Aug 182014
 

Have apocalyptic tropes like conspiracy theories and the living dead run their course in literature?  At an Edinburgh Book Festival event titled Breathing Life into Zombies, Mike Carey and Ken MacLeod answered this question with a resounding “no” as they discussed their new books and the ideas behind them.  Perhaps best known for his work in comics (having written series like Hellblazer, Lucifer and Unwritten), Carey’s newest book is The Girl With All the Gifts, a “non-zombie” zombie novel which tells the unsettling story of a little girl who doesn’t know she’s a monster.  Ken MacLeod’s protagonists are rather mundane in comparison, unlike the labyrinthine conspiracies at work in his latest book, Descent, which he describes as “science fiction bloke-lit”; sort of like Nick Hornby with alien abductions.

Both authors spoke about the gestation of their works, as well as their thoughts on ‘genre’ writing in general.  Carey’s book, he said, began as a short story which became a novel “by accident”, and represents his attempt to subvert the tropes of the zombie subgenre; the only way to avoid “peak zombie”, in his opinion, is to get meta-textual about it.  He’s already written a screenplay, so The Girl With All the Gifts may yet repeat its initial success onscreen, although the fungal similarity between his ‘zombies’ and the monsters from popular game The Last of Us could prove awkward!  MacLeod said that Descent was born out of his desire to see “alien abductions done right”, as well as his ideas about one possible (if extreme) consequence of the economic crisis.  He enjoyed writing it, he said, because although most conspiracy theories are nonsense, we still need theories about conspiracies.  He was inspired by Mark Pilkington’s book Mirage Men, and also the opportunities for voyeurism afforded by our new age of drones and smartphones, a topical slant which goes some way to cementing his reputation as one of the world’s foremost writers of political science fiction.

MacLeod argued that robots were the original embodiments of slave labour in fiction, a recurrent simulacrum for the travails of the working class in the 19th and 20th centuries, but have since been superseded in this role by zombies, hence the latter’s virtual omnipresence in modern popular culture.  Carey suggested that their prevalence is also due a resurgence in popular thinking about the end of the world, and the various horrible forms it might take.  Uncertainty, said MacLeod is the new normal, and it’s this uncertainty that both these authors will continue to exploit as they write further works of startling speculative fiction.

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