#23 Robopocalypse: All Watched Over By Machines Who Want To Kill You

This month we’re going to be taking a look at some non-zombie related apocalypses. After all, I deliberately called this blog “Chris Writes About the End of the World” not “Chris Writes About Zombies” so that I had a get out clause in the event of zombie overload.

So, with zombie apocalypses off the board, let’s take a look at the next best thing: Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse.

A robot uprising differs from a zombie apocalypse in a lot of ways, but perhaps the most crucial one is plausibility. When the zombie apocalypse happens we don’t need to know how it happens, only how people react to it. The zombie apocalypse is the story of how humans respond in the face of an irrational and impossible event that flies in the face of everything we knew about the world.

Like Ted Danson becoming the lead on CSI

A robot uprising is different however. The robot uprising is the culmination of advances in technology that are supposedly taking place right now, it is the logical extension of where our society is already heading.

A Brief History of You Getting Killed by Robots

So it is that previous robot apocalypses have been very much a reflection of current concerns. The very first robot uprising- in fact, the very first use of the word “Robot”-dates back to 1921, not all that long after an actual uprising had taken place. In R.U.R or Rossum’s Universal Robots, the robots are less mechanical men and more artificial humans, built as a slave race. It’s not hard to see why, not long after the Russian Revolution, people (by “people” here I mean “rich people”) would be scared by the idea of such an uprising. The robots here aren’t just a slave race, there the basis of an entire economy. They keep the factories working, the streets clean, and what’s more they’re doing tasks in your home. If they revolted, your society would collapse and your home would no longer be safe.

Poor people are nature’s robots!

Skip forward a few decades to a better known robot apocalypse. This one, admittedly, takes place almost entirely off screen, with the entire battle being symbolised by a punch up between that space marine from Aliens, and that body builder from Jingle All The Way.

This time the rebellious robots weren’t our slave race of robofactory workers and robobabysitters. Instead, the rebellion came in the form of Skynet- a "Global Digital Defense Network" and given command over all computerised military hardware and systems. So, being a massive super-intelligent computer, it did what all massive super-intelligent computers do- became sentient and dropped nuclear bombs on everyone.

This film came out in 1984- Your guess is as good as mine as to why people in 1984 might have been scared of a vast, faceless machine killing us all with nuclear fire. Maybe it was a metaphor for fast food or disenfranchised youth.

My generation’s parents saw this video and thought “Hey! Let’s bring a child into this world!”

So while R.U.R’s robot apocalypse was a metaphor for poor people, and The Terminator’s nuclear Armageddon was a subtle metaphor for our fear of nuclear Armageddon, today the robot apocalypse is a metaphor for... well.

We live in an age where the army regularly deploys robotic drones. Remote controlled robotic drones, but they’re working on that, and occasionally they have been known to lose control go rogue. Meanwhile we have AI controlled cleaning robots and MIT has built a computer that can teach itself to read English, in order to learn how to play Civilisation- that game about taking over the world.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. Oh wait! Nukes!”

Aside from the scientists who seem to be actively working towards our own annihilation however, we’ve got the same anxieties about machines that monocle wearing factory owners at the start of the last century has about the proles. We rely on them, they keep our economy running, they’re telling us where to drive and they’re in our home. And they know us, everything we do, from shopping online, to using our bank cards, to wandering around with your smart phone in your pocket, is resulting in information being collected by us.

More overtly than ever before, our fictional worries about technology are a mirror to our actual worries about technology. This is when Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse steps in.

An Actual Review of the Book We’re Supposed to be Talking About

Spoilers from here onwards.

First things first- Robopocalypse does feature some similarities to Max Brooks’ World War Z, a story that some might think is more suited to this blog. Like World War Z, Robopocalypse is a novel by a writer who has previously written a How-To guide to surviving just that sort of event. Like World War Z, Robopocalypse starts its story in the aftermath of the war, then takes on the form of an oral history telling the story of the war from several different points of view. Whether or not Daniel H. Wilson was deliberately mimicking Max Brooks’ style, his book’s publicists certainly did. We at Chris Writes About the End of the World aren’t that bothered by this however, because as we’ve said before, all writers are thieving bastards.

