SF/F Commentary

SF/F Commentary

Are Zombies People? — The Morality of Zombies

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An unusual question rings its ugly head.  Earlier this week, I had a discussion with a guy who believed that morality in a post-zombie-apocalypse world was absolute.  That is that the lines are clearly drawn:  zombies are bad, humans are good, and “killing” zombies is not a moral issue.  There are huge problems with this line of thinking, not least because it ignores the problems with “killing” zombies that arise in many zombie films and stories.  It is also disconcerting, since the very rhetoric used to justify this pure moral position is the same rhetoric used to justify slavery and discrimination against minority groups. To start, I think it’s important to note that many zombie films/books do not subscribe to a purist moral model.  There are often huge conflicts between the act of “killing” a zombie and the people who perform it, despite the recognition by the characters that zombies have no such compunction.  The problem with zombies is their origins:  at their worst, they are/were our loved ones (mothers, fathers, children, best friends, wives, husbands, etc.); at their best, they are/were people who might have lived next door or that we didn’t know at all, but former-people nonetheless.  Hesitation is usually a narrative conflict in zombie stories, and most recently in The Walking Dead.  One of the first characters we meet in The Walking Dead (the TV show) is a man (and his son) who is being followed by his zombie wife.  We watch him (and his son) struggle with the prospect of “putting her down,” and there is one particularly gutting scene where the man tries for several minutes to bring himself to shoot his wife in the head from a window.  He recognizes that his wife is not “his wife” anymore.  She is a zombie.  She will eat him and his son without hesitation.  But he also cannot let go of the past (i.e., who she used to be, the life they used to have, and so on).  These are frequent themes in zombie stories, but ones that I think are relevant to the problem of personhood. Not as good as I would have liked… To suggest that “killing” zombies is not a moral issue–i.e., that doing so poses no more of a problem than shooting a bear that is attacking you–is an attempt to ignore what zombies “used to be”:  people.  In the discussion I mentioned above, it was frequently said that “zombies are not people,” and do not have the rights afforded to people (defined here as sapient beings).  When pressed on this matter, he suggested that mentally handicapped people are considered “people” by definition of being “human,” but that zombies are not, since they are not human.  But the problem with zombies (most recent incarnations, at least) is that they are, in fact, still physically and, in part, mentally human.  One might suggest that zombie-ism is a kind of mental disability, but one brought on by a virus or other chemical/biological infections (or, in rare cases, the supernatural; some infections in the real world have led to mental disability, of course).  From a genetic perspective, zombies are as human as the rest of us.  Since human beings are made up of hundreds of species of bacteria, viruses, and so on, only a portion of our bodies are made of “human” material anyway.  Zombies are no different.  Their minds may be governed by natural impulses, but they remain human underneath.  Humans, of course, are also governed by natural impulses; it could be said that zombies have a ramped up metabolism which drives them to one-directional feeding compulsions, which is something humans sometimes do to themselves to burn calories and lose weight (in the form of pills).  The line between zombie and human, then, is a fuzzy one, if not impossible to mark. Gross… If we include “human by default, but not sapient” into the category of personhood, then it seems logical that zombies would also be included.  They may be dangerous people, but that, too, is no different from members of our “normal” species (i.e., murderers, rapists, etc.).  And if zombies are people–even undesirable people–then it poses serious issues for the formation of morality in post-zombie-apocalypse worlds.  The uninfected have to learn to be hard, not just in terms of having to sacrifice their old-world luxuries for the new-world of manual labor, but also in terms of learning how to cope with destroying the lingering figures of the past.  Some of us may adjust more effectively than others, which says more about human coping mechanisms than it does about one’s prior mental state, but adjustment is unavoidable.  The fact that we have to cope, regardless of how we do so, suggests that the destruction of zombies is, in fact, a moral problem.  Surviving a zombie world might mean learning how to shut down our internal (memory-based) moral “nerves,” because as much as I am trying to deconstruct the notion of zombies as “non-moral agents, the killing of which is a-OK,” I also recognize that killing zombies is necessary for the survival of the uninfected.  It would be akin to killing a murderer who has broken into your house and threatened your family.  You must learn to cope with your own act of murder, despite your understanding that doing so was necessary for your own preservation.  And if zombies are people, then they are nothing more than beings with “murder” on the mind.  They are the ultimate serial killers. Other questions should be asked at this point, but I’ll leave them unanswered at the end of this post for now.  Feel free to tackle them in the comments (or what I’ve written above): Is mass “killing” zombies considered genocide?  Why or why not?  Is it possible to change the framework of human morality (i.e., to permanently cope) so that zombie “killing” is no different than shooting deer for hunters?  How would we manage this?  Is it desirable, even in a post-zombie-apocalypse world? ————————————————————- Note:  You might want

SF/F Commentary

Video Found: Lazy Teenage Superheroes

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(Thanks to SF Signal for the discovery). Amateur video meets Kick-Ass meets Heroes meets teen comedy.  Throw in some fantastic visuals and you end up with a pretty awesome short movie!  I’m so jealous… Here’s the video (after the fold): Awesome, no?

SF/F Commentary

New Poll: If you had super powers, how would you use them?

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The new poll can be found on the left (third widget down).  It is divided into the following fun categories: For good! For neutral purposes! For evil! Detailed answers are much appreciated, of course, but since polls make it hard to do that, I decided to test your morality (in the poll) and give you an open comment thread (on this post) to discuss the correct use of super powers (in detail).  Have at it, folks! As for me:  neutral all the way.  Why?  Because I definitely wouldn’t save everyone.  Say what you will, but that’s how I roll.

