Better Living Through Zombies

If you haven’t read World War Z, you should. The premise is that it’s a series of interviews with the survivors of a global zombie holocaust. There’s been a lot of light-hearted, cheezy zombie stuff lately, but this is serious and good. It’s that great kind of science fiction that’s really about changing the context so that we can look at our world in another way.

Like all good science fiction, it’s not about science, it’s about people. In this case, it’s about how people react to disasters: People as individuals, people as groups, people as societies and nations. It’s about how they react in the short term to an unthinkable reality, and how they cope with the aftermath. A key part of it is that these interviews are taking place ten years after, when the shock has worn off and the world has settled back into a kind of stability.

It’s not just about our one heroic group of intrepid survivors who made all the right moves. The interviews are with people all over the world, and show the whole range of reactions. There are stories of individual heroism and cowardice. There are politicians who denied the problem, stonewalling, trying to maintain control and stability, until it was too late to do anything. Others made the kind of hard choices that were made in World War II, in the horrible calculus of death, deliberately sacrificing some so that more would survive.

Then there’s what happens afterwards. Commendably, it’s not the usual post-holocaust bullshit: Mad Max-style warrior tribes bad-assing around the blighted landscape until they run out of gas, ammo, and canned food. I got to see Max Brooks do a talk as an in-character lecture on zombie preparedness. He drove home the point that the classic survivalist approach is flat-out wrong. The idea that you’ll hide in a bunker by yourself with a big pile of guns and MREs is completely backwards. That’s a short-term tactic at best. Really, if you want to survive long term, you’re going to find yourself turning into an Irritating Hippie: Forming communes, growing your own food, building windmills, all that kinda crap.

Because really it’s about sustainable survival, reconstruction, the re-formation of civil society and government; all that boring practical stuff. It’s about finding a new equilibrium condition once most of our population and infrastructure is gone. It’s about what our society needs to function, how our priorities shift when survival is more of an issue. There’s a fair amount of grim humor in the plight of white-collar career people who suddenly discover they have no skills of use in an agricultural society.

But in the end, it’s basically hopeful. Life goes on. It’s not like it was before, it’s not a situation we’d choose to be in, but we make the best of it and it’s not all bad.

So it’s a good story, and it’s different from the rest of the zombie genre. We all know the basic George Romero situation. This extrapolates it out - what happens after the credits roll? What’s the world like ten years down the road? Taking that long view changes the way you think about the whole thing, makes it new again, and that’s entertaining. But the really interesting thing about it, the really useful thing it gives us, is a way of talking about disasters, of thinking about the unthinkable.

There’s a bunch of scary shit out there on the horizon; potential situations that over the next 20 or 50 years are just a little too plausible to discard completely. I’m not going all Chicken Little. I’m not saying to drop what you’re doing and start preparing for the end times a-comin’. But there are a bunch of cases where we may want to think about having a Plan B. The trouble is that whenever you start talking about any one of them, you immediately get derailed in an argument about probabilities and details.

If I start talking about the collapse of agriculture due to global warming, we’ll immediately get bogged down in bickering about how fast the climate is really changing, whether it will increase production some areas enough to balance things out, yadda yadda yadda. For flu pandemics, it’s quarantine procedures and vaccine stocks. But if I start with, “So, when the zombies come…” people say, “OK, yeah?” and we can move on to a productive conversation.

This is what scenario planning is all about. You don’t focus on the mechanics and probabilities. You’re just asking, what do we do if we find ourselves in this situation? What we would do to avoid it is a separate discussion. In this case, we’re looking at a whole range of different events, with different probabilities and counter-measures, that would all land us in more or less the same end situation. So, given that we’re there, that the zombies have come, what do we do? Once you’ve skipped over the unthinkable horror that leads to the collapse of civilization, the puzzle of how to go about re-building it is pretty interesting.

First off, it really makes you appreciate what we’ve got going now. You don’t learn much from a working system. Generally, the world chugs along fairly smoothly. It’s only when you’re start contemplating things like, “What if we didn’t have regular electricity, or any at all? What if we couldn’t get gas to run vehicles and generators?” that you realize how much is dependent on them. That understanding alone makes this a worthwhile exercise.

If you knock out all that modern infrastructure, you’re pretty much talking about living as people did a couple hundred years ago or more. So read up on your history. How did society work back then? When you go in with questions like that, you look at history differently. Skip the battles and big events and famous personages, and try to get a handle on what was going on with the other 99% of the people. That too is a worthwhile study on its own.

You start thinking about how we’d have to grow our own food, or get it locally. We’d need houses that didn’t require air-conditioning or much heating, that followed old regional styles. We’d need to live close together, in walkable communities. We’d need to learn basic handicrafts, like woodworking, blacksmithing, pottery, and so on. We’d probably still need some sort of locally-generated power, like biomass, muscle-powered electric, or steam.

Once you start thinking about this, you realize that some of these ideas are probably worth doing anyway. They’d add to your quality of life right now. Rebuilding your house is kind of extreme, but there are any number of things you could do to improve its energy efficiency. Growing your own food isn’t a bad hobby. It gives you something to do, and a community of people to talk to about it. You get fresher, tastier food, and you might even save money. Similarly for handicrafts and random electro-mechanical tinkering - you get a hobby, a community, and maybe something useful out of them. This all beats watching TV.

Now our wild-eyed, end of the world speculation has dovetailed into what fairly mainstream environmentalists and foodies are up to. It also fits well with a number of subcultures: The growing Steampunk ethos, and the various medievalist and other historical re-enactment groups. These may be kinda fringe, but not that fringe - you’ll have a lot of company on this ride.

So: New hobbies, new communities, a few quality-of-life improvements, a renewed appreciation for the complexity and convenience of modern life, and an intriguing line of inquiry into pre-industrial societies. That’s a whole lot of new and interesting things in your life, even without the inconvenience of an actual zombie apocalypse. That’s what science fiction is all about: Getting you to look at the world with fresh eyes, approach it in a new way, develop a new understanding of it; and nudging you to work towards a better future.