What matters is, what does it do with the rip off?

Another way that the robot uprising differs from the zombie apocalypse is that in a zombie apocalypse you don’t have to pay much attention to the zombies. Zombies do what zombies do- which is mostly walking towards you going “Nom!”

With the robot apocalypse the writer has to think about how the robots look, how they’re designed, and, in its biggest departure from the zombie apocalypse, what the robots want. Most of these questions are ones that Wilson has good answers for. He’s the first to admit that if you’re trying to design the ultimate killing machine for a combat environment, you don’t base it on a shape that can’t survive a car crash without a seatbelt on.

That’s right you guys! I’m talking to you!

There are humanoid robots in Wilson’s world, but it’s repeatedly pointed out that the only design advantage the human shape has for robots is that it’s better for interacting with humans. Far more useful are the gigantic preying mantis shaped robots, or the exploding insect-like stumpers. Think about that name for a second. Lovely.

The scariest portion of the book however, is the opening chapters that emphasise just how dependent we are on the machines that turn on us- from the robotic toys that start trying to blackmail a senator’s child in a sort of Satanic version of Toy Story (In fairness, a talking doll will always be more terrifying than anything that isn’t a talking doll) to the hacker who finds the phone and computer network he uses to screw with people turning on him, to the sheer chaos when an air traffic control computer just decides to crash planes into each other. Once the robots finally decide to just go nuts and kill everybody a survivor looks out his window to see what the robots have done to his New York Street. What he sees isn’t an image from a zombie apocalypse, or even a war zone- he sees a perfectly clean, well maintained street, because cities are environments designed to be convenient for machines to get around, and why would you screw with that?

Although a road paved entirely with human skulls works too I guess...

One area where the book misses a trick is with its Afghanistan plotline, where a US soldier ends up fighting alongside Taliban insurgents for the justifiable reason that the Taliban have been fighting robots for years. Given that, like World War Z, this book makes a point of giving us protagonists from every conceivable age, race, nationality and background, I do wish that as well as giving us the US soldier as a PoV character the story had given a chapter or two over to an Afghani narrator fighting alongside him.

It’s also worth noting that, given that this is a story about mankind fighting machines, the book doesn’t take the easy and obvious anti-technology standpoint. Humankind wins the fight not by resorting to slingshots and bows and arrows, but by salvaging and repurposing robot technology, eventually even working alongside other robots that don’t fight for “Big Rob”.

And Big Rob himself is never painted as necessarily evil. Throughout the book he is curious about humans, as well as all other forms of animal life- it’s repeatedly pointed out how well the natural world seems to be doing once the humans are cut back. We never really learn exactly what his motives are, but whatever they are, they are complex.

I guess what I’m saying is that should a super-intelligent homicidal AI- maybe one that’s taught itself to learn English- be unleashed upon the Internet, I want to point out that I wouldn’t necessarily be against it, and could in fact be an extremely loyal and useful ally, totally willing to serve his probably completely benevolent dictatorship.

Just saying.

Right- the drinking game.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? One character does end up building a massive fortress for survivors to take shelter in, and many other fort-like outposts form throughout the book, so I’m going to let you take a shot.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? Is mankind the real monster? I’m actually going to go with no on this one. The Big Rob does seem to think humankind are fairly monstrous, but in terms of how they actually behave throughout the story, humans actually seem like a decent enough species.

Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain? This a book about robots, not zombies. So it’s actually pretty surprising when, near the end of the book, the human survivors have to face off against a bunch of slow moving (take a shot) walking dead (take a shot) soldiers who have been taken over by robots, and who can only be killed by shooting the (robotic) brains (take a shot). Who knew?

