gloomysundae
New Member
There goes the neighbourhood
Posts: 2
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Post by gloomysundae on Sept 22, 2010 8:50:14 GMT
i think some of you might be up for the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse from Robinson's. 'Created by' Stephen Jones and set in the very near future, it envisions what happens when a plague pit is disturbed as an increasingly desperate coalition Government cut corners on health & safety procedures to ensure the Great Festival Of Britain site is ready on time. Have enclosed press release which describes it better than i ever could. Another excellent post-apocalyptic zombie collection is the Skipp & Spector edited Book Of The Dead (Bantam, 1989) set in the days following The Night Of The Living Dead. some of the much-maligned 'When Animals Attack!' nasties from the seventies & eighties - Slugs, Night Of The Crabs, Spiders, Maggots, Night Killers, Abomination etc., possibly qualify as post-apocalyptic fiction of sorts? James Herbert's Domain certainly does, though personally, i found it a not entirely rewarding slog after the brevity of The Rats and Lair. How about The Fog, or Shaun Hutson's Erebus? I'm guessing Guy N. Smith's Doomflight doesn't count because by the end of it, there's no planet left! meanwhile, the current issue of 'Paperback Fanatic' includes an eight page feature on Ryder Stacy's 'Post Apocalyptic SF Mens Adventure series', The Destroyer from the early 'eighties. hope some of this is of interest. Attachments:
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Post by Matthew on Dec 30, 2010 20:51:24 GMT
Got a copy of Zombie Apocolypse today.
And although I have only just started it, its certainly my cup of tea.
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Post by Matthew on Jan 3, 2011 11:17:37 GMT
My first PA themed book of the year and quite possibly a contender for the best.
Basic premise is that during the course of a rushed and ill-conceived Government project to put on a new ‘Festival of Britain’ to divert attention from the economic and social woes the country is facing an old church in South London is knocked down and allows a centuries old ‘death’, which people had wrong labeled as the bubonic plague, to wreck its havoc once again.
The book is not written in a conventional sense in terms of plot and characters but is instead comprised of a mixture of e-mails, reports and even hand written diaries and journals to show how things all go wrong and then go from bad to worse.
Now I must confess that I would not really label myself as a Zombie fan per se. It’s a part of the whole post-Apoc genre that I admire greatly but if I am honest its not what I turn to first of all but this book is an important one because of the way its been put together. For me it brings the 21st century fully into things and the use of things such as Twitter and so on gives it a very contemporary feel which works because it does not feel forced. Whether you are fan of things like Facebook and so on is irrelevant because they are part of our modern world and would play a part in how any post-apoc scenario plays out.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first half, which is predominately set in a South London that I grew up in and many of my old stamping grounds feature (with only a single geographical error which I suspect might have been caused by an over-zealous editor not reading a name correctly because everything else is spot on but that’s just the pedant in me coming to the fore) so it works for me because when one of the characters is dictating his journey I can actually visualize the places he talks about.
I found the second half less engaging as the action switches elsewhere but that might just be a reaction to feeling so comfortable with the locales at the beginning and it certainly does not detract from the over-all feel to the book.
In fact thinking about it as I write this I can see how it helps because it shows just how interconnected our modern world really is and it also encompasses the traditional Zombie fiction focus on issues concerning how our modern culture is evolving.
Now I can see why not everybody would enjoy this book due to its unconventional style and there is an element of traditional ‘Gothic’ horror to elements of the plague back story that don’t sit well with me along with a suspicion that myself and the author would not see eye to eye on many parts of British politics but nothing wrong with that and that this probably says more about me than the book.
And its worth reading just for the revelation about what the official British response to a Zombie outbreak might actually be. Having a good friend who has been involved at the highest of levels in trying to structure just how the UK might react to a whole host of potential problems from nuclear power plants blowing up to Alien invasion the hows and whys of our civil service reaches it conclusions on just how we should react in the face of Zombie hordes rings so very true.
Enjoy.
I did and it’s a book I will be reaching back to because some of it is a sheer joy to read.
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Post by edwin on Jan 3, 2011 15:43:58 GMT
What part of South London, I was a Lambeth boy myself, latterly Brixton bfore being moved by parents out to Essex and then Wiltshire.
Part of London in the fifties were PA as I mentioned before, wandering round those ruined bombed buildings. As an 8-11 year-old it didn't bother me in the least, not even when a wall fell down quite close. Suspect that children would be toughter than we think.
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Post by Matthew on Jan 3, 2011 16:47:20 GMT
What part of South London, I was a Lambeth boy myself, latterly Brixton bfore being moved by parents out to Essex and then Wiltshire. Part of London in the fifties were PA as I mentioned before, wandering round those ruined bombed buildings. As an 8-11 year-old it didn't bother me in the least, not even when a wall fell down quite close. Suspect that children would be toughter than we think. It starts off in Blackheath with the notion that this was were a lot of plague victims had been buried. This is quite common South London folk-lore which also claims that this is how the area got its name but I have heard that disputed recently. The action then moves to Lewisham and Deptford. The bit I specifically refer to takes in Stockwell to Blackfriars Bridge so its probably an area you would be familar with Edwin. And bomb sites do sound like a very mixed bag of delights.
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Post by edwin on Jan 3, 2011 22:28:14 GMT
Stockwell to Blackfriars more or less defines one edge of our area.
I remember being taught about the black death at Fenstanton Primary School, Tulse Hill. The teacher a Mrs Pinn mentioned that plague pits were avoided when construction work was undertaken but a lot of primary school history teaching was a mix of fact and fantasy.
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