books

Zombies on the brain

Here are three zombie-inspired links: Zombie Neurobiology [via], Zombie Legos [via], and China Mieville’s proposed literary movement, “Zombiefail ’09-ism” [via]:

…this will be the movement for those tired of the unrelenting imperialism of zombies in horror–and now other–fiction. The writers’ position will be that what started as an invigoration (one hesitates to say ‘revivification’, in this context) of an antique trope has viralled to the point where its ubiquity makes it ambulonecrotophile kitsch. Zombies that once stalked the cultural unconscious like baleful rebukes are now cuddly toys, dead metaphors (ba-boom) at which we can’t stay mad. Paradoxically, out of very respect for increasingly degraded zombies, Zombiefail ’09-ist writers will either explicitly undermine their banalisation by melancholy mockery of them, or refuse to write about them at all, instead plundering various mythoi for more neglected monsters with which to end the world.

I’m not sure I can jump on the “fewer zombies” bandwagon, however tongue-in-cheek, and even if we maybe are reaching a saturation point. Books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are supposed to be surprisingly good, Plants vs. Zombies is great and addictive fun, and there’s no end of intelligent discourse on zombies to be had. Just because there are zombie toys, that doesn’t mean that zombies can’t also be scary. (I’d maintain that those zombie Legos are pretty darn creepy in their own right.)

Still, Mieville isn’t wrong; their ubiquity maybe has undermined some of what made zombies so frightening in the first place. Certainly it’s happened with other boogeymen, notably vampires. As Zach Handlen writes in his reivew of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s new novel The Strain:

Vampires aren’t scary anymore. Blame Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer, Hot Topic, whoever; whatever the reason, blood-sucking fiends lurking in the shadows no longer carry the same old skin-crawling cultural cachet. Which presents a problem for writers who still want to use them.

But every problem is a challenge if you look at it in the right light. I have no doubt there are still new and inventive takes on the zombie still waiting to be created. Even 28 Days Later, which Mieville includes among the “negative influences” his movement will shun, can be seen as a reaction against the sort of campy Romero knockoffs that dominated zombie pop culture for most of the’70s and ’80s. No doubt something — or many different things — will come along to react against the camp that’s since followed it.

Then again, even in Romero’s movies, it’s rarely the zombies who are the most frightening people.

Getting out of science fiction

From a recent profile of China Miéville:

But he feels that fantastic tales are a natural part of storytelling. When skeptics ask him, “How did you get into sci-fi and fantasy?” he has a response. “My answer is: How did you get out of it?” says Mr. Miéville. “Because if you look at a roomful of kids, huge numbers of them will love aliens and monsters and witches…and at a certain point, some of them will start to leave that behind and go on to what they think of — wrongly — as more serious stuff.”

Via SF Signal.

Hungry like the Wolfe

I finished reading Gene Wolfe’s Urth of the New Sun this evening, and you know, it really does shed a lot of new light on the four books before it. Here are a couple of things John Clute had to say about Gene Wolfe, in discussing his recent Best of short story collection:

We do not enter a story by Gene Wolfe without knocking, because the door to the inner rooms is never open. What many potential readers have wrongly assumed over the years, however, is that a door that is not open is door that is locked, that everything Wolfe writes needs a key—probably inscribed with runes—to get inside of.

…and…

What is pointed at is each word. The only way to read Gene Wolfe is to knock first, to glue your eyes to the carapace and peer into the world inside, like a blind man suddenly gifted with sight. The only way to read Gene Wolfe is to read Gene Wolfe.

Ain’t that the truth. I’m also reminded of something user timbot recently wrote at the Gene Wolfe Solar Cycle Book Club:

On an aside, do you ever find with Wolfe that you have a clear memory of the text only to go off and find the relevant passage to find that there is a clause or modifier in it that you didn’t remember, making the whole quote (the cornerstone of some argument you were constructing of course) less concrete than you had previously thought? Genius!

Wolfe really does ask a lot from his readers.