(no subject)

[camwyn]

A thought occurs to me this morning as I scramble to phone tech support for this and purchasing for that; it is a thought about my video game habits/preferences, and unrelated to work. And it amounts to this: I think, mayhap, one of the reasons I am so very fond of Fallout 3 is because it offers me an apocalypse that does not have the word 'zombie' in front of it.

I've always been fond of the post-apocalyptic genre. I think it has its roots in my third- or fourth-grade panic over how people described the movie The Day After to me. I never saw that movie, probably because my mom, in her knowledge of my eight-or-nine-year-old psyche, knew better than to let me watch it. But people who did see it told me about it, and I resolved that I wanted to be able to do anything just in case the people who did all the stuff that I normally didn't do for myself happened to die or vanish or what have you. Watching movies where that kind of thing had already happened provided a sense, once the movie was over, that at least the terrible thing has not happened yet in the real world; reading books where the end of the world was happening, or was yet to happen, gave me a sense of preparing even if all the preparing involved was recognizing the signs. (I was part of a gifted and talented class in third and fourth grade, and we got into competition over who could read the biggest book. At one point I read the entire Bible. I think I went over Revelation about five times.)

Later, somewhere along the line, I developed something of a fondness for the Empty World aspect of post-apoc fiction. There is something immensely relieving about not having squintillions of people around you at every turn, even if it does mean you have to scrabble like a mad thing for every single aspect of everyday life. It's an inverse of the life of a city dweller, and from time to time the Empty World is a welcome point of retreat into that inverse.

I also like the post-apoc aspect of having to rebuild society from an extremely small set of survivors. Founder effect is fascinating to track in genetics. In anthropological terms it can have an even more profound effect, I think- you have this minuscule cluster of people to work with, and now everything they do to create a working society is based on just what they have available to them, whether in writing or action. It gives you some truly enormous opportunities to change things, assuming there are enough people to genuinely rebuild.

The thing is that lately, every time there has been an end-of-civilization event in fiction it's involved the goddamn bitey dead people. OH NO THE MINDLESS DEAD ARE RISING AND HUNTING THE LIVING. EEK. You know what? I don't really care. I am tired of people thinking that the walking dead- or the virally infected- are the scariest thing to ever scare people. I'm not interested in killing mindless dead people, and I'm not real big on predatory feral dead people, either. Civilization being overwhelmed by its dead? Not something I particularly feel like exploring. But there it is, every time you turn around: the freakin' zombie apocalypse. I like Valve's games but I'll never buy Left 4 Dead because, well, ZOMBIES. I was okay with 28 Days Later because I was more fascinated by the prospect of an empty London and a plague than I was turned off by the Infected.

Ultimately, though, I'm just tired of the end of civilization being pinned on its dead coming back, or its disease victims overwhelming its healthy. Sorry. Had enough of that. When I want to see civilization burning I want it to burn either because of what its living did, or because of something completely beyond its control. And Fallout gives me that: a good old-fashioned nuclear apocalypse. Yeah, there are feral ghouls, which are basically mindless predatory zombies, but they're a relatively minor component of the whole thing. They're a by-product, not a central focus or a point of blame. Fallout just set us up the bomb, not the OH MY GOD DEAD MAN IS DRIVING HOW CAN THIS BE, and that's something I can appreciate.

Comments

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this, and couldn't Noah's family after the flood be considered the first post-apocalyptic story?

[camwyn]

If not Noah, then some culture's After the Flood story probably qualifies as first. Although as far as biblical post-apoc goes I'd like to nominate the story of Lot as fitting more with the modern sense of how such stories run: the city destroyed by fire, the absolute conviction that the world is ending, the loss of a family member, and the desperation measures taken by Lot's daughters to ensure that they have someone to look after them and to continue the species.

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

Zombies seem to be in fashion now. I guess in a few years it will blow over?

Btw, have you read Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind? It contains most of the post-apoc elements you like as well as being an amazing graphic novel.

[camwyn]

I'm not real keen on vampires either, but that's just the Bitey Dead People supercategory. You don't really get a vampire apocalypse unless someone does their math wrong.

Can't say I've read Nausicaa, no...

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

A vampire apocalyps would probably leave the whole world very empty as their society collapses too...

