> Instead of clashing with the Chinese Empire to their south, the Uighurs forged a durable but uneasy alliance with the Tang dynasty in China, a rare feat for a steppe empire. The Uighurs traded their surplus horses with the Chinese in exchange for silk. They then traded that silk with merchant allies in the fertile lands to their west.
This paragraph seems to betray a deep misunderstanding of historical Chinese relations with steppe peoples to the north. This was the status quo. The Chinese empires more often than not tried to buy off the nomads with markets and the nominal tributary system. It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the pre-gunpowder era; far cheaper to play them off against one another and create a buffer zone. This goes back more than 2000 years, to the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu, if not earlier.
> It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the pre-gunpowder era
That isn't incompatible with what the article says, though. Just because China wasn't actively going out and attacking the steppe peoples, doesn't mean that the steppe peoples weren't actively going out and raiding Chinese villages, souring China's relations with individual steppe tribes (even if China never mounted any punitive expeditions in response.)
The difference being proposed here, I think, is that the Uighurs actively sought to pacify and build trade relations with the Chinese Empire, and actively prevented their citizens from engaging in raiding across the Chinese border.
That's one thing I've never understood about the zombie shows. Instead of showing people banding together to deal with the problem, they almost always show people acting selfishly and tearing each other down. That's always seemed the biggest fallacy of those shows.
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.
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
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.
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)."
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.
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).
> 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?
"World War Z" [1] -- the book, not the movie -- is based on the premise that people would work together to ultimately overcome the zombie plague. Notably, Max Brooks wrote "The Zombie Survival Guide" [2] before he wrote "World War Z".
The Survival Guide is really good. It nicely uses an american guidebook form
to define which zombie variant is present in this world (unlike too common and
inelegant "now, Computer, tell me all about The Century War", replied with
a lecture ended with "...but you should already know all this, because you
were in The Academy"), and if you strip the zombies and guns from the book
altogether, you get a sensible guidebook on how to prepare for surviving
a disaster.
Was really disappointed that the movie had nothing to do with the book. I think they just wanted the name. The book comes across as more of a comedy, though. Sending in little dogs to get zombies out of tunnels? Pretty funny stuff.
This never made sense to me either. Humans have been so good at hunting and killing entire species. I think we could come up with some very creative ways to annihilate a brain dead horde.
Max Brooks' version of zombies have the ability to vocally signal other zombies, then they spread out, creating a detection net. It means that if you want to kill zombies, you better do it quietly or prepare for the horde.
My thought was to use this as an advantage... Make beacons along the coastline to attract the horde. The target beacon would make random loud noises once per second. Within earshot of the target, beacon #2 would make loud noises once per hour. The next would be once per two hours, then four hours, etc. It'd corral them.
Though it's a game, not a movie, The Last of Us had a fairly good premise for the outbreak. Theres a fairly large latency between infection and visible symptoms, so by the time society is aware of the outbreak a large portion of the population is already infected. That combined with the fact the infection spreads both though contact and through inhalation of spores.
To add to that, in some zombie stories, such as The Walking Dead, everyone turns into a zombie when they die, even if they haven't been bitten. I don't know if it's ever explained in the graphic novels, but in the TV show it's glossed over, with the character Rick Grimes saying something like "whatever it is, it's in all of us now". I forget if Romero's films share the same conceit. But in The Night of the Living Dead, the dead are actually coming to life, raising from graves.
I think they'd kill a significant number of people who weren't expecting them. Afterwards, killing them off shouldn't be too difficult. Unless they're zombies who can do passable impressions of a normal human being until they get isolate victims and get close enough to bite them, which I think technically makes them vampires :-D
It's not just the zombies that jeopardize your safety in that scenario, though -- the non-zombie self-absorbed idiots inside your building are a factor, too[0].
That's great if everyone (a) has boards, nails, and umpty days/weeks of supplies on hand, (b) is in a defensible place or can easily get to one, (c) finds out about the outbreak in time to take appropriate action, and (d) is genre-savvy and knows they need to do all of that.
Well, it's the horror genre. The zombies are only the intial pretext; much of the real horror is about betrayal, either as the people you are with turn on you or you turn on them. Tropes like being forced to murder family members who have succumbed to zombiefication.
There's also the question of what the zombies are serving as a metaphor for. Lumpenproletariat? Slave rebellions? Cold war era nuclear attack victims? Revenge of the colonized? And so on.
Not a Zombie show, but similar in form - I liked Falling Skies. It depicts the world destroyed by an alien invasion. Though the details of that invasion add up less and less over the course of the show, it has much more realistic people dynamics - almost everyone prefers to band together and pool resources to survive on the planet roamed by alien ground forces.
Just like the Martian invasion tropes of decades past, the zombie tropes of today play on & exaggerate social fears. They're not a projection of what would actually happen.
It's because zombie shows are a fantasy about the state of nature. In capitalist societies, it's always assumed that the state of nature is essentially lawless and atomized, and all bonds of community are products of culture.
This paragraph seems to betray a deep misunderstanding of historical Chinese relations with steppe peoples to the north. This was the status quo. The Chinese empires more often than not tried to buy off the nomads with markets and the nominal tributary system. It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the pre-gunpowder era; far cheaper to play them off against one another and create a buffer zone. This goes back more than 2000 years, to the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu, if not earlier.