Zombies in my sci-fi!

[pasithea]

Okay sci-fi writers... Look... I think it's time we had a little discussion.

I'm bored with zombies. I'm sick and tired of zombies in every freaking story I listen to.
I've been a zombie in a flash mob. Recently I was wearing a ghoulish set of face paint with eyes and horns and green skin and I lurched along the street at twilight alone and I saw that indeed zombies do work, even the classic ones. I could get right up within grabbing people before they even noticed a large percentage of the time.

But this doesn't change the fact that I'm just plain bored of zombie stories. You set up cool sci-fi. Man finds an alien artifact, ends up far from everything they know, discovers alien cultures and ... OMGZ ZOMBIES! And then all the cool world building and stuff you've done gets thrown out and it's just a zombie story.

Zombies don't scare me, okay. I'm surrounded by zombies. If you like zombies, Sean of the Dead should have explained this to you. We're in a world full of real zombies. Mindless stupid animals that want to infect you and drag you down into their version of reality.

If you want to write about zombies, fine with me. You're the writer. What you do is your thing, but could you just tell me up front that it's going to be yet another zombie story so I don't waste my time getting interested in the story for the first five chapters?

Oh, and another thing. As prevalent as zombies are in pop culture, why is it that characters in space zombie stories, when faced with ACTUAL staggering undead just assume that if they get bit by a zombie, things will work out different? For that matter, why do techno zombies even need to bite people. If you hit them with a machine gun at close range, aren't you probably going to inhale some of the spray of their blood that's contaminated with the engineered virus, nanites, or whatever plot hook you're using to tell another boring zombie story? How about that huh? Why wouldn't the military team instantly quarantine everyone who was anywhere near the zombies? But oooh noooo. They have to get BIT and then NO ONE CONSIDERS THE POSSIBILITY THEY'LL BECOME INFECTED.

You see what I mean about living in a world run by zombies? I'm surrounded. Come on. They're fantasy characters. They're supposedly highly trained soldiers and scientists. Give your zombies some freaking brains before they get bit by the other zombies.

*sigh*

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, agreed. Like anything else, zombies are cool the first 200 times and after that they start getting kinda boring. Like everyone else I thought oh cool zombies and started drawing out bits of an alternate WWII scenario with 'em, and then everyone else in the world had zombies in everything and I thought, eh, why bother. It's stale already.

[cobaltie.livejournal.com]

There's even a video game with zombies in WWII...actually probably several at this point. I haven't played any of the newer Wolfenstein stuff, but I'm sure there were zombies in it.

Yeah. Zombies are a bit moldy, and falling apart. No brains left.

[paka.livejournal.com]

That's the thing, I was going to have super-soldier serum for the Soviets, the Nazis would have traditional monsters/necromancy, the Americans would have power armor, and the British would have just sheer bravery. There are at least two or three iterations of miniature games with that as the focus and the artists working on them are 'way more talented than I am.

The weird thing is; I think about stuff like Cthulhu or steampunk and I find I still like the original material and kinda bristle at the dumbed down pop culture version once everyone and their second cousins think it's the coolest thing in the world. Maybe with zombies, there was never anything with more depth out there, like what you get with say Lovecraft or Verne or Wells or Mieville or whatever.

[cobaltie.livejournal.com]

I'd totally play a game involving Verne or Wells styled sci-fi...and especially even Mieville.

I still like some of the original stuff for steampunk, but sadly I've only seen derivative stuff of Lovecraft and not gone to the source yet. Might be hard to read after playing Arkham Horror, but maybe not.

Depth in zombie related things tends more towards the existential horrors of being 'the last man on earth' or some such. Rarely any depth on the part of the actual zombies, other than 'they run fast or shamble slow, but kill you or turn you one way or another'.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Vamps are over. Werewolves have peaked. Now zombies are over too?

Dang, I guess it's time to move on to popobawa or something.

Current SF is all steampunk, with no zombies. (the steampunk lesbians fighting zombies is out of print right now)

[cobaltie.livejournal.com]

There's a bat demon character of mine who gets righteously indignant when I call him a popobawa. :-P

Though I heard that recently there were some of them in a children's cartoon cryptozoology show, but they glossed over the actual details of the critter. But from that show, there was /nearly/ a popobawa stuffed animal made. :-P

Jo-El

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

How about a loa? He seems to enjoy horsing others....

Kristy

Re: Jo-El

[cobaltie.livejournal.com]

that has crossed my mind, really. Though as a 'demon' I actually think of him more like an incubus.

