16 ms·

Yet another novel I will no longer write

304 points by ttepasse 7y ago

pacman128 7y ago
One of my favorite authors. Listening to his novel, Glasshouse, right now. If you're looking for something to read right now, check him out.
- plerpin 7y ago
  I read Neptune's Brood and was hooked. It's a fun surreal sci-fi adventure/romp with a heck of a lot of really interesting, geeky tech interludes. Who knew a novel about futuristic accountancy and forex could be so intriguing?
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    It even has zombies!
  - shoo 7y ago
    > The theory of interstellar trade is a well-understood topic, with an extensive literature consisting of one paper (pdf) I wrote in 1978. Interstellar finance, however, is less well covered. > That’s all about to change, however. I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date. > It’s also a fantastic novel. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-interstellar-finance/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-i... > This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are derived. https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
- shoo 7y ago
  Glasshouse is great. I've enjoyed every Stross novel I've read, and Glasshouse was the first one, after stumbling across a newspaper review when it was released. Both the Laundry Files & Merchant Princes / Empire games series are also great fun. You can get a feel for Stross' Laundry Files series from: "A Colder War" http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm (not Laundry Files, but in the ballpark) "Equoid" https://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/ https://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/ For the longest time I didn't try reading the Merchant Princes series because it _appeared_ to be too much of a fantasy series for my tastes -- boy was I mistaken. It's less "Narnia" and more "what do you reckon would actually happen if a paranoid US administration discovered Narnia" with healthy doses of feuding and economics.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    Merchant Princess started off as "secret royal heritage" fantasy - the first 3 books (which were later recombined into one larger book, IIRC) were closer to alternate-universe fantasy than the subsequent books, which are more sci-fi/[rot13-spoiler]nygreangr-uvfgbel[/rot13-spoiler]/wormhole-opera? Also, I need to catch up on the series
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Stross's blog posts on the series are fascinating reads. The short badly paraphrased tale is that Stross wanted to diversify his publishers but was contractually obligated to give sci-fi books to his first publisher, so he pitched a "fantasy" book. Stross being Stross though, he can't actually write a fantasy novel so it was stealth sci-fi, because of course it was. He wrote the first book in the 1000+ page "door stop" form common to a lot of "high fantasy" mega-authors like Stephen King, Neal Stephenson, GRRM, Robert Jordan, et al, because Stross wrongly assumed that was the intended form factor of a fantasy novel (because it wasn't his native genre and when you do look at bookshelves they are rather dominated by the mega-books), and the publisher did exactly what JRR Tolkien's publisher did for Lord of the Rings and said it was way too long for a first book in a new series, as that would be expensive if it didn't sell well, and chopped it (somewhat roughly) into three books. (So the combination of the first three books was actually recombination into something more resembling their original manuscript form.)
jhbadger 7y ago
I just don't get the multiple people saying "Zombie epidemics as a topic are over because of COVID-19". They might be over just because there's been a glut of them, but in no way, shape, or form does the current pandemic resemble a zombie pandemic.
- dhosek 7y ago
  He's not saying that zombie epidemics as a topic are over, just that his take on it has been rendered obsolete by current events. It's sort of like a short short (either written by or edited by Isaac Asimov, I don't remember—I read it forty years ago) that proposed that Everest would never be summited because it had been colonized by Martians. Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited.
  - dhosek 7y ago
    Another similar instance just popped into my brain—in college a friend wrote a piece for the college paper in which, writing about political changes in Eastern Europe, he wrote, "but don't expect the Berlin Wall to come down any time soon." As you might have guessed, the Berlin Wall came down between the writing and the publication.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      I recall a book in the bookstore in 1989 about how IBM was inevitably going to grow and take over the world. Wish I'd bought it. :-)
    - macintux 7y ago
      I stumbled upon a paper I wrote in high school in 1987 about European unification. I came to the same conclusion; thankfully no one but my teacher ever read it, and I doubt she remembered it 2 years later.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    >Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited. That's obviously what they want you to think!
hyperpallium 7y ago
Includes first draft of first chapter.
Barrin92 7y ago
>The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence. It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite. This is such a salient point. It's something I've noticed when someone recommended me The Walking dead years ago. It's horrendous how reactionary and borderline fascist that show is in its nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out. At one point I was thinking if the show is actually pushing this narrative so hard as to parody it but it certainly doesn't seem to be viewed that way.
- biztos 7y ago
  “Fear the Walking Dead” deals with these questions very explicitly. One of the main characters is what you could call a zombie sympathizer.
- ilamont 7y ago
  "I am Legend" not only portrayed surviving humans as more sympathetic toward each other, but even humanized the infected zombies (to a degree). The zombies had a leader, and he was motivated not by a desire to kill humans, but by what appeared to be desperate love of someone taken from him. I won't give any more details, but if you haven't seen it, it's a great film.
  - sigzero 7y ago
    The book and the film diverge. It's still a good film. The alternate ending is way better.
avip 7y ago
Should have adopted the strategy of assuming the book exists and write a review. Used so effectively by Borjes it won him a Nobel.
