Zombies, Sushi and Beyond’, Lost Worlds

There was a report on the BBC News website, that researchers from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University had been calculating the effects of a zombie attack. They have been working from the ‘traditional’ film version of the zombie. Slow shambling, but one bite turns you into them. Apparently if not stopped quickly, they would overwhelm the human race.
The work was intended as a model for the spread of infectious diseases.

This does illustrate the zombie has become the all-purpose face of monsterdom (they could have used vampires or werewolves or body snatcher style aliens). But I do think that zombies are starting to lose their effectiveness. The popular image of them is that they are the walking dead, who move about and eat the living. But still manage to turn the living into zombies with one bite to swell their numbers. So really, what seems to happen is that they bite the living a bit, decide they don’t like the taste for some reason and leave the victims to rise up as zombies to do the same thing. But you can get rid of them, by going for the head. And they don’t tend to speak. They are in danger of losing their ability to be scary. There is the potential shock value of hordes of them pushing through doors and crowding the cities. But this imagery, popularised by George Romero, is becoming a cliché as well.

Finished reading ‘Sushi and Beyond’ by Michael Booth. An interesting culinary tour of Japan, containing much information on the country and its culture. Makes you want to try some of the foods mentioned, only to realise that they are not usually available at the supermarket.

Since I heard about the genre of steampunk, I’ve wanted to try a story in that vein. Thinking of retro science-fiction, I keep coming up with the idea of the ‘Lost World’ type of story. The drawback is that these tend not to get very far, beyond “oh look dinosaurs”. The last major work in this line ‘Jurassic Park’ did popularise some species but could be most notable for moaning up not trusting computers and using chaos theory as another to moan “we’re all doomed”.