The Undead are Social and we are thusly blogging The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse. Keep calm. Carry on. Aim for the head.
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4 posts tagged Project: Dyszombie
ATTN potential Contributors. The following is the dyszombie milieu. This is “privileged” information, which means that you need to know it if you want to contribute, but your character will not necessarily know it. (For what a Character knows outside of his or her own experiences, see the Field Report and the “Objective” History.) Your writings must conform to these “physics”, at the very least, and of course, I will have to judge whether some other ascertainment which is not covered here is in or out of the milieu. Again, cannibalism is outside of the milieu unless it is an uninfected person eating an uninfected person. The dyszombie will never do something like that. If you base your story on traditional understanding of zombies, it will not meet the standard for publication and will be rejected.
The accounts themselves are all in the first person (or a modified version of the third person, where the main character is merely the narrator and is relating a story he or she witnessed.) Similarly, the writing doesn’t have to be perfect. Few people who are writing for themselves, and fewer people who are writing for posterity, really make an effort to demonstrate that they care about spelling.
So you think you want to participate in this writing collective? Here is the overview of this project:
THE IDEA
The idea is this. Take your standard post-apocalyptic story of the zombapoocolypse milieu, following the episodic format found in recent books like World War Z and the anecdotes accompanying the practical instructions in Zombie Combat Manual. Record the last days of the final survivors. But flip it.
The standard zombie story presents a zombie archetype which is brainless, constantly searching for humans, who, upon receiving a bite, end up turning into the zombie, and joining the roving horde.
Has anyone ever wondered WHY this happens? How is it that the zombie virus turns a human being, which has about an equal chance of being good or evil, constrained by his upbringing, into a ravenous cannibal? How is it that a person’s actual moral character can change when one gets zombism? Has anyone ever really given any thought to this question? I mean, a person can die and come back to life, that is not too much of a stretch, but why is it that they come back as an automaton, dedicated either to eating the flesh of living humans, or interested in spreading the disease to those who don’t have it.
But the more interesting question is: why is that it can’t go the other way? Why do zombies have to kill without any reason? Why are they completely amoral braindead… well, zombies? Wouldn’t it be just as likely that they would become like paladins? Why wouldn’t they become moralists?
Every society has a foundation. For some the foundation lies in the mists of time, way back before anyone can remember. These societies often rely on myth to explain their foundation. Other societies however have more recent and memorable foundations. Sometimes people who were alive then reported on the founding moments of the society.
I guess this is sort of like that: a report on the foundation of a new society, in the midst of the ashes and skeletons of the old. But unlike most societies, in this society there never was any specific meeting of some people who declared “We are *a* people.” This society, which more or less came into being by default, like some unforeseen hand flipped a switch, is more defined by what it replaced. Hopefully someone with a measure of intellectual curiosity will come along and find this account someday. But it is highly doubtful that anyone will scratch their heads one day and ask “I wonder where we came from.” Not the way things are going.
That doesn’t really matter, to be completely honest. I write because I can. Because I am one of the few left in this world that do. And as long as I am holed up in this library, which was stocked with enough canned and preserved food to feed a small city for weeks, thanks to Cold War paranoia and bureaucratic oversight, I will be able to finish my history at least. Its more likely that someone will find me here and do me in though, long before there is ever any danger of me starving to death.
When I think back to how this whole thing started, I can easily point to a single moment in history. I was just a kid, about 15 then, but I knew that what was happening would change things for ever. I knew because that night, we watched a member of the New Ethics Party, a Dr. David Owens, be elected President of the United States, and then, after we turned off the TV, my father left the house and drove the family car off a cliff outside of the city I grew up in. We were of course devastated: it seems, however that my mother was not in the least bit surprised.
ATTN: ALL SERIOUS WRITERS AND SUPPORTERS OF THE INEVITABLE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
RE: We need help building a new Zombie sub-milieu
I would like to cordially invite all members and followers of the Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse to participate in a new sort of project. It is called “Project: Dyszombie”.
The project is open to all serious writers who want to contribute to the milieu. When enough quality content is generated, we will compile the work into a single, standalone volume. There is a catch: The dyszombie is NOT the same as your classic Zombie. Below is a quick FAQ:
1. What is a “Dyszombie”?
The dyszombie is a twist on the classic thinking of the zombie. Suppose everything we know about zombies was actually incorrect. Suppose there was a type of zombie that was very much alive. More alive, in fact that you and I. Suppose that zombie was not a cannibal, but possessed superhuman strength, and the inability to differentiate between friend and foe. Suppose the zombie was not the degenerate form of the human life, rotting and decaying, as a metaphor of the rot and decay in us all. In fact, suppose you and I were the degenerate form of this creature, and while we grow weaker everyday, the zombie grows stronger, is more healthy, and will eventually replace us all. And suppose this zombie attacks not the living human, but his baser tendencies. Suppose it is not our mere existence which causes the zombie attack, but the fact that we hurt one another, and steal from one another, and spend our time falling farther and farther from utopia.
This creature is called the dyszombie, or the anti-zombie.
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