[protocat.livejournal.com]

Zombies used to be fun for me. It was what got my sister and I interested in movie makeup among many other horror films we used to watch in the 80s and 90s. My sister actually trained under Tom Savini, the special effects supervisor for the original Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead and she now does makeup professionally. So yeah, this was a pretty big thing for my family and somehow pop culture stumbled upon it and beat it to death with massive overexposure. I don't want to say 'ruined forever', but I'm pretty apathetic about the whole 'zombie' thing for now.

It feels like pretty much everything gets massively overexposed now, but maybe that's just me.

(When I was little I used to find zombies scary simply because it seemed massively unfair. Like 'unfair' was the only way I had to describe it.)

EDIT: Can we please declare Steampunk dead too?

Steampunk... dead?

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

But... my gears! =O.O=

Kristy

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

What about steam-powered zombies?

[protocat.livejournal.com]

Aren't they the ones that update BoingBoing?

[aylira-tesayon.livejournal.com]

I'm more of a fantasy girl, but the same complaint generally goes there. It's nice to see a bit more fae stuff showing up though, unfortunately most of it is YA and also very...romance plot heavy, I'd far rather see a more deeply drawn world like DeLint does in his urban faerie stuff (his Dreamtime is so well described...its somewhere I've been, it's just so right) than random mushiness and a rehash of "beauty and the beast" (the romance plot of Valiant was kinda...ugh, however I loved it for its depiction of fringe life, though again in the end I have to condemn it for the weak, moralizing ending...but I guess I should expect that going in with YA fiction *ugh*) Hell, DeLint even had it beat in some ways in the life on the fringe too...

Wow, ok, I'm sorry, that comment got away from me...I hope it makes sense.

[sci.livejournal.com]

Presumably because the story where they never board the ship, electrostaticly repel incoming nanites, remotely hack the ships navigational computer and send it straight to atomic death in the heart of the nearest star wouldn't be as good a story? Or at least, not as long a story.

Might make a good 1st chapter storyline bluff though.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

The zombie fad bothers me more than most others because, hey, many of us have had deaths among our famililies and close friends. Recently. I find it funny like a noose hanging outside the black fraternity is funny.

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

I once created a character as part of a story proposal that never went anywhere, which addressed this exact concern about zombies. Essentially, a comic relief zombie which was being experimented on to figure out what made zombies tick gains full sentience (when the force being the zombie's creation makes an offer to the experimenter and she refuses). Having her full knowledge of Earth customs, he calls himself the Daimyo, and he is a reflection of the way zombies must perceive us. He is very intelligent and articulate. "I'm dead. I'm not heartless."
He perceives traditional zombies as children, rampant without discipline. He despises how humans treat them, and experiments on humans to figure out how to bring intelligence to his kin. He still respects humans, as every one may someday be his kin, in the same way that we revere animals and nature as having elements of the Divine in them. He sees no need to slaughter humans - they will all die anyway and death is a wonderful thing.
He revels in the malleability of dead flesh and replaces parts of his body which are falling apart. Since the flesh's nerve endings are dead, his senses are far more muted than our own, and it gives him a tranquil, more Buddhist disposition. he is not quick to anger. Most of the physical world and living culture is alien to him.

In the proposal, he is killed by being transported to our Earth, which has nothing to sustain him, and he becomes a corpse.

I really wish I could have worked with him as a character ad explored him more.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Ever since Romero Zombies have been a metaphor for the non-in group people you are surrounded by who are making the world shit. Not every producer of zombie related media has been entirely cognizant of this. The zombie apocalypse is always a power fantasy about hooking up with some cool like minded folks and sticking it to the lumbering idiotic system. But the market for zombie related media has become saturated lately. Like vampires I wish to impose a ten year moratorium, but I know we have further to go, and the amount of zombie related media present even in a zombie recession tends to be much higher than say, a vampire recession. Either way, these recessions are always much shorter than could usually be wanted. Sigh.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

I've never liked zombies because, well, they're a turnoff. Everybody in town has turned into bloodthirsty monsters made of decaying flesh, and the hero must hook up with a band of people and occupy increasingly small, scary and uncomfortable spaces to try to stave off the inevitable end as long as possible?

Blecch! I prefer lighter stuff.

As I like to put it, I don't like zombies because I don't fantasize about the destruction of my world, because my world doesn't suck. Certainly not in a way that zombies would make it suck *less*. :}