Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: It's the End of the World As We Know it, and I Feel Fine

I was in fourth or fifth grade when I was introduced to post-apocalypic science fiction.

Once a month, our class went to the local public library, where a librarian would read to us from a book, followed by a discussion. When the discussion was over, we were allowed to check out up to two different books, with the understanding that we'd write a book report on one of them. Each month had a different theme, and it's not surprising to me that the only one I clearly remember was science fiction.

The librarian read from a book called Z for Zachariah, which tells the story of a young girl who survives a nuclear holocaust. She lived in a valley that was protected from fallout, with her father and brothers. One day, they leave her and the valley to seek food or other survivors or something, and never come back. She thinks she's all alone in the world until she sees smoke on the horizon that gets closer each day. After watching it for a week or so, a man wearing a survival suit and pulling a wagon comes into her valley. Pretty quickly, it turns out that she was much better off without him, and he's in-fucking-sane.

(I wrote that plot summary from memory, and just checked it against Wikipedia; as far as I can tell, the impression that book made on me when I was 9 was pretty strong, because I pretty much nailed it. Sweet. Go me.)

After I finished Z, I hungered for more post-apocalyptic science fiction, but there wasn't that much literature geared toward kids my age that wasn't just silly. I turned my attention to television and movies, where I found an embarrassment of riches: The Twilight Zone gave us stories like Time Enough at Last and The Old Man in the Cave. Before it was a craptastic series, NBC's V was a full-on television event. Video stores were filled with VHS and Beta copies of films like The Road Warrior and Damnation Alley. Saturday mornings would find me glued Thundarr The Barbarian, which combined the sorcery I loved from D&D with my fledgling interest in post-apocalyptic fiction. That it didn't seem to be a transparent advertisement for toys like Transformers or He-Man was a bonus.

I was drawn to these stories because they were more serious than Star Wars and seemed more plausible than Star Trek. In many ways, the dystopian world they portrayed was more believable and relevant to me than the fantasy worlds I'd been exposed to. They were all scary-but-cool and felt sort of cautionary to me, which I suppose is a hallmark of all apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, but they did it in a way that wasn't as over the top as The Day After (also a favorite of mine that scared my mother shitless, mostly because she'd lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and knew what it meant to truly fear a nuclear armageddon.) Because I was a geeky kid who was constantly picked on, I relished any opportunity I could find to trade the boring and shitty real world I lived in for something more exciting, and these stories intelligent, compelling, and rewarding.

Around sixth or seventh grade, I was introduced to the zombie apocalypse when this kid I knew had a sleepover. His dad worked at a studio - Warners, I think - and we watched one of his screeners of Heavy Metal on Betamax while we drank Jolt and stayed up all night long. I recall all the other 12 and 13 year-old boys wanting to rewind the tape over and over again to watch the animated naked ladies, but I was fixated on B-17 Flying Fortress with its zombies and juxtaposition of WWII technology with futuristic horror, and Den, which felt like Thundarr for grown-ups. After Heavy Metal, we all watched the original Night of the Living Dead. This was B-17 Flying Fortress in terror-vision. It was the apocalyptic fiction I already enjoyed taken in an entirely different direction, and it was scary. I loved it, and I devoured as much zombie-related fiction as I could get my hands on. In the early 80s, that pretty much meant Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, (which was damn close to being too gory for me) and Return of the Living Dead which wasn't scary, but had Jewel Shepard boobies, which more than made up for its other failings.

In even wrote a zombie apocalypse short story of my own in seventh grade. This is how I described it in Just A Geek:

As I grew older, my affinity for post-apocalyptic science fiction never waned, but I ran through just about everything in the zombie apocalyps pretty quickly. I mean, in popular fiction, the standard zombie story is pretty simple:

1. Oh my god, there are zombies everywhere.
2. Let's hide in this place where we'll be safe.
3. Oh shit, some of us just got eaten.
4. Hey, there's a helicopter!
5. Let's fly away without any real closure for the audience.

