Zombies
Recently I’ve been reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner. It’s a book about how much Dean hates me. I figured out that I need to have some kind of reward system in order to complete it. Read certain amount, reward myself. That kind of thing. So I picked up Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker.
This one is interesting if you take into account the Gardner chapter we just read about “jazzing around”. It is reported as a steampunk book but, generally, in order to be a steampunk book you have to meet a couple basic criteria. One of them is that it has to take place in victorian London, or victorian England. It’s usually London, though. And it has to have, y’know, steam.
This book, however, takes place in the united states, although it is still during the victorian period. Yet we still call it steampunk. Priest is jazzing around with the genre but the reason she will likely get away with it is because she added zombies into the mix. That seems to be the recent trend lately where if you want to do something different, something bold, to cross barriers and boundaries you just stick some zombies into the book and call it a day.
Now, this isn’t to say that adding zombies to a story makes it a bad story. I just feel that it may take away from the long-term appeal of the story or it may detract from some of the more useful elements that will let the story live a lot longer than it otherwise would have. That’s the danger of working within a fad. It’s over-saturated, and you don’t know if your story has what it takes to actually stand out. Is it worth grabbing the attention of mainstream readers? I don’t know. Just a thought.
We can thank Steam’s “Left 4 Dead” for this. Since that game has surfaced, we have seen movies, books, and the general media play into the whole zombie thing a bit.
I feel we have reached the peak of it though following the DVD release of Zombieland…or at least we can hope. Like everything, zombies go in and out of style.
Someone will find something new to write or design something after.
I have to agree with you though, it would take away from the story, unless it was explicitly about zombies. For example, look at Vampire Diaries, the Twilight Series, and True Blood, all of them contain “vampires” and are therefore grouped together, combined, and ultimately diluted. Now let’s call in Blade to end the anti-creative movement!
@Garrett Radant
I would have to argue that the zombies were blooming before L4D, although that surely doesn’t hurt. World War Z was kind of the pinnacle, and the zombies have been pouring in since then.
I think that Romero just kind of “did” the zombie story and there isn’t a lot left to say on the subject other than derivative fiction like you mentioned.
It all depends. I think some people, no matter overplayed a concept is, they just make it work.
I’ve been wanting to read that book. It’s on my very long to-read list. haha.
@Red Ah yes. Max Brooks. Thanks for reminding me. I own all of his books. Very well written.
First, As I Lay Dying is amazing. And it, too, has a zombie of sorts (Addie gets to come back and talk for a while, but she doesn’t eat Cora’s brain, sadly).
The London and steam bits are a byproduct of where steampunk comes from (well, besides the name itself). It’s a genre that revises a certain brand of very early Sci-Fi called the “Edisonade,” where young inventors go out into nature and tame it, along with the barbaric natives. They were adventures that had a bunch of racist, sexist and other things generally immoral.
Steampunk inverts many of the qualities of those old adventure tales, but keeps others. There is usually an inventor type (Perdido Street, The Difference Engine, Warlord of the Air, Diamond Age, and The Steampunk Trilogy all have them), but the settings are often urban (since that’s where the “punks” tend to reside). Many of the texts like to tinker with time and genres, too, since their authors are already in the strange position of writing science fiction of over 100 years ago. These are some of the reasons I find it so interesting.
I think that Boneshaker has an inventor family, no? Isn’t that how the zombies come about? I skimmed the blurb before I went into my rage over the Macmillan buy buttons disappearing from Amazon.
But, yeah, the zombie bit feels like a trend, especially apparent by the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
@Dean
I have been schooled!
I’m not saying that As I Lay Dying is bad. If I read it of my own volition, and at my own pace, I’m sure I would enjoy it. Sadly neither of these two options are dependent on what I want. :p
I suppose that, ironically enough, my knowledge of the genre has come from the trends that I’ve been following. There was an “inventor type” in The Difference Machine but it wasn’t very pronounced. In fact, it wasn’t very pronounced in any steampunk book I’ve read, but there is always a machine that was built, I suppose.
Boneshaker is the same, where there is an inventor but he’s already dead (because of his invention) before the book begins. The zombies come from the accident that the boneshaker created, but (in the early parts of the book, at least) it is used as nothing more than a tool to leverage some drama out of the book and create contrast between the perception of characters, and it’s used fairly astutely. It’s mostly a story about perception and redemption, and how a family with nothing deals with those concepts.