#22 Community, Epidemiology: TV Shows That Need More Zombies

One of the great things about being self-employed and working from home is that you very quickly become familiar with a number of sitcoms you weren’t familiar with before. I’m still a full four episodes off finishing the first season of the Wire, but in the space of a fortnight I’ve brought myself fully up to date with campus sitcom, Community.

For those who don’t know it, it’s a series about discredited lawyer Jeff Winger being forced to go to a community college after his BA is revealed be a fake. He falls in with a study group of loveable misfits and hilarity ensues. It’s a fun series, while it has a few episodes that rely overly on characters passing The Idiot Ball, and it’s rife with geeky references, or Chris Candy, as I call it. While it has plenty of episodes set around typical sitcom and high school plots, these are interspersed with episodes based around a Dungeons and Dragons game, or a rogue space simulator, or, a staple of the geeky sitcom genre- a paintball episode (Community actually has three).

However, for its Halloween special, the sixth episode of season two, Community went a step further with the geekiness. It actually just flat out had a zombie outbreak in the episode- it doesn’t explain it away or make it a dream sequence, for one episode, and one episode only, Community became a sci-fi horror. A sci-fi horror with an Abba soundtrack and one guy wearing a banana costume, but the point still stands. And it does it the same way Shaun of the Dead does- by playing the zombies straight and letting the characters tell the story.

This brings me back to a point I somehow never get bored of making- that in the zombie apocalypse genre the zombies exist just as a catalyst to see how the characters react. They’re good as that sort of catalyst, because we all know the zombie rules more or less, and so we’re able to keep the camera firmly on the survivors.

Community isn’t the first to do something like this- the Simpsons had an out-of-continuity zombie story for their Halloween special one year, and the Smurfs did a version of a 28 days later style plague with The Purple Smurfs decades ago (Based on a comic which actually predates Night of the Living Dead, but which is usually forgotten because the “Infected” smurfs aren’t purple, but black).

This got me thinking about which other TV series could use a zombie apocalypse episode to spice things up. And because I hate having to think of things, I recruited the Internet for some suggestions as well. Of course, the first few suggestions were all hilarious- Newsnight, the Antiques Roadshow, Waking the Dead (Although seeing Boyd and Dr. Foley fighting zombies would actually be pretty badass). But then, we got to the televisual genius...

House

This one should be a no-brainer really, and not just because we’ve seen what a badass zombie killer Greg House M.D. makes in this dream sequence. It’s because we know exactly how House would respond to zombies- he’d want to know what’s causing it. Since zombie movies are usually pretty shut-mouthed about the cause of the outbreak, this could get interesting, especially as the outbreak gets worse. Imagine all the microscope peering scenes in I Am Legend, only instead of The Last Man on Earth, it’s House and his team bickering the whole time.

On top of that, one theme zombie stories frequently return to is how far our ethics will bend in the face of human extinction. Given how bendy House’s ethics are anyway, we can expect stuff that’ll make the lab in Day of the Dead look like a petting zoo.

Glee

Okay, let’s make it clear from the start, when we’re talking about a zombie episode of Glee, we are definitely not talking about their rendition of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which is an entirely different interpretation of how things can return from the dead a mangled, revolting version of what they once were. We’re talking about an episode where real zombies rise and invade the school with lots of songs on the run leading to a climax when they discover Kurt's falsetto can explode zombie heads. This idea came from Anil Godigamuwe.

CSI/CSI: New York/CSI: Miami

Yes, I’m imagining a massive three way crossover for this story, all over the world the dead are rising from the grave, but the CSIs still have a job to do, even if their corpses keep wandering away from the crime scene. Of course, each series would have their own approach to the zombie menace.

In vanilla CSI Grissom (They’d bring Grissom back for this, I’m sure of it) would notice interesting parallels between the zombie epidemic and the effects of a certain mind controlling fungus on ants. 

In CSI: New York we would see how the zombie apocalypse has caused all sorts of zombie-related subcultures, including at least one fetish group and an underground urban zombie killing sport. Mac, Danny and Lindsay would of course do some serious zombie killing.  Jo Danville would die in the most painful and gory way possible, probably while dispensing some sort of folksy wisdom.

