Babel Clash

Well, I hope you spent all of Sunday wondering the answer to Mira’s question at the end of her Saturday Blog. Why did Jesse feel the need to destroy everything to launch off her apocalypse in MARRIED WITH ZOMBIES. Actually, I found Mira’s whole blog very interesting. It’s true that there are a few apocalypses where everything doesn’t go to hell in a hand basket. In fact, in one my favorite zombie tales, “Shaun of the Dead” we end the movie with Shaun and Lizzie living life as usual, watching the one year anniversary news shows on their outbreak (when Coldplay is headlining the Z-Aid concert, CLASSIC). Clearly life is back to normal (with the exception of Ed out in the back playing video games and occasionally trying to take a bite out of Shaun). 

And I actually also agreed with Mira’s reasoning for why an apocalypse takes you to hell in a hand basket or not. The whole concept of the awful trifecta of Population Loss/Lack of Governmental Response/Failure of Vital Services really does make all the difference. It certainly does in my story. But I got the trifecta, unlike Mira. Over half the population is wiped out on day 1, the government doesn’t have a response (well, they do, but you won’t see it until the end of Book 1 and through Book 2-3) and Vital Services? Yeah, my characters basically have a repeating message on the radio telling them to remain calm. Awesome. And I think sort of realistic when you consider the messes made of some recent natural disasters.

So why did I go that way? Well, when I imagined Sarah and Dave, emotionally screwed up married couple on the edge of divorce using their dead marriage counselor’s advice to escape a zombie apocalypse, I didn’t want them to be able to depend on anything else in the world but each other. Simple as that. If Sarah could just call a cop on her cell phone or Dave could IM the National Guard, well then they wouldn’t really have no way out but to work together. At every turn I had them realize more and more that the only people in the world they could really trust were each other… and that is really the catalyst that drives them to answer the question “Are we going to be together or not?” by the end of the book.

Plus, another big difference between MARRIED WITH ZOMBIES and FEED (which I loved by the way, I actually thought the idea of still having a social and political infrastructure was freaking brilliant) is that Dave and Sarah don’t know WHY this is happening. They know there was a lab on University of Washington campus, that it was somehow related to the government and that zombies have been rampaging ever since, but there’s little news, little information and no contact with the outside world almost from moment one of the book. The government actually cuts off the areas affected (and you’ll see more of that in the second and third books). They don’t spend a lot of time asking why, either. They just spend a lot of time running like hell and hoping they’ll live to see another day. In that way, I think I’m more like “Shaun of the Dead” or maybe even “28 Days Later” in that the cause is a mystery that isn’t really ever answered completely.

But there’s another side to zombie films and books. The “why” side. You see it in “Resident Evil” or “I Am Legend” or in Mira’s book, FEED. The people in those stories know exactly WHY they’re in this situation. They know how “it” happened, whatever “it” is. And that may be just as scary as the empty, not-knowing that David and Sarah encounter.

So Jesse–who is apparently a lot more destructive than I knew, and by the way, if you come over, Jesse, I’m hiding the C4–wants to know why mankind has not yet descended into chaos and anarchy and lots of Mad Max-style hairstyling in the Newsflesh universe.

The short answer: Because I didn’t want it to, and I’m the author, so I get to have my way.

The long answer: The collapse of civilization isn’t a guaranteed result of any given apocalypse.  Look at Independence Day.  The aliens wiped out like half the planet in a very short period of time, and you still walk away from the movie feeling like they’ll be rebuilding by the end of the year.  The Canadians burned down the White House once, and we built a new one; why not just do the same after the aliens atomize it?  Mankind is very fond of reconstruction.  We’re sort of like wasps that way.  Kick over a wasps’ nest, the wasps will just build a new one.  After stinging the ever-loving crap out of you, that is.

The total collapse of society is predicated on several elements:

1. Population loss.  You need a lot of people to die, very quickly.
2. Lack of government response.  You need the government, for whatever reason, to delay action.
3. Failure of vital systems.  You need to lose power, shipping, communications, and law enforcement, all very quickly, all without replacement systems in place.

Stephen King’s The Stand achieves the collapse of society primarily through step one: population loss, with a lovely extra dose of step two: governmental denial.  Dawn of the Dead, on the other hand, achieves the collapse of society primarily through step three: even before most of the people are dead, the power’s out, there’s chaos in the streets, and everybody’s shooting wildly at everybody else.  As a rule, you need two of these elements to totally destroy society, and all three if you want to salt the ashes.