It's awesome the first couple of times, but after awhile it's a little . . . derivative. I still loved the classics, but by 1986 or so, I was getting tired of the genre, and slowly lost interest in the ongoing saga of the undead.

Then the zombie revival happened a few years ago, and it took this genre out of the realm of geeks and hardcore splatterheads into the mainstream, lead by films like 28 Days Later which brought something new to the genre: zombies who run real fucking fast. It was scary as hell, but in the great "fast vs. slow" zombie debate, I'm a purist, and I like them slow.

After 28 Days Later we got Shaun of the Dead. (If you haven't seen Shaun, please punch yourself in the back of the head, and stop everything, including that life-saving transplant you had scheduled for tomorrow, and watch it, so that you can declare yourself to be a huge zombie geek.) Then they remade Dawn of the Dead, which was also cool and scary, but with the damn fast zombies. The grand master of zombie fiction, George A. Romero, even returned to the land of the dead with, well, Land of the Dead in 2005.

I was totally infected by the revival, though, with the release of David Wellington's Monster Island. This was the first zombie novel I'd ever read, and it was the first bit of zombie fiction to tell much of the story from the zombie's point of view. Wellington followed it up with Monster Nation, which is an incredibly satisfying prequel. Around this time, Stephen King returned to the storytelling that made him eleventy bajillion dollars with Cell, and my love of the post-apocalyptic horror genre was reawakened with a vengeance . . . you could even say it was raised from the dead, if you were trying to be clever.

Earlier this week, on the advice of seanbonner, I picked up the audio book of Max Brooks' World War Z, and I've been riveted. It's a full cast performance of interviews with people who survived the zombie war that nearly destroyed humanity. Yeah, that's right: this is all about what happens when you don't just survive a zombie apocalypse, but you win. If you're even a casual fan of the undead, you've got to pick this up. Hell, it's almost inspired me to participate in one of those zombie walks the damn kids today do.

As a longtime fan of these genres, I'm happy, but not thrilled, that we're starting to see apocalyptic fiction hit the mainstream. I say "not thrilled" because when things like this hit the mainstream, the good stuff gets marginalized, while the majority tends to become guilty pleasures like The Omega Man, moderately entertaining efforts like Jericho, or full-on suckfests like the Resident Evil movie (that one shot -- you know the one -- notwithstanding, of course.)

Currently, graphic novels like Walking Dead do what the movies could never do: continue forever, examining all the situations that would realistically come up if the zombies ever did begin their insatiable feast on humanity. (Yes, I am aware of how silly it sounds to use "realistically" that close to "insatiable feast on humanity." Shut up. Zombies are cool.) And there is, of course, much, much more for the fan of apocalyptic science fiction and horror. I haven't even mentioned games like Car Wars, pretty much everything White Wolf puts out, and Twilight Creations' awesomely fun Zombies!!!. There's anime and manga, like Akira and NOiSE. There are video games like Dead Rising and the Fallout series of PC RPGs. There's also a ton of original stuff online, created by guys like me who just love zombies and want to have as much fun with the it as we can before someone comes along and hits us in the head with a shovel.

So why is the revival in full swing now? I think it's because a lot of the same fears and geopolitical conflicts that dominated the post-WWII era when apocalyptic fiction really got started are alive and well today. We don't have the Cold War, but we have terrorism, global warming, and a government that does everything it can to keep us in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. When we feel like this, one way we cope is by creating worlds where the worst of our fear have been realized, worlds where we can walk away if it gets too scary, and maybe it prepares us to deal with that world, should we create it for real.

Of course, we don't have to read too much into it if we don't want to. These stories are fun, and entertaining, and sometimes a shambling mob of rotting undead corpses lurching toward you with insatiable hunger and murderous intent is just a shambling mob of rotting undead corpses lurching toward you with insatiable hunger and murderous intent.

Pleasant dreams . . .

Wil Wheaton was an undead celebrity in Dead Eyes Open. He's not really dead, and doesn't want to go on the cart.