By the opening of CSI: Miami Horatio Caine would already be the only survivor, climbing a hillside made up of the corpses of his team mates. From atop his mountain of corpses, he would spot a figure running up the street. In one swift movement Caine would shoot the figure dead without checking to see if it was a zombie, while simultaneously swiping up his sunglasses with his other hand and placing them on his nose before saying “Looks like I got you, dead to rights.” (Click this now. DO IT.)

Mad Men

Even as zombies they will look better than you

This was another suggestion, this time from Tom Hunter. Now, like I said, working from home has got me completely caught up on Community, while still four episodes away from finishing the first season of The Wire- so as you can probably guess I’ve not seen Mad Men yet. All I know about it is that everyone wears amazing outfits, it makes smoking and misogyny look cool and that it has the sexy con-artist lady from Firefly in it. Having listed all these things I can’t really tell you why I haven’t seen Mad Men yet, the only possible reason I can come up with is that it doesn’t feature a zombie apocalypse. Well dressed misogynist zombies! Who doesn’t want to see that?

Gilmore Girls

I work it out as, starting top left, lives, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives, lives, lives... ummm... dies.

Okay, so Gilmore Girls has finished- but hope still abounds for the movie version!

The trouble is, making the jump from TV to Cinema is a difficult one. You need a story that feels bigger than just an extra long TV episode- you need to raise the stakes and make everything feel just a bit more epic than before. Many TV series have done this really really badly by simply assuming it’s enough to put their character in a different location- usually Ibiza. This always results in a terrible, terrible movie. However, you know what would work?

Yeah I’m going to skip the rest of my preamble and say it’s a zombie apocalypse. This would be great for Gilmore Girls, because as the series has developed we’ve come to care not just about the eponymous girls, but the entire community of Stars Hollow. You know what that means? Lots of characters who the audience cares about, but who are expendable enough to be killed off!

Can’t you just see it as the community is, bit by bit, forced to retreat to the Inn? I can see Lorelai generating a real Ripley vibe when it comes to the crunch, and Luke, being a generally aimless slacker, will of course end up saving the day (because if zombie movies teach us nothing else, it’s that generally aimless slackers are the best at fighting zombies). Kirk, I’m sorry to say, is probably a dead man, and Lorelai’s parents will likely meet a dignified, but inevitably grizzly end. However, I imagine Lane and Michel will discover previously unsuspected levels of combat badassery.

Come on! You know it makes sense! One of the writers, Jane Espenson, even has extensive experience writing about the undead for the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Now, returning to the episode of Community that triggered off this fountain of television genius, it’s time to play the drinking game.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Yes, the building being Greendale Community College- particularly their study room.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? It’s hinted the army is planning kill everyone off, and it takes them six hours to get there, by which point the crisis has been resolved. So take two shots.

Is mankind the real monster? There is plenty of infighting, and Jeff does point out he likes one character better as a zombie. So let’s take a shot.

Are the zombies walking dead (No, just infected) who move slowly (One shot) and can only be killed by destroying the brain? (Someone does mention the importance of destroying the brain, so take one shot)

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? Nope.

#21 Falling Skies: Don't Mention The War

We’ve not really done any alien invasions in this blog so far. There’s a reason for that. While this blog was never intended to be exclusively about zombie apocalypses, I did want to stick to Earth-bound apocalypses. Not that I don’t enjoy alien invasions as much as the next nerd, but they seem to pose a different set of questions to the ones we’ve been looking at here. Zombie apocalypses, as well as other post-apocalyptic fiction such as The Road, The Time of the Wolf, or The Stand, are about the end of civilisation. The protagonists are looking at a time where there will be no new art, no new technology, no future generations writing the history of the time they live in.

Alien invasions are rarely truly apocalyptic- even War of the Worlds seems to jump back to a comfortable status quo remarkably quickly after the Martians all get wiped out by bacteria- but even when they are apocalyptic, the story isn’t about the end of civilisation, it’s about our civilisation being crushed by a bigger and more powerful one.

