmental collapse, but are tales of entertainment, and are both palatable and enjoyable to the viewer.

The same definitely goes for science fiction. Worlds of nuclear and environmental desolation have served as Adventurelands for quite a long time. I vividly remember devouring the Traveler series of post-apocalyptic shoot-’em-ups as a teenager, despite my paralyzing fear of nuclear war. Disaster was a pretext for the rise of a hero, and that’s what the novels were really about. Once they have submitted to that action-hero formula, those stories become digestable and uneasy questions are subsumed by the rush of conflict.

I would love to see less of that, and more tackling of the issues and possibilities that make us squirm, and maybe think harder about where we’re going. I think that both Diamond’s Collapse (despite some problems I have with it), and Weisman’s The World Without Us (which is one of the best non-fiction works I have read in the past few years) are challenging discussions of environmental & civilizational endpoints. I wish that more writers would step up and try to give us a sounder, more provocative picture of such possible endings, so that we aren’t just telling zombie stories around campfires in the future.

I have to write one of those now, I think :-).

That all may sound rambling, but I have very strong beliefs about the nature of SF/F and how it CAN be used, as opposed to how it is used, or sold, or packaged. All I think we need is something really different and really compelling that can bust down that old standby opinion of Men in Country Clubs that SF/F is a genre that can’t be taken seriously, packaged as it is as “escapist” literature.