I was looking up an author on Twitter, and saw something posted to his feed:
The protagonists of the last three things you read/watched/played are the members of your zombie apocalypse team. How screwed are you?
Anybody wanna play?
For me, it’s Anita Blake, necromancer and vampire slayer (don’t judge me, the first half dozen or so novels are still good), Lucifer, a.k.a. the Devil (fanfiction to tide me over until I get the new stuff on Netflix), and Captain Jeffrey Sinclair of Babylon 5 (because Sheridan would try to speechify those zombies to death.)
Star Trek: Discovery
Game Of Thrones
The Librarians
… I’m pretty sure the crew of Discovery could technobabble their way to a cute, so that’s good.
For GoT, it would largely depend on whether the zombies have a single point of failure to exploit; otherwise, they’re not gonna be much help.
The Librarians seem like they’d be really useful in a zombie scenario, though.
RED from Slasher House, who woke up in a creepy abandoned asylum-like place with total amnesia and just decided she may as well have a beer and go exploring. (Seems a good choice.)
Brian from Drones who just found out hes dating one alien and best friends with another, but doesn’t really seem to care because at least it gives them something to talk about in their boring office jobs. (Also seems a good choice, unlikely to freak out when things get weird.)
The zombies from Aaah! Zombies!! who think that all the normal people who keep trying to kill them are the ones infected, since from the point of view of the zombies, it’s the normal people that are acting like mindless killers. (Uh-oh. That introduces a bit of a problem!)
Jenna from Seanan McGuire’s Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day … Jenna’s a ghost and in that world… Things just suddenly turned into calculus. OTOH, a corn witch could be very useful.
As for Dragon Age, well… Zombies are basically darkspawn with less brains. This is not going to go well for the zombies. Between the Grey Wardens, The Legion of the Dead, they have specialists for this sort of shit.
As for the Fallout world: non-radioactive zombies will be a picnic compared to feral ghouls (or worse yet, glowing ones. And don’t get me started on the radscorpions). Plenty of guns and ammo and robots.
The biggest trick will be keeping all the living people from killing each other.
I think professional monster slayers are overrepresented in the kind of fiction we consume around here. It might be harder for our zombie squads to succeed at some more mundane task, like running a flower shop or something.
The problem with Anita Blake is not so much that it’s kinky porn about somebody’s wish-fulfillment-fantasy alter ego, it’s that writers should write about what they know and Laurell Hamilton doesn’t seem to know anything. She hasn’t had any real-world experiences, she doesn’t do any research, there are no realistic details anywhere in her books.
Oh, I agree. I still think the first books in the series hold up well… but after a certain left-turn-at-Alberquerque, the books get worse and worse. Character development grinds to a halt (or reverses, at the whim of the author), plotting goes out the window, scenes are practically cut-and-paste from one book to another, sometimes repeating in the same book. It’s a crying shame, because the early books were truly fun, but the last couple of novels I read were so awful, I could barely finish them.
Sure, but we could say the same things about, say, Doctor Who. We can forgive bad, pulpy, comic-booky storytelling if there’s something else in there worth reading or watching, but LKH isn’t bringing anything to the table.
I don’t know why she doesn’t contract the actual writing out to other people. Her readers seem really patient and forgiving, always ready to believe the next one might be good. Just hire somebody to write them a better book.