However, watching Stephen Spielberg’s Falling Skies I found it demonstrated some good points about what not to do when creating a post apocalyptic storyline. As I’ve said before, the Internet has more than enough people being snarky and slagging things off, and so as a rule I only write about works that I happen to really like- apart from when I don’t.

Also, in the interests of full disclosure, I have a longstanding grudge against Stephen Spielberg. In my last year of university I wrote a dissertation on War of the Worlds and how over the last century various people have adapted it to suit the politics of the time. Spielberg brought out his adaptation- full of juicy Iraq War imagery and post-9/11 imagery, about a month after my dissertation was due in. That Spielberg hasn’t put that much effort into making this series all that different from his War of the Worlds means I’ve got plenty of opportunity to use up all those left over dissertation theories.

Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds: The TV Series

So, let’s start off by saying Spielberg’s fingerprints are all over this. On the surface this is a very gritty and dark looking portrayal of humanity’s last stand against alien invaders, but it’s spliced all the way through with the sort of saccharine moments you’d expect from the man who can’t bear the idea of secret service agents pointing guns at Alien-napping children.

This picture has brought more hits to this site than any actual blog entry

You’ll see plenty of tropes and ideas reused from his War of the Worlds film. The main character of the series is a history professor- we know he’s a history professor because he keeps comparing events to things from history, and if that’s not a big enough hint, every five minutes a character has to roll their eyes at him and say “Ever the history professor!” Because he’s a history professor. He professes history, is what I’m saying.

"I'm a history professor!"

Spielberg uses his history professor character that is a history professor to repeatedly make a point he also made in War of the Worlds, that no occupying force can ever be successful- here citing the American Revolution against the British as an example. Here, as in War of the Worlds, this comparison raises some interesting comparisons considering Spielberg’s vocal opinions on other occupying forces. Here however, a character,  who I think is supposed to be a loveable anti-hero despite being both a racist and possible rapist, finally poses the shockingly obvious counter example to that argument that really, any American ought to be completely ashamed of not thinking of- That the aliens aren’t the British trying invade the United States, they’re the first settlers invading the home of the Native Americans.

"I already knew that, because I'm a history professor!"

It’s About What You Don’t Say

One thing that struck me about these opening episodes of Falling Skies however, and the reason that I thought it deserved a blog, is that the world building, the way the series tried to introduce us to the circumstances of the characters and the rules of the world they lived in, was clumsy in such a way that it actually highlighted how to do it well.

It’s been said before that readers of science fiction are also pretty good at reading historical fiction.

"I read historical fiction, because I'm a history professor!"

Both modes of fiction require you to be plunged head first into a world with unfamiliar technology, etiquette, language, and even history. This is a skill useful for reading anything that isn’t set in the same period and culture that you happen to be living in- it’s as true of space opera and sword and sorcery fantasy as it is of Victorian family saga or wartime romance. Not many of these works will start off by giving you a potted history of the culture you’ll be reading about or seeing, you have to pick up the cues as you go along. In historical fiction, you either have to figure out the bits you don't understand by their context, or read the whole book with wikipedia open to one side- and using a wiki isn't an option with a new piece of science fiction (Oh wait!)
One of the ways to do this is to look to what people aren’t saying- because those are the things everyone takes as given.

Looking at it another way, if on a typical day in Britain you hear someone say “Wow! This country’s really rainy isn’t it?” you will automatically think one of a small number of things, either “This person’s new to Britain” or “This person has been away from Britain for a while”. We love complaining about the weather in this country, but saying “Britain gets a lot of rain” is something nobody feels the need to say- it’s a given.

Likewise, if you watch the news or listen to people talking about 9/11, you’ll find people can talk about it for a very long time without ever saying what 9/11 actually is. 9/11 was such a huge event, seen by everyone, with repercussions felt worldwide for the whole of the last decade. We don’t need to tell one another what it was.