SF/F Commentary

Poll Results: Do you think SF/F is going to have a good year in 2011?

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The results are in (obviously), and they are overwhelmingly optimistic.  Is that a good thing?  I sure hope so.  It’s early in the year, but I’d like to think that 2011 will be a year without someone proclaiming the genre dead (or something like that).  We’ll see how those thoughts pan out in six months. Here are the results of the poll: 55% said “yes” 22.5% said “maybe” 22.5% said “no” The no votes came pretty late in the poll (well after the corresponding post had disappeared from the homepage), so the big question I have for those individuals is this:  why do you think SF/F isn’t going to have a good year in 2011?   I’m defining SF/F beyond its marketing boundaries (the SF/F shelves in your bookstores); for me, then, I see the genre as having a great deal of room to keep pushing outward in very powerful/interesting ways.  I’m hoping we’ll see more experimentation in SF/F novels, but I am also cautious about the genres because it’s really easy to get burned by hype.  We do have some excellent works of literature coming out, though (or what appear to be excellent works).  We’ll wait and see. Anywho! A new poll will be up later today, so look out for the post announcement.

SF/F Commentary

New Weird and Scifi Strange: Part Three — The Existence of Unsure Things

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(Read Part One and Part Two) III.  The Strange is Coming? When I initially began work on the series of which this is a part, I had always intended to end with a post about Scifi Strange.  I thought I would write a long, definition-based post about Scifi Strange and its problems.  But then it occurred to me that I’ve technically already done the definition thing elsewhere–i.e., for a conference.  Why rewrite the same basic information if you can simply update the language and add little bits where necessary?  With that in mind, below is an updated version of the Scifi Strange piece of a paper I wrote and presented in the Summer of 2010 (for a conference in England): Whether Scifi Strange is actually a new movement or subgenre is probably not apparent at the present moment. The problem with Scifi Strange as I see it is that Sanford has attempted too much of a catch-all with his definition, throwing in all manner of science fiction stories that, while certainly strange, have very little in common beyond their basic strangeness–a feature that can be said about most genre fiction.  But there are exceptions, such as a number of Sanford’s stories and the works of authors like Ted Chiang and Kij Johnson. And what those stories are doing is absolutely a development that is very unusual, somewhat experimental, and an extension or response to New Weird, whether intentional or otherwise. While New Weird places heavy focus on urban spaces with defined contours, familiar locations, and so on, many of the stories that I would label as Scifi Strange detail locations that are spatially disconnected. By this, I mean that the locations are often not named, given little context within the human spectrum of space exploration, and generally seem to exist in a bizarre vacuum that culturally separates the inhabitants from other species—usually humans—but doesn’t place the inhabitants in a local vacuum, which would make the environments alien to them. These spaces are detailed in similar fashion as what might be found in New Weird texts, though understandably less so due to the short form. As a prime example of this, we can look at Jason Sanford’s “The Ships Like Clouds, Risen By Their Rain” and Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.” Both stories occur on other planets, contain alien ecologies (to us, but not to the characters), and faint (or absent) implications for the existence of Earth exists.  Earth is not relevant to the stories, nor is the fact that humanity has moved to the stars; we, just like the characters, are disconnected from familiar locations. Sanford’s story takes place on a strange world of mud inhabited by humans who have lived there for centuries.  It is a world where ships in the shape of clouds appear and fly across the planet, often pouring rain on the human settlements on the planet, resulting in floods, which, in turn, require the residents to build upwards into the sky, continuously, else they be buried alive in the mud. Chiang’s story is told as a written historical account of the final days of the last sentient machine on a planet closed off from the universe by a massive metal sphere, within which they have discovered that the air pressure is equalizing, leading to the eventual cessation of brain activity for the humanoid beings that live there. Both stories lack the coordinates readers need to orient ourselves within their universes and privilege the “alien” spaces over the familiar space of Earth, and Earth itself (as we know or might recognize it) is marked by near-total absence. At best, we have human characters to identify with, but the cognitive dissonance of Scifi Strange is in the displacement of character and audience from familiarity, leaving no place to hold on to.  They are utterly alien experiences. This is the function of Scifi Strange and the authors who write it (assuming it actually exists). But because Scifi Strange is a new development, it’s impossible to know whether this will develop into something centralizes–even partially–in the same why that New Weird seemed to be when it first began to gain attention in the early 2000s. If it does, and it can be identified, I suspect Scifi Strange will continue to embody the spatial disconnection that makes the works of Ted Chiang and Jason Sanford fascinating.  Perhaps in another few years, there will be nothing more than a handful more stories with similar narrative themes, or, if we’re lucky, we’ll see Scifi Strange become a “real” subgenre.  Then again, some people hate new subgenres more than they do the genre they claim to love.  Maybe a Scifi Strange hate-fest will do it some good.  Science fiction seems to be doing just fine considering it’s been “dead” for decades… Some other reading on Scifi Strange: Response to Jeff VanderMeer on Scifi Strange by Jason Sanford The Online Scifi Strange Anthology by Jason Sanford The Noticing of My Noticing of Scifi Strange (a collection of links) by Jason Sanford Podcast Interview w/ Jason Sanford And there you go.  Feel free to lob your complaints in the comments! P.S.:  I may have more to say about this, but I think leaving this post as is will be a good start to a discussion. Your comments might inspire me to throw out a few more things.

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