“Portland, Oregon, once a hipster haven, the progressive jewel of the Northwest, was now nothing but a collection of buildings on the precipice of becoming a ruin.” As the plot continues, survivors try to escape the unrelenting threat from the undead, shifting perspective offer depth to the characters that make this a compelling read.
This Rotten World by Jacy Morris
First in the series begins with the fall of civilisation at the teeth of the undead. A disparate collection of survivors, forced together by circumstance, battle to escape Portland.
Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End by Manel Loureiro
This first novel by Manel Loureiro, started as a blog before its publication as a book, follows a lawyer, his cat, and a Ukrainian helicopter pilot, as they fight to survive the undead.
Plague of the Dead: The Morningstar Strain by Z. A. Recht
The Morningstar virus causes fever followed by a violent death, then its victims return from the dead. Hits the ground running and doesn’t stop.
The Undead. The First Seven Days by RR Haywood
A deadly virus sweeps across the planet, turning anyone it can infect into a flesh hungry monster. Supermarket manager Howie and one of his employees, the unassuming shelf-stacker Dave, who just happens to be an ex-special-forces killing machine, team up to survive the apocalypse. As Howie and Dave collect an assortment of survivors, Haywood injects a heavy dose of gallows humour and proper geezer bants into the full speed ahead bloody mayhem.
The Pulp Magazine Archive
Pulp magazines or “pulp fiction” refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The Pulp Magazine Archive contains hundreds of titles, and thousands of editions. Looking at any one of them is like going back in time.
The revolutionaries of Algiers
Andrew Hussey reviews Elaine Mokhtefi’s book “Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers” in The New Statesman paints a picture of Algiers as a “hotbed of political and cultural activity as idealistic foreigners flocked there to help build a new world in the experimental nation”.
“Mokhtefi, née Klein, was a young Jewish woman from Brooklyn” is compelling as the political activist, “working as a translator for a variety of anti-colonial causes”. The story has potential as the subject of screenplay.
Is Carrion a dystopian fiction?
I’ve been reading a lot of dystopian fiction recently. I’m currently sixty percent through Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World. It’s another of those books I read a long time ago. In fact it was so long ago that it now feels like I’m reading the book for the first time. Anyway before I started Brave New World I ploughed through Yevgeny Zamyatin‘s 1921 novel We, George Orwell‘s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the 1908 novel The Iron Heel by Jack London.
While they are all very different, articulating various concerns the authors had about the time in which they were writing, they all share a similar plot device, the transgressive protagonist. Ernest Everhard, D-503, Bernard Marx and Winston Smith are all at odds with the orthodoxy of world they live in. Whether it’s socialist revolutionary Ernest Everhard attacking the capitalist oligarchy, or the thought-criminal Winstone Smith defying the totalitarian power of Big Brother, all four novels have a transgressive protagonists.
The other thing that I’m struck by, it might be the thing that makes all these novels dystopian fiction. All the protagonist’s eventually exceed to orthodoxy. They all transgress, and are violently punished for their offences.
This raises a question, is Carrion a dytopian fiction if Adam Leigh remains unpunished for his transgressions at the end? The plot of Carrion only really covers Adam’s transformation from prohibitionist to insurgent. Without the punishment at the end, is his challenge to orthodoxy complete? Perhaps Carrion is less dystopian than I thought? It could be that Carrion is actually just the beginning of Adam’s story, the first part of a much longer journey.
The influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four
I recently re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I don’t think I’ve read this cornerstone of dystopian fiction since 1984. The thing I’m struck by now, twenty-something years later, is how much of an influence it’s had on me.
Two of the three screenplays I’ve written so far are dystopian in nature. Carrion is set in a society on the cusp of exceeding to totalitarian regime. The Singularity is essentially a vision of room 101. I can’t think of anything worse than being tapped on a spaceship with hoards of zombies.
I have another idea, something that’s been on the back-burner for a while now, that deals explicitly with surveillance. The story is still unformed but inhabits a world where surveillance is used as a substitute for morality. I don’t have much more than that notion and a few nebulous images, some of which were used in my short screenplay Phos/phate.
The thing that all these projects share with Nineteen Eighty-Four is an interests in the technologies of power. It’s a subject I come back to again and again. It comes I think from a feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I am being controlled in some way. I want to understand power, how it works, and how to survive it?
I’m not sure if anyone else views the world like this, but I often have the feeling that when the rulebook of existence was handed out, I wasn’t given a copy. It could just be that I’m just far too sceptical, too much of a heretic.
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