So, here’s the problem with Falling Skies- they’re six or seven months into the planet’s occupation by an advanced alien army. There are conversations I’m willing to give a pass on- the moment when two characters look at a huge alien structure and swap theories on how they would destroy it feels like a conversation they’ve had many times before (and then history professor walks up and says how he’d destroy it with a Trojan Horse, which is a thing he learned from history, being a history professor).

"Yeah, I'm a history professor."

I’m also okay with the opening scene, where children use drawings to tell the story of the alien invasion- this seems like the sort of exercise a teacher would set to try and get their kids to deal with a massively traumatic event. Plus, kids would tell you at length and in detail about that one time they saw a red car.

However, other scenes grate. There is a scene where characters are waiting to get their weak oatmeal and talking about how they would really like a steak, or pie, or some other delicious thing. You could see this happening a few weeks after the invasion, when food starts to run low. When you’re six months into a period of prolonged famine and rationing however, the guy who goes on at length about how he really wants a burger is the guy who everyone hates.

"You know where they had better food? That's right! History!"

Saying “I wish there was more food” when you’re looting an empty convenience store is... well, duh? Even the kid (who you will remember, I was lenient with about the opening) saying “I wish everything was back the way it was” just felt like it wasn’t something you would say if this was a reality you’d been living with for over half a year.

Having people who live in the middle of an alien occupation explicitly saying “Gee, I wish we didn’t live in the middle of an alien occupation” feels as genuine as us saying on a near constant basis “I’m going to use this glowing rectangle to talk to other people who have glowing rectangles!”

A great contrast for this is Game of Thrones (which, having not read the books yet, I strongly suspect is heading in a zombie apocalypse like direction). Throughout the opening episodes of Game of Thrones the viewer is made constantly aware that this story is set in the aftermath of a larger, more dramatic story. Cryptic mentions of The Mad King, The Winter and The Dragons hint at huge events, but nobody every directly narrates these events to the viewer, they are just a background to the character’s more present concerns.

Perhaps an even better example is Spielberg’s own E.T.

E.T. is a powerful story about divorce- the character of E.T. is based off of Spielberg’s own imaginary friend “who could be the brother I never had and a father that I didn't feel I had anymore." The divorce is present in every single scene of that movie, in the way the kids deal with each other and in the way the mother acts, but at no point do we ever get anyone really talking at length about the divorce. Everybody in that family knows there’s been a divorce, but now they have day to day stuff to deal with.

I feel like much the same attitude should be had towards a global apocalypse.


Okay, drinking game time.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Sadly no, they're on the run for most of the two hours.


Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? Well, the history professor seemed to thinking he was making a really insightful point by saying that you know, looking after the civilians is important, he knows that, because he's a history professor. So let's say one shot.


Is mankind the real monster? After the special effects are used up in the first hour of the pilot, they're forced to throw in some evil humans that can be mostly defined by words spelled R-A-*-I-S-T, so take a shot.


Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain? No zombies, but everyone seems to agree headshots are the only way to kill the aliens, so one shot.


Kiddy zombies? Well, I say no zombies- there are slaves that are controlled by weird spikey worm things on their backs, and a lot of them are kids. Yeah, take two shots.

#20 Being A Zombie: Seeing How The Other Half Lives

Last time I was here I was telling you about prophecies of a global apocalypse due on May 21^st. Once I had published this information, I disappeared for a while. I was off-the-grid, if you will. In the mean time, the world didn’t end. Are the two events connected? Was I, Chris Farnell, neglecting this blog because I was off on an incredibly daring and sexy mission to save the world?

I’m afraid I can’t possibly comment. All I’ll say is that ninja blood is a bitch to wash out.

Still, aside from events that may or may not have happened involving the infiltration of a subterranean blood temple, the discovery that various works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood combined under ultra-violet lighting actually reveal the blueprints for an ancient super weapon, and an eventual sword-fight in the bowels of an erupting volcano, I have also been taking a walk on the wild side. And by walk, I mean lurch. And by wild, I mean really actually quite sticky.