- danidiaz 7y ago
  Also used by Stanislaw Lem in "A Perfect Vacuum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum The last review in that book anticipates much of the premise of Cixin Liu's "Remembrance of Earth's Past".
- ableal 7y ago
  If you mean Jorge Luis Borges, sadly no Nobel for him. P.S. Local press had an item about an "International Writers Committee" naming Borges for the 2018 prize posthumously: https://www.dn.pt/lusa/comite-internacional-de-escritores-atribui-nobel-da-literatura-a-jorge-luis-borges-9988389.html https://www.dn.pt/lusa/comite-internacional-de-escritores-at...
  - avip 7y ago
    Thanks for the (double) correction! Just read he "lost" in 65' with Nabokov and Neruda. Nice list to be in.
IndrekR 7y ago
I was just browsing/reading his old Linux articles. May be interest for others as well: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/linux/index.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/linux/index.html
setgree 7y ago
This is an interesting take on what zombie fiction is about: > The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Contrast this to Christian Thorne [0], who writes: > Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds. People-in-groups are the genre’s single motivating concern. Other classic movie monsters are like malign superheroes, possessed of special powers, great reserves of speed and strength. What’s peculiar about zombies, when put alongside vampires or werewolves or aliens, is that they are actually weaker than ordinary human beings. They are really easy to kill for a start, because their bodies are already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off. They go down by the dozen. You’re in no danger of being outwitted. They can kill only because they have the numbers, and so that’s the menace that zombie movies are always trying to clarify: The threat of multitudes. I've watched/read a fair bit of zombie stuff, and I think Thorne is more on the mark about modern zombie movies. -- lots of scenes of zombies breaking down barricades or tearing people out of their cars (America's favorite refuge against crowds!). But movies that try harder to have a point, like the original Day of the Dead, lay it on pretty thick that we are the zombies (who, even after death, return to the mall to amble around). Which is, I think, more in-keeping with a 'zombies are slaves doomed to eternal toil' reading. Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' flips the slave/master dynamic by having a mediocre black protagonist advance in post-zombie society way more than he was ever going to pre-outbreak, because the C student who survives in a low-effort way is more resilient than traditional high-achievers. 0: https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running-of-the-dead-part-2/ https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running-of-t...
- xrd 7y ago
  That is a fantastic write-up of those movies. Thank you for offering this in this thread.
- 7y ago
bhaak 7y ago
> And then COVID-19 came along and basically rendered the whole thing unneccessary because we are all getting a real world crash-course in how we deal with people suffering from a viral pandemic, and we do /not/ generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us. But that's not the standard zombie scenario. Having 1% of the population being somehow sick and dying or a strain on the medical resources doesn't make society collapse. The zombie scenario is that only 1% of the population is unaffected and society breaks down and disappears and modern humans, humans living after the Enlightement, have to survive in a hostile environment. I agree with Charles Stross that people don't just bash their heads in a crisis but that they start to look after their own community. But this probably stops after we reach the magical number of 150 people. After that, other people are not friends anymore and how we deal with them when resources are scarce, well, I'm not as optimistic as he is. Just look at the current mediterranean situation and that's when resources aren't actually scarce.
- XorNot 7y ago
  Person 151 is not a non-person, they're just a member of another group, who's leadership will include the other groups within the 150 monkey-sphere hence the basis of hierarchical human societies. The dumbest thing about most "preppers" is that they invariably develop absurd ideas about how their fortress will beat back the hordes they imagine to descend (sound familiar?) yet pay basically no attention to their local council, who would be the nearest level of organization and planning continuance which would allow a practical response if the larger systems failed. This isn't even speculative: the current the COVID-19 response in America has required local councils and city boards to coordinate, particularly in the absence of any clear direction at a Federal and frequently State level.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Reminds me of the Subgenius advice for the faithful. In the end times don't be a sap holed up waiting for defend yourself against marauding gangs. Join a marauding gang as soon as possible.
StavrosK 7y ago
Pet peeve: An expatriate isn't like an ex-skier, it comes from "to expatriate", ie to drive out of one's country, like "excommunicate" or "excise". Something that has been excised wasn't formerly cised.
- fhars 7y ago
  I think you missed a joke at the expense of the toothsome nightmare of après ski culture.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Maybe, but I don't think I did, mainly because "expatriate" isn't spelled with a hyphen.
    - sangnoir 7y ago
      I thought that was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek: ex-zombie...ex-skier...ex-patriate. And this was disclaimed as a very rough first draft - I'm guessing the author (in subsequent drafts),an editor or a test-reader would have caught it & have it revised (it's pretty low-effort wordplay - but that's more than OK for a first draft as disclaimed, and the author could even keep it if they feel strongly about it)
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        Hmm, yes, it could be. I've seen it written like that too often for it to be a good joke, but who knows what the intention was.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
d_burfoot 7y ago
> Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them... It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats... It's also fundamentally wrong. This statement is so profoundly ignorant and offensive that it's hard to reply to it. It's almost literally equivalent to Holocaust denial - the Holocaust was very much about the poor German masses rising up to murder the wealthy Jewish elites. History is replete with other examples of poor people overthrowing and then murdering the rich: the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the Cuban revolution, etc etc. In rhetoric, the revolutionary slogan is "we're going to take money from the rich", but what happens in reality is more like "we're going to take the money from the rich and then murder them".
- stcredzero 7y ago
  In rhetoric, the revolutionary slogan is "we're going to take money from the rich", but what happens in reality is more like "we're going to take the money from the rich and then murder them". Also: The Kulaks in the Ukraine. Various persons during various Maoist upheavals in China. Everyone has the same illusions to different degrees: "Our side doesn't do these bad things." Then, when the facts come out, "It was justified!"
  - bsanr 7y ago
    The issue is that this behavior doesn't come out of some inborn bloodthirst, but rather a scenario akin to, "We're taking you're stuff." "I'll kill you if you try." "Well then we must defend ourselves." Inevitably, stuff is appropriated and the mob, in its losses, learns to pull the trigger first. "Society" is this but both sides knowing when to stop before the shooting begins.
    - Udik 7y ago
      I don't think it works like that at all. I think the cognitive process is more like "they have all the stuff, and we have nothing. They have it because they're stealing it from us. And they know we're starving and they don't care, so they're existential enemies to us, and they deserve to die". Thus the process is completely one-sided, and there is very little the other side can do.
Igelau 7y ago
> this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising I think it's a pretty fair to say the modern zombie story starts with Night of the Living Dead, and this viewpoint couldn't possibly be any further from how Romero handles themes of race, class, and authority. I mean, maybe it's because I don't watch Walking Dead, but I've never seen a zombie film where I thought I was supposed to empathize with the protagonists. Except maybe Shaun of the Dead!
rapind 7y ago
What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy. I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be taught to perform complex tasks through reward / punishment? Seems like the next logical distopian step to take, and brings up all sorts of complicated mechanics, economics, and morality questions.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy. Not true for Shaun of the Dead!
  - fragmede 7y ago
    Fido (2006) as well!
- misnome 7y ago
  "Day of the Dead" (1985) has a scientist trying to do this...
- Talanes 7y ago
  Zombies also seem to just keep moving without any energy input. Figure out how to keep them moving where you want them and you have a generator that runs as long as the zombie is solid enough to move it. If you're dealing with Walking Dead rules where everyone turns after death, and it's a renewing resource.
- chippy 7y ago
  the early zombie movies covered this too. It was a major plot point of the research of living with the virus (and training them) via intelligence vs eliminating it via brute strength
  - 7y ago
auntienomen 7y ago
Still hoping for a 3rd novel in the Freyaverse. It doesn't have to be named Uranus's Spawn.
mcguire 7y ago
Hmm. There are some science fiction tropes that become really obvious when you start looking for them. For one, check out Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Heinlein's Puppet Masters: that's "the Commies are among us", and it's not surprising that it became a significant thing in the 1950s. Although the idea that there are a group of people out there who look and act completely normal but who are actually out to destroy everything that decent people hold dear is a pretty common fear; demonic possession and all. The Zombie 'Pocalypse is another. Charlie's right, it is the same fear as that of the owners of an antebellum Southern plantation at the mention of a slave uprising. The idea that all of the people you live with every day might suddenly turn into degenerate, savage monsters yearning to snack on your favorite nervous system is pretty scary, though. But it doesn't really have anything to do with infection or disease, and he is wrong to try to tie the two together. The infection isn't the important part. Oh, and let's wait until the next time something like the current pandemic happens before we pass too much judgement on how people react. Consider the difference between the Northeast blackout of 1965 and the New York City blackout of 1977.
invertY 7y ago
92 comments no-one noticed that Cstross' Zombies weren't actually zombies qua zombies & the entire twist was that 'finding and feeding a zombie before it became truly dead' was his 1st chapter. i.e. If you find and feed a "zombie" chicken nuggets, its brain ceases to degrade.[1] It's a riff on Metaphysical P-Zombies and Cognition hidden in his usual "here's the guff that gets you a sale pitch in modern media" coupled with a "What if Mind [i]thought[/i] it was a zombie, but wasn't, and Humans did not act like the movies, but as if they were plague victims". 92 comments: no-one spotted the philosophy. Or the kinda obvious morality hit-you-with-a-sledge-hammer meta-tale. As a note: HackerNews seems to not have noticed this at all or read the entire piece. OH, and it's probably not going to be published because the entire Western world just proved that in a Capitalist system, they're going to back-stab each other over contracts, run prices past gouging and into actual piracy between NATO states and the like. But. 92 comments, and none of you spotted even the basics. [1] Mr Stross might be aware of the "Chicken Tendies" meme. He probably is, seems clued up about Frogs and Alt-Right memeology these days. (Won't get upvotes, but edited because formatting was wrong)
- icebraining 7y ago
  Why would you assume we didn't notice it?
deleted 7y ago
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erikbye 7y ago
His previous novels had many tropes. In fact, most stories do, and it should probably not stop one from writing them. You will be hard-pressed to find stories without numerous familiar tropes. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Rule34 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Rule34 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HaltingState https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HaltingSta...