Nausicaa (it was also made into a movie, which is lovely to look at but doesn't contain the whole story) has a post-apocalyptic world, created by humanitys hubris and enviromentally destructive ways.

Most of the world is covered by a giant, poisonous fungus forest, where the really HUGE bugs live. The remaining humans are split into two empires (at war with each other) and a few small clans living just on the edge of the poison forest. Nausicaa belongs to one of those clans, admires the great insects and doesn't like to go to war but since she's the princess of her people she has to. Has lots of beautiful images of the forest and the insects, good characters and.... well, it's just really awesome, so consider it recced with the greatest fervor ;)

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Nausicaa = awesome. With a very morally ambiguous ending...

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

You know, for all that shatterverse is theoretically every apocalypse, I don't think we've had too many zombies. I guess you're not the only one who considers the undead a yawner.

[nesmith.livejournal.com]

Where would you place something like Stephen King's The Stand? You have the plague aspect at the outset but then it really becomes an Empty Earth scenario, with most of the population wiped out by the superflu.

To this day I'm still chilled by the image of all the big cities as great charnel houses, with millions of dead people just lying around.

[camwyn]

I could probably deal with that pretty well- it reminds me somewhat of the early issues of Y: The Last Man, where everything on Earth with a Y chromosome other than one guy and his monkey dropped dead at once. There was a scene that involved trying to get into Washington, DC, but the problem was that the death wave hit at rush hour for the Eastern seaboard, so you can imagine what the highways were like...

[nesmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was the same scenario as The Stand; the flu hit fast enough to wipe out the population in short order, but not fast enough that people weren't jamming the highways trying to get out of town and locking everything up. The survivors basically had to find motorcycles or bikes or just walk.

[unmisha.livejournal.com]

Huh. I must be missing the zombie apocalypses... or that's just in games. I dunno.
Some of my favorite fiction is post-apocalyptic or rebuilding from a certain step (The 1632 series, for instance, it's quite post-apocalyptic, but it's certainly a rebuilding/restructuring sort of series.)

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

I was twelve when I watched The Day After. It *terrified* me; I had nightmares for a week. The only way I got over that was planning what to do in case of nuclear attack.

It didn't help that my mother actually *worked* for Civil Defense at one time, and she stated she'd rather die in the explosions than try to live in the world after the Bomb.

[dragonwhishes.livejournal.com]

There's just something fun about zombies, I think. There's room for action, snarky comments, and blazes of bullets.

The story I'm trying to work on right now is post-apoc, but I'm not entirely sure what caused the apocalypse yet. I know it wasn't zombies, though, but that's all I got right now.

[cupenny.livejournal.com]

I've always liked post-apocaliptic books for roughly that same reason- how people rebuilt 'civilization' with what they have left.

This prolly goes to show that one of the sci-fi books I read in my formative years was Daybreak: 2250 A.D. (http://www.amazon.com/Daybreak-D-G-717-Orig-title/dp/B0007HJI3Q) by Norton. Old-school sci-fi, with exploring the nuclear wasteland that used to be North America, complete with mutant cats, rat- and lizard-people.

So, yeah. Zombies? Not so much. People exploring the ruins of the ancient city of "El-Ay", complete with their own re-built culture and making things by hand and legends about the 'Fire in the Sky' that ended the world- yes please!

[hannahrorlove.livejournal.com]

The first zombie I ever had direct exposure to, as opposed to general cultural osmosis, was Reg Shoe. It's made it hard for me to understand what everyone else is so scared of.

[batyatoon]

I still love the bitey dead people, but yeah, there are other ways to end a world and it's good to see them too sometimes.



For some value of "good". Er.

[bookwyrm95.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire trilogy? Very interesting post-apoc story. Basis is that everything electronic stops works plus combustables loses the essence that makes them explode so cars, guns, fireworks do not work anymore. Trilogy follows a witchy coven, re-enactors and those just trying to survive in world that rapidally depopulted because people do not live near large sources of food. Founder's effect plays a big role as time goes on.

ps-As an aside these books are a spin-off of his Island in a Sea of Time series; taking place in the world the island of Nantucket left behind when it goes back to the Bronze Age.

And if you want anymore reading suggestion just ask, because I just adore post apoc fiction.