Yes, over the last two weeks I have found myself on two separate occasions walking amongst the walking dead. And today I shall share with you my insights from my Jane Goodall like adventure.

Zombification Number One: The Undead Uprising: Lurch For Zombie Rights

As regular readers will know, on the day of the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, I asked my good friends Hannah Eiseman-Renyard and Amy Cutling to provide me with coverage of a Royal Zombie Flash mob- a protest/alternative celebration of the wedding. This rather backfired when the pair of them, and three other zombies, ended up being held in police cells for four hours.

This was many things, including A: Scary and B: Really, really stupid. The zombie arrestees are engaged in various actions to the illegal arrests.

Of course one of the responses to seeing people arrested just for wandering around London in fancy dress, perhaps the most sane and rational response to seeing someone arrested for wandering around London in fancy dress, is to get a bunch of people together to wander around London in fancy dress.

Pictured: A rational response. Also I want make a joke about zombies and iPhone users here.

We did this. And I’ve got to admit, as I got off the tube at Leicester Square, I was pretty intimidated, seeing that huge mob of people with their wordless groaning and vacant eyes, ever on the cusp of some terrible violent act- because we had, perhaps foolishly, arranged our zombie protest lurch on the same day as the Champions League Final.

Perhaps because of this, and also the really quite appalling weather on the day, we ended up with a horde that was less close to the 92 people who’d signed up to the facebook event, and closer to, well actually, exactly 15 people. It should be pointed out that, according to our best estimates, this was almost double the people who were present at the actually zombie flash mob that the police felt the need to arrest people over.

Things I learned:

One: The first lesson I learned, in a pub toilet just before the event, is probably the same lesson that many small girls and first-time transvestites have already learned the hard way. When it comes to applying makeup, less is more. Wanting to be thoroughly unambiguous about undead nature, the white facepaint and fake blood were laid on pretty thick, so that my final appearance was a little more Heath Ledger’s joker than I originally intended.

Also- fake blood tastes minty.

Two: In the event of a zombie apocalypse, we’re pretty much screwed. London doubly so. This is something I pretty much knew already- it’s what the films have told us. As we all just heard, my home city of Leicester has admitted it is completely unprepared for a zombie apocalypse, while the USA’s Centre for Disease Control has made a valiant effort to prepare its population by advising families to meet together at the mailbox outside their house.

You should do this if you don't really like your family

In London, however, the problem was far worse. On seeing an approaching crowd of bloodied, groaning figures, the response of onlookers, both locals and tourists, was to point, laugh, and get their camera phones out.

Pictured: A relatively un-breached peace.

If we had been anything like the flesh eating zombies of the movies, we’d have had them. Faced with such a combination of indifference, or good-humoured amusement, I find myself seriously doubting the original zombie flash mob’s real potential to breach the peace.

Zombification Number Two: The Shoot For Short Zombie Movie Sola Gratia

I got back from my adventures in London, and was ready to relax, satisfied that I had single-handedly put an end to police malpractice. That was until I got an email from Alexander Gordon Smith . Now Gordon is a writer of young adult fiction (Here the phrase “Young adult fiction” apparently means stuff too pants wettingly terrifying to be read by anyone over 21) and I’m sure that before long we’ll be telling you about The Fury- his young adult zombie novel that isn’t a zombie novel (It’s definitely a zombie novel).

However, when he’s not been trying to do permanent, irreparable damage to young minds, Gordon has been writing a short zombie movie (On set the director told me that it wasn’t really a zombie movie, which I think proves it is.)

Recognising me as someone with that magical combination of expertise and contacts, Gordon asked me to bring some zombies along to his film shoot. Cue an Ocean’s 11 style montage of me jet-setting around the world (Well, Norwich) using a combination of blackmail, called in favours and sheer charisma to assemble a crack horde of four people. Including me. Fortunately Gordon had brought a few other of the undead along with him.