304 points by ttepasse 7y ago

One of my favorite authors. Listening to his novel, Glasshouse, right now. If you're looking for something to read right now, check him out.

plerpin 7y ago
I read Neptune's Brood and was hooked. It's a fun surreal sci-fi adventure/romp with a heck of a lot of really interesting, geeky tech interludes. Who knew a novel about futuristic accountancy and forex could be so intriguing?
- egypturnash 7y ago
  It even has zombies!
- shoo 7y ago
  > The theory of interstellar trade is a well-understood topic, with an extensive literature consisting of one paper (pdf) I wrote in 1978. Interstellar finance, however, is less well covered. > That’s all about to change, however. I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date. > It’s also a fantastic novel. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-interstellar-finance/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-i... > This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are derived. https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
shoo 7y ago
Glasshouse is great. I've enjoyed every Stross novel I've read, and Glasshouse was the first one, after stumbling across a newspaper review when it was released. Both the Laundry Files & Merchant Princes / Empire games series are also great fun. You can get a feel for Stross' Laundry Files series from: "A Colder War" http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm (not Laundry Files, but in the ballpark) "Equoid" https://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/ https://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/ For the longest time I didn't try reading the Merchant Princes series because it _appeared_ to be too much of a fantasy series for my tastes -- boy was I mistaken. It's less "Narnia" and more "what do you reckon would actually happen if a paranoid US administration discovered Narnia" with healthy doses of feuding and economics.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  Merchant Princess started off as "secret royal heritage" fantasy - the first 3 books (which were later recombined into one larger book, IIRC) were closer to alternate-universe fantasy than the subsequent books, which are more sci-fi/[rot13-spoiler]nygreangr-uvfgbel[/rot13-spoiler]/wormhole-opera? Also, I need to catch up on the series
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Stross's blog posts on the series are fascinating reads. The short badly paraphrased tale is that Stross wanted to diversify his publishers but was contractually obligated to give sci-fi books to his first publisher, so he pitched a "fantasy" book. Stross being Stross though, he can't actually write a fantasy novel so it was stealth sci-fi, because of course it was. He wrote the first book in the 1000+ page "door stop" form common to a lot of "high fantasy" mega-authors like Stephen King, Neal Stephenson, GRRM, Robert Jordan, et al, because Stross wrongly assumed that was the intended form factor of a fantasy novel (because it wasn't his native genre and when you do look at bookshelves they are rather dominated by the mega-books), and the publisher did exactly what JRR Tolkien's publisher did for Lord of the Rings and said it was way too long for a first book in a new series, as that would be expensive if it didn't sell well, and chopped it (somewhat roughly) into three books. (So the combination of the first three books was actually recombination into something more resembling their original manuscript form.)

