Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Tag: zombies
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In comments on my review of Mt. Takao as a zombie survival spot, commenter’s Claytonian and Paul raised the complex and controversial issue of Zombies and water. Claytonian even went so far as to raise the radical (but in my opinion very interesting and challenging) notion that zombies might retain some human instincts: come to…
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Takao Mountain (高尾山), on the western edge of the Tokyo metropolis, is a low (approximately 500m high) peak on the edge of a small nature reserve, easily accessible on the Keio line or the Chuo line. The mountain top hosts a temple, Yakuoin (薬王院), and some hiking paths, and although it is a steep climb…
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A novel I picked up in (surprise!) Iceland, Zombie Iceland is exactly what it says, no more and no less. It’s the tale of a group of survivors in Iceland after a mysterious gas explosion at a local geothermal powerplant turns the good folk of Reykjavik into Zombies, written by a journalist and comedian called…
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Apparently there has been a hundred year quest to find them, ever since Darwin’s contemporary discovered the first Zombie ants, but lost all records in a mysterious fire that destroyed his ship. Some new researchers have discovered them in Brazil. But will they, too, be ruined by a strange curse?
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I think everyone is probably familiar with the idea of this novel, which is the original tale of Pride and Prejudice set in an England beset by a plague of zombies (or “unmentionables”). I’d been meaning to see how this story worked for some time now but, sadly, it was a little disappointing. The basic…
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I just discovered a new book, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, by Daniel Drezner, which is nicely summarized and reviewed at Inside Higher Education. There is much speculation on the explosion of zombie cultural material in the 1990s, but little consideration there of the possibility that it’s related to public health awareness rather than…
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Reading World War Z has got me thinking about a lot of different things, but the first thing I noticed was the way in which the modern Zombie tale has increasingly become a commentary on (and, generally, an endorsement of) modern public health and disease prevention principles. Of course, public health principles applied in the…
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I devoured this novel in 4 hours on the Beppu-Fukuoka return train, and I thought it was awesome. The book is an Oral History of an international zombie conflict, which starts in China and brings humanity to the edge of extinction. It is written as a series of interviews, which were intended to be incorporated…
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I started reading World War Z this morning, and so far it’s excellent but the central conceit – that it’s a factual account written in the aftermath of a zombie plague – just doesn’t hold up, because the introduction presents information so implausible that you can’t trust the credibility of the author. I mean, sure,…
Compromise and Conceit 