Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well a zombie show where people acted sensibly would end after the first few minutes because:

- The scientists involved used sensible precautions because they are pretty intelligent and have no interest in exposing themselves to dangerous pathogens.

- After the first sign of a dangerous outbreak the government gets involved and unlike movie governments they know what they're doing and soldiers will actually just sit in armored vehicles where the risk of zombie bites is minimal.

- It turns out brain tissue alone does not contain enough nutrients for a human-sized being to subsist for a significant amount of time and the outbreak naturally dies down after two days because the zombies run out of energy.

- In any case, Australia will be fine because zombies are not smart enough to pilot a plane or boat all the way there. If the outbreak starts there, the rest of the world is fine by the same logic.

Same thing how horror movies famously depend on the protagonists making the worst possible decisions ("let's split up!"). Zombie movies started off as societal critique about the dangers of consumerism. A realistic scenario does not make for an entertaining movie, and non-entertaining movies don't get funded.

Na. You're making a bunch of assumptions that may not be true.

- Scientists, especially early in an outbreak may not have the procedures down. For example, they will have to study specimens and take samples somehow. Where or how will they get the specimens? How will they put them into quarantine? If they need to be live specimens, this becomes even harder. How do they contain and sedate the specimens? I agree they will better than most movie scientists, but it's hardly a foregone conclusion that everything will safe and fine in perpetuity.

- I doubt this is true. There aren't enough armored vehicles for soldiers to be in one at all times. Plus mission parameters won't allow for that. For example, what if they need to secure a building? Also grunts are grunts, not hazmat experts. People will make mistakes.

Plus even if you're right about this, this say nothing about spreading through the orders-of-magnitude-large civilian population.

- I think you're arbitrarily mixing your zombie mythos. If it's a braaaaains type zombie it's a magical undead creature, and none of your scientific assumptions hold. If it's a virulent disease type zombie, then they can eat more than just human brains. And even if we imagine a scenario where the disease only lets them eat human brains, then it doesn't really matter since the wave of zombie outbreak will hit people regardless of whether the ones closer to ground zero are still alive or not. If they only survive for a couple days after turning, they are still successful if they spread to a new host before that happens.

- You're assuming the incubation period is short. If it starts out like a flu outbreak or something, people who are sick but don't know it yet can land on Australia.

Fight me!

AD 1. I'd assume there would be multiple teams worldwide; some would probably screw up, but most screwups would be containable by scientists themselves, or by police/military.

AD 2. It's not just armored vehicles. It's also forming firing lines, using air support, and generally employing proper tactics instead of ending up in the middle of a Zombie horde.

AD 3. If we exclude Zombies-as-magic, the Zombies really need to eat something. I vaguely recall there was a movie that exploited this in a backstory, mentioning that the epidemic somewhere died down because Zombies starved to death.

AD 4. Yeah, that would be a worst-case scenario, though it would be easier to manage - if we assume the sickness spreads only through bodily fluids (bites), on the one hand you'd have sudden outbreaks everywhere, but on the other hand, you wouldn't be dealing with great hordes immediately turning your dying comrades into more Zombies.

> I vaguely recall there was a movie that exploited this in a backstory, mentioning that the epidemic somewhere died down because Zombies starved to death

28 days later

More specifically I think it's the story of 28 Weeks Later which is based on that.

Has anyone written "rationalist fiction" about a zombie setting? Something like what Worm [0] was for superheroes. Something that isn't just a genre-savvy parody of the flaws of characters in zombie films, but a serious exploration of a band of survivors working to build a community/society to survive and thrive against the zombies. It's probably hard to make it entertaining if one is in the mindset of mainstream tropes, but there's probably a way to make it work.

[0] https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

The Day of the Triffids sort of counts here I think

It's a very smartly written novel that holds up very well. It's also unusually grim for the era.

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion also comes to mind as an example of a realistic, scientifically accurate depiction of an epidemic.

Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, while not being about zombies, is a very science/fact-based exploration of a hypothetical outbreak. A much less scary scenario, though; the pathogen only affects a single, isolated town which is quickly secured, and all of the action occurs in the experimental underground science lab where they study it. The 1971 film is also fantastic, and holds up really well.

Funny enough, the Contagion movie was funded by Jeffrey Skoll a billionaire philanthropist. The purpose was too educate the public on the reality of a pandemic and importance of health organizations.

There are other movies too, all designed to compel social change.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-giving-pledge-a-new-club-fo...

I haven't read it yet myself, but John Ringo's Black Tide Rising series is on my reading list with this note from a rationalist-fiction-loving friend of mine: "There'll be like twenty pages of epic zombie fighting, and then thirty pages on the logistics of salvaging supplies from abandoned ships. And the characters are complicated and nuanced but nearly everyone is super competent (or dies)."

World War Z the book is more or less this, on a global scale.

The movie has nothing to do with the book, except wasting the license.

Great analysis.

My only complaint: "Zombie movies started off as societal critique about the dangers of consumerism"

The meaning of "Night of the Living Dead" (the film that defines where zombie movies started out, critically), is a much-debated topic, but "excessive consumerism" doesn't get much notice until at least a sequel or two later (forgive my memory), with the one that takes place in a mall.

The first/original was much less specific, much more philosophical, which makes it by far the most interesting (to humble 'ole me).

In The Walking Dead, the first season reveal is that the living are already infected. Everybody is a zombie yet to be.

The show isn't about anything though, it's just a shitsack world¹ for the writers to stumble about aimlessly in.

1. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld

> it's just a shitsack world¹ for the writers to stumble about aimlessly in

I gave up on that show halfway through S3 because of the latter part. Shitsack world is fine. My problem with The Walking Dead is that the show lost any kind of sense after S1, and boils down to people doing nasty stuff to other people, without any goal or purpose. It's stories about people who just gave up.

If you want to build the "assume a spherical cow" zombie world, sure.

But the zombie genre tends to be based on the dynamics and interactions of actual humans. Romero's zombie movies are famed as social commentary, and you can (and people probably have) written entire graduate theses on what's going on in those films.

World War Z (the book, I haven't seen the film) explicitly has wealthy people using their resources to hide their infected status and spreading the infection as a result, some governments opting for tough-guy responses that make things worse but at least calm people down a bit, others deciding to protect favored racial/ethnic/economic groups while leaving disfavored ones out as literal bait, etc. etc.

That's mostly what the zombie genre is for, to comment on things like racism, economic inequality, etc. without risking the knee-jerk responses that would come from just explicitly saying "we live in a society that has these problems".

People can utilize energy from the day in their own bodies for weeks before dying. Now remove any central governor and allow them to metabolize bones, fascia, skin, muscles, and unnecessary organs. Still alive?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com