jhbadger 7y ago

I just don't get the multiple people saying "Zombie epidemics as a topic are over because of COVID-19". They might be over just because there's been a glut of them, but in no way, shape, or form does the current pandemic resemble a zombie pandemic.

dhosek 7y ago
He's not saying that zombie epidemics as a topic are over, just that his take on it has been rendered obsolete by current events. It's sort of like a short short (either written by or edited by Isaac Asimov, I don't remember—I read it forty years ago) that proposed that Everest would never be summited because it had been colonized by Martians. Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited.
- dhosek 7y ago
  Another similar instance just popped into my brain—in college a friend wrote a piece for the college paper in which, writing about political changes in Eastern Europe, he wrote, "but don't expect the Berlin Wall to come down any time soon." As you might have guessed, the Berlin Wall came down between the writing and the publication.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I recall a book in the bookstore in 1989 about how IBM was inevitably going to grow and take over the world. Wish I'd bought it. :-)
  - macintux 7y ago
    I stumbled upon a paper I wrote in high school in 1987 about European unification. I came to the same conclusion; thankfully no one but my teacher ever read it, and I doubt she remembered it 2 years later.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  >Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited. That's obviously what they want you to think!

hyperpallium 7y ago

Includes first draft of first chapter.

Barrin92 7y ago

>The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence. It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite. This is such a salient point. It's something I've noticed when someone recommended me The Walking dead years ago. It's horrendous how reactionary and borderline fascist that show is in its nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out. At one point I was thinking if the show is actually pushing this narrative so hard as to parody it but it certainly doesn't seem to be viewed that way.

biztos 7y ago
“Fear the Walking Dead” deals with these questions very explicitly. One of the main characters is what you could call a zombie sympathizer.
ilamont 7y ago
"I am Legend" not only portrayed surviving humans as more sympathetic toward each other, but even humanized the infected zombies (to a degree). The zombies had a leader, and he was motivated not by a desire to kill humans, but by what appeared to be desperate love of someone taken from him. I won't give any more details, but if you haven't seen it, it's a great film.
- sigzero 7y ago
  The book and the film diverge. It's still a good film. The alternate ending is way better.

avip 7y ago

Should have adopted the strategy of assuming the book exists and write a review. Used so effectively by Borjes it won him a Nobel.

danidiaz 7y ago
Also used by Stanislaw Lem in "A Perfect Vacuum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum The last review in that book anticipates much of the premise of Cixin Liu's "Remembrance of Earth's Past".
ableal 7y ago
If you mean Jorge Luis Borges, sadly no Nobel for him. P.S. Local press had an item about an "International Writers Committee" naming Borges for the 2018 prize posthumously: https://www.dn.pt/lusa/comite-internacional-de-escritores-atribui-nobel-da-literatura-a-jorge-luis-borges-9988389.html https://www.dn.pt/lusa/comite-internacional-de-escritores-at...
- avip 7y ago
  Thanks for the (double) correction! Just read he "lost" in 65' with Nabokov and Neruda. Nice list to be in.

IndrekR 7y ago

I was just browsing/reading his old Linux articles. May be interest for others as well: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/linux/index.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/linux/index.html

