It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

Through their symbolistic versatility, zombies provide a place where many different stories intersect: apocalypse by plague; climate apocalypse; apocalypse by entropy. These decaying corpses have become the focal point for so many of our fears and insecurities that they have become the ultimate expression for the end of the world.

* Over the last decade alone we’ve seen Bud Hanzel and John Olson’s The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (2010), Max Brallier’s Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? (2011) and Bryan Hall’s An Ethical Guidebook to the Zombie Apocalypse: How to Keep Your Brain Without Losing Your Heart (2019).

* . . .  while lamenting that the Covid-19 outbreak made it impossible for him to publish a novel that he had been planning in which a fictional virus turns people into zombies . . .

* Charlie Stross, ‘Yet Another Novel I Will No Longer Write’, www.antipope.org, 2 April 2020.

* Efthimiou did not calculate the comparative rate for zombies, but as they are considerably less restrained in their feeding habits than vampires, we can assume that global apocalypse would arrive even more swiftly.

* Unless unrelenting mindlessness and rotting flesh are your kinks.

* Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: a Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015), pp. 7–8.

* Michael Newton, ‘The Thrill of It All: Zombies’, London Review of Books, 18 February 2016, p. 27.

* Eugene Thacker, ‘Weird, Eerie, and Monstrous: a review of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie’, B20: an Online Journal, June 2017: http://www.boundary2.org/2017/07/

* Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Contemporary Zombies’, in Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (eds) Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p. 90.

* In the movie Love and Death (1975), Woody Allen’s Boris sums up the movie in his final monologue: ‘The question is: have I learned anything about life? Only that human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy. But the body has all the fun.’

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD: WORLD-ENDING PLAGUES

In Homer’s Iliad, set in the twelfth century BCE, the Greek army laying siege to Troy unwisely disrespects one of Apollo’s priests. In response, the god shows his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp: ‘the mules he assailed first and the swift dogs, but then he let fly his stinging shafts on the men themselves, and struck; and constantly the pyres of the dead burned thick’. The plague lasts for nine days – brief by modern standards. After the Greeks make amends to the priest and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured.

Seven centuries later, a real-life plague struck Athens, killing a quarter of the city’s population and setting the city state on a path to military defeat at the hands of Sparta. Greeks of the time had a simple explanation for the pandemic: Apollo. The Spartans had supplicated to the god, and he had promised them victory; soon afterwards, their enemies started dying of the plague. Hindsight suggests that Athens was under siege and its population swollen with refugees; as a result, everyone was living in unsanitary conditions and at risk of contagion in a way that the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, was not. However, this thought didn’t occur to the Ancient Greeks and they blamed the god.

Stories of plague-driven apocalypse abound, in movies such as Outbreak (1995) and Contagion (2011), but unlike the gods and monsters of our previous chapters, disease has always been a very real feature in human life, as well as in our stories. We understand contagion vastly better now, and have a greater arsenal of medicine and hygiene to fight it, but we are all susceptible still. This is both a bad and a good thing: bad because disease can cripple or kill; but good because our bodies respond to disease by developing antibodies. Every parent knows that the seemingly endless parade of snotty noses and various lurgies that define their kids’ early years are necessary for those kids to build healthy immune systems, however distressing the process can be for all concerned.

What is true on an individual level is also true on a civilisational level; and just as the body sometimes succumbs to disease, so whole communities can be – and have been – devastated. In his influential study Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond considers the defining role disease has played in human history. In Europe, argues Diamond, because people moved around extensively, to trade for example, disease spread easily between different regions. This looks like a bad thing, and it’s true that a series of ghastly plagues afflicted medieval and Renaissance Europe: 75 million Europeans died of the Black Death in the fourteenth century – almost half the entire population of the continent. But there was a hard-won advantage: the survivors of these plagues carried antibodies to the germs that caused them.

When Europeans began spreading around the world they were able to use their superior technology and weapons of war to conquer other continents. But even more importantly for the trajectory of human history, these Europeans brought with them diseases to which populations in other parts of the globe had no immunity. European settlers in North America and Australia killed vastly greater numbers of natives with their diseases than with their guns. Chickenpox and measles, which Europeans might survive, tended to be deadly to such populations, and resulted in human suffering and death on a staggering scale.

This was the point in history where disease moved from being a local affliction to being a way in which the world ends. Many epidemics have had a catastrophic effect on populations. The Wampanoag population of Native Americans, mostly located in modern-day New England, suffered up to 90 per cent loss of population as a European disease, now thought to be leptospirosis, spread through their tribes. In the cocoliztli epidemic of 1545–48, in what is now Mexico, 12 million people – a staggering 80 per cent of the native population – died of a disease brought by European settlers that