The apocalypse in Feed (colloquially known as “the Rising”) was specifically designed to avoid hitting any of the steps above whenever possible.  First off, while we did suffer some pretty major population loss, the start of the infection was documented enough that the death rate was a lot lower than it might have otherwise been.  Secondly, thanks to the CDC and WHO, the government was involved on a global scale almost immediately, which also did a great deal to keep things intact.  Finally, the fact that it was the zombie apocalypse meant that we had a very high geek survival rate…and they, along with the speed of governmental response, kept the power on.

Breaking everything so badly it can’t be fixed takes an incredibly fast death rate and a speed of collapse that is frankly not pretty (and probably leads to multiple unpleasant nuclear reactor incidents, since zombies can’t vent the core).  Plus, I’ve done it before.  I wanted to see what it would take to put society back together with duct tape and paranoia.  And it was fun!

So why did you feel the need to break everything?  Apocalypses like that are the reason the dystopian future can’t have nice things.

Okay, now I really want to get down to brass tacks. Seriously we have been talking about the tone and the feel of horror and why zombies are so damn cool and that’s great. But I think the real reason I love writing zombies is this:

I like to blow shit up.

Okay, maybe I should be clearer just in case the FBI decides to read this blog and expand my file. I haven’t ever actually blown anything up. My brother used to blow up his GI Joes with firecrackers, but I wasn’t really involved in that. But the idea of blowing stuff up is soooo cool. And what gives you a better excuse for doing it than a zombie apocalypse? I mean, seriously. Anarchy is the name of the game in Zombieville. If you aren’t blowing things up, you are doing it wrong.

And it isn’t just the blowing up part. Nope, you can also shoot people. Or say… kill them with their own stiletto. Or with a toilet seat. There are a hundred creative ways to kill a zombie and no one even bats an eye about the murderous rampage you are participating in (or… writing. Yes, writing, not participating).

Apocalypses are different from regular wars, I guess. In regular war you get soldiers with weapons and they’re trained. In an apocalypse we’re all soldiers and everything around you is a potential weapon. Those with the ability to creatively kill will be highly valued.

Oh and speaking of that, after the shit goes down, what we value in general will change. White collar workers, I’m sorry but you will be useless. People who can grow food, drive heavy equipment, run the electric grid and kill stuff will be GODS. They will rule and have many wives (or husbands) as a reward. Because as we know, in the post-apocalypse we’ll all go Lord of the Flies or Mad Max and run wild.

Sounds pretty fun to me.

Except wait, Mira, in FEED… it kind of didn’t go that way. So what’s up with still having a political and social infrastructure, man?

One of the interesting things that came up at the symposium I attended in Japan, was about the way we in SF treat scarcity concepts–mostly with rioting, looting, banditry, complete societal breakdown, and Australian desert–and how that may work to embed certain images and perceptions in people’s minds about what scarcity might mean in the future.

SF isn’t predictive very often, or, at least, not successfully predictive, but it does have an interesting function in illustrating mythologies about our future.  SF written during the aerospace expansion of the cold war was not only inspired by the changes that were happening in technology, it also provided in some ways a dream for people to live into.  By the time something like 2001 was in theaters, you could see a version of the future that was inspired by and also inspiring, and you could almost unconsciously lean into that shuttle flight to the moon.  To the extent that we’re all still wondering why our 2001 was so lame in comparison to Clark and Kubrick’s, it’s an indication of how powerful the myth was.

And so with scarcity and apocalypse. If the visions of scarcity that SF provides are all visions of horror, it means that in some ways we (as sf writers) are providing powerful reasons for our society to not look scarcity questions squarely in the face, and also not challenging society to come up with positive versions of societies handling scarcity well, as opposed to poorly.  If you don’t have a model or archetypal pattern of a highly functional society that deals with drought or peak oil or global warming it makes it difficult for a rational dialogue to commence about how to create an adaptable society.  Instead, we all bury our heads in the sand and hope the apocalypse will never come, because a Mad Max world can only be met with denial.

…is tan, apparently.  Because all the ones that really stand out in my mind happen in the desert.

What is it about bleak desert landscapes and the crash of civilization?  I’m sort of wondering if the iconic experience of Mad Max has so imprinted itself on our minds that we as sf authors can’t get away from it.  Ho hum. One more journey across the desert, with roving gangs all around, looking to do nothing apparently except wreak havoc on the few innocents who are still left alive.

Apparently, the good people either all get selectively nuked, poisoned, turned into zombies or just plain turn to evil as soon as the apocalypse hits. Because, you know, only psychopaths survive.  Which is sort of funny, because in general, it seems like people are basically decent, and basically decent people do a better job of cooperating and organizing than wingnuts.  If they didn’t, we’d already be at each other’s throats.