setgree 7y ago

This is an interesting take on what zombie fiction is about: > The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Contrast this to Christian Thorne [0], who writes: > Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds. People-in-groups are the genre’s single motivating concern. Other classic movie monsters are like malign superheroes, possessed of special powers, great reserves of speed and strength. What’s peculiar about zombies, when put alongside vampires or werewolves or aliens, is that they are actually weaker than ordinary human beings. They are really easy to kill for a start, because their bodies are already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off. They go down by the dozen. You’re in no danger of being outwitted. They can kill only because they have the numbers, and so that’s the menace that zombie movies are always trying to clarify: The threat of multitudes. I've watched/read a fair bit of zombie stuff, and I think Thorne is more on the mark about modern zombie movies. -- lots of scenes of zombies breaking down barricades or tearing people out of their cars (America's favorite refuge against crowds!). But movies that try harder to have a point, like the original Day of the Dead, lay it on pretty thick that we are the zombies (who, even after death, return to the mall to amble around). Which is, I think, more in-keeping with a 'zombies are slaves doomed to eternal toil' reading. Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' flips the slave/master dynamic by having a mediocre black protagonist advance in post-zombie society way more than he was ever going to pre-outbreak, because the C student who survives in a low-effort way is more resilient than traditional high-achievers. 0: https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running-of-the-dead-part-2/ https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running-of-t...

xrd 7y ago
That is a fantastic write-up of those movies. Thank you for offering this in this thread.
7y ago

bhaak 7y ago

> And then COVID-19 came along and basically rendered the whole thing unneccessary because we are all getting a real world crash-course in how we deal with people suffering from a viral pandemic, and we do /not/ generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us. But that's not the standard zombie scenario. Having 1% of the population being somehow sick and dying or a strain on the medical resources doesn't make society collapse. The zombie scenario is that only 1% of the population is unaffected and society breaks down and disappears and modern humans, humans living after the Enlightement, have to survive in a hostile environment. I agree with Charles Stross that people don't just bash their heads in a crisis but that they start to look after their own community. But this probably stops after we reach the magical number of 150 people. After that, other people are not friends anymore and how we deal with them when resources are scarce, well, I'm not as optimistic as he is. Just look at the current mediterranean situation and that's when resources aren't actually scarce.

XorNot 7y ago
Person 151 is not a non-person, they're just a member of another group, who's leadership will include the other groups within the 150 monkey-sphere hence the basis of hierarchical human societies. The dumbest thing about most "preppers" is that they invariably develop absurd ideas about how their fortress will beat back the hordes they imagine to descend (sound familiar?) yet pay basically no attention to their local council, who would be the nearest level of organization and planning continuance which would allow a practical response if the larger systems failed. This isn't even speculative: the current the COVID-19 response in America has required local councils and city boards to coordinate, particularly in the absence of any clear direction at a Federal and frequently State level.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Reminds me of the Subgenius advice for the faithful. In the end times don't be a sap holed up waiting for defend yourself against marauding gangs. Join a marauding gang as soon as possible.

StavrosK 7y ago

Pet peeve: An expatriate isn't like an ex-skier, it comes from "to expatriate", ie to drive out of one's country, like "excommunicate" or "excise". Something that has been excised wasn't formerly cised.

fhars 7y ago
I think you missed a joke at the expense of the toothsome nightmare of après ski culture.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Maybe, but I don't think I did, mainly because "expatriate" isn't spelled with a hyphen.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    I thought that was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek: ex-zombie...ex-skier...ex-patriate. And this was disclaimed as a very rough first draft - I'm guessing the author (in subsequent drafts),an editor or a test-reader would have caught it & have it revised (it's pretty low-effort wordplay - but that's more than OK for a first draft as disclaimed, and the author could even keep it if they feel strongly about it)
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Hmm, yes, it could be. I've seen it written like that too often for it to be a good joke, but who knows what the intention was.
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d_burfoot 7y ago

> Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them... It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats... It's also fundamentally wrong. This statement is so profoundly ignorant and offensive that it's hard to reply to it. It's almost literally equivalent to Holocaust denial - the Holocaust was very much about the poor German masses rising up to murder the wealthy Jewish elites. History is replete with other examples of poor people overthrowing and then murdering the rich: the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the Cuban revolution, etc etc. In rhetoric, the revolutionary slogan is "we're going to take money from the rich", but what happens in reality is more like "we're going to take the money from the rich and then murder them".

stcredzero 7y ago
In rhetoric, the revolutionary slogan is "we're going to take money from the rich", but what happens in reality is more like "we're going to take the money from the rich and then murder them". Also: The Kulaks in the Ukraine. Various persons during various Maoist upheavals in China. Everyone has the same illusions to different degrees: "Our side doesn't do these bad things." Then, when the facts come out, "It was justified!"
- bsanr 7y ago
  The issue is that this behavior doesn't come out of some inborn bloodthirst, but rather a scenario akin to, "We're taking you're stuff." "I'll kill you if you try." "Well then we must defend ourselves." Inevitably, stuff is appropriated and the mob, in its losses, learns to pull the trigger first. "Society" is this but both sides knowing when to stop before the shooting begins.
  - Udik 7y ago
    I don't think it works like that at all. I think the cognitive process is more like "they have all the stuff, and we have nothing. They have it because they're stealing it from us. And they know we're starving and they don't care, so they're existential enemies to us, and they deserve to die". Thus the process is completely one-sided, and there is very little the other side can do.

Igelau 7y ago

> this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising I think it's a pretty fair to say the modern zombie story starts with Night of the Living Dead, and this viewpoint couldn't possibly be any further from how Romero handles themes of race, class, and authority. I mean, maybe it's because I don't watch Walking Dead, but I've never seen a zombie film where I thought I was supposed to empathize with the protagonists. Except maybe Shaun of the Dead!

rapind 7y ago

What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy. I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be taught to perform complex tasks through reward / punishment? Seems like the next logical distopian step to take, and brings up all sorts of complicated mechanics, economics, and morality questions.

stcredzero 7y ago
What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy. Not true for Shaun of the Dead!
- fragmede 7y ago
  Fido (2006) as well!
misnome 7y ago
"Day of the Dead" (1985) has a scientist trying to do this...
Talanes 7y ago
Zombies also seem to just keep moving without any energy input. Figure out how to keep them moving where you want them and you have a generator that runs as long as the zombie is solid enough to move it. If you're dealing with Walking Dead rules where everyone turns after death, and it's a renewing resource.
chippy 7y ago
the early zombie movies covered this too. It was a major plot point of the research of living with the virus (and training them) via intelligence vs eliminating it via brute strength
- 7y ago

auntienomen 7y ago

Still hoping for a 3rd novel in the Freyaverse. It doesn't have to be named Uranus's Spawn.

mcguire 7y ago

Hmm. There are some science fiction tropes that become really obvious when you start looking for them. For one, check out Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Heinlein's Puppet Masters: that's "the Commies are among us", and it's not surprising that it became a significant thing in the 1950s. Although the idea that there are a group of people out there who look and act completely normal but who are actually out to destroy everything that decent people hold dear is a pretty common fear; demonic possession and all. The Zombie 'Pocalypse is another. Charlie's right, it is the same fear as that of the owners of an antebellum Southern plantation at the mention of a slave uprising. The idea that all of the people you live with every day might suddenly turn into degenerate, savage monsters yearning to snack on your favorite nervous system is pretty scary, though. But it doesn't really have anything to do with infection or disease, and he is wrong to try to tie the two together. The infection isn't the important part. Oh, and let's wait until the next time something like the current pandemic happens before we pass too much judgement on how people react. Consider the difference between the Northeast blackout of 1965 and the New York City blackout of 1977.

invertY 7y ago

92 comments no-one noticed that Cstross' Zombies weren't actually zombies qua zombies & the entire twist was that 'finding and feeding a zombie before it became truly dead' was his 1st chapter. i.e. If you find and feed a "zombie" chicken nuggets, its brain ceases to degrade.[1] It's a riff on Metaphysical P-Zombies and Cognition hidden in his usual "here's the guff that gets you a sale pitch in modern media" coupled with a "What if Mind [i]thought[/i] it was a zombie, but wasn't, and Humans did not act like the movies, but as if they were plague victims". 92 comments: no-one spotted the philosophy. Or the kinda obvious morality hit-you-with-a-sledge-hammer meta-tale. As a note: HackerNews seems to not have noticed this at all or read the entire piece. OH, and it's probably not going to be published because the entire Western world just proved that in a Capitalist system, they're going to back-stab each other over contracts, run prices past gouging and into actual piracy between NATO states and the like. But. 92 comments, and none of you spotted even the basics. [1] Mr Stross might be aware of the "Chicken Tendies" meme. He probably is, seems clued up about Frogs and Alt-Right memeology these days. (Won't get upvotes, but edited because formatting was wrong)

icebraining 7y ago
Why would you assume we didn't notice it?

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erikbye 7y ago

His previous novels had many tropes. In fact, most stories do, and it should probably not stop one from writing them. You will be hard-pressed to find stories without numerous familiar tropes. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Rule34 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Rule34 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HaltingState https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HaltingSta...