Among the zombies I’d brought along were Matt and Alina, from my zombie LARP adventure, and our blog’s regular butt monkey, Tom Harvey.

What they lack in numbers they make up for with vacant expressions. Note how Alina's smile is far more terrifying than if she was actually trying to be a zombie.

Were we required the play dual roles of “zombie” and “crowd member”. We really got into the role, while me and Tom were playing the part of “two people queuing for a cash machine” we were so convincing that two other people actually started queuing behind us. I think it’s because we were so method.

Things I Learned

One: Being a zombie is really, really sticky. We were pretty well covered in fake blood and it was a sunny day, and I swear by the end you hear a crackling sound if I tried separating my fingers.

From the outside he may look dead, but inside he's dying to scratch!

Also, bizarrely, the fake blood smelled of mint again. By the end of the day, peeling the thin layers of congealed gore off my hands was getting so addictive I was starting to worry there wouldn’t be any gore left on me for the final shoot- and that’s before I discovered you could peel really long strips off the blood on Tom’s neck, at which point things got sort of horribly homo-erotic.

Go on! Look at his neck and tell me you don't want a piece of that?

Two: Being a zombie involves a lot of standing around. In the movies, if there are ever zombies on screen, they’re usually groaning and lurching towards the still-living protagonists. Even the slow moving zombies always seem very into it. Now I know why- when the humans aren’t around, what do the zombies have to do? During the filming of this short there was a lot of waiting around between takes, so I feel like I have a pretty good idea now. There is a lot of standing around- mixed in with the occasional bit of weirdly homo-erotic skin peeling.

They're filming a pivotal scene here. I wasn't in it.

Three: Police brutality isn’t all bad. Like I said, there was a lot of waiting around between takes. Having been to the zombie protest lurch the previous week, I was sure a lot of my readers would be looking forward to hearing my account of that, possibly with some reports of more arrests or maybe even a bit of police brutality. Sadly, I didn’t witness any. So when I ran into two of the actors for this film playing police officers, I asked them to do a little favour for me.

It was great.

Now, it’s been a while, so I’m sure you’re all waiting for a long awaited round of the Chris Writes About The End Of The World Drinking Game. Here goes:

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Nah, we wandered around a lot.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies?

Yes, but only when I asked them nicely. Two shots.

My new desktop wallpaper.

Is mankind the real monster? Nah. Mankind likes pointing and laughing and taking photos with its phone. Nothing particularly monstrous about that.

Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain? A zombie protest sprint would have been way too much effort, and both incidents of zombying up ended in the pub, where brains were promptly destroyed. Three shots.

Instead of taking our order, the bartender poured spirits all over the bar and set it on fire.

Kiddy zombies?

And they were adorable!

Ironically, her grandmother's last words were "You're so cute I could just eat you up!"

We will back with our more regular blog next week. Until then, never stop kicking Tom.

Never stop!

Pre-Rapture Special: How To Spend Your Rapture Weekend

Well, with the end of the world as we know it fast approaching, I’m sure you’re looking for ways to avoid having to spend your last few precious moments trapped into spending time with your loved ones and family. Here are a few events you should check out this last weekend, to make the end of the world go that little bit quicker.

Friday

Eco-Horror party and DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS screening 

Shortwave Cinema, London 9pm
Remember the good old days, when we thought that the end of the world would be brought about by man’s ceaseless meddling with nature, as opposed to the almighty wrath of God? It was a purer age.

Mark the occasion with this special screening of post apocalypse and zombie move precursor Day of the Triffids, organised by our very own Amy Cutler:

“Shortwave Cinema says they’re going to let all Passengerfilms fans have an amazing reduced rate at Friday’s eco-horror party. Everyone else is paying full price at cinema rates, but if you say you’re with us you pay anything between FREE and SUGGESTED DONATION £4. Amazing. So please bring all your leafy creepy friends for a horrible night in celebration of sprouting and germination.

At 9pm in the cinema bar we will have Triffid face-painting by Muna of Artistic Strokes, a huge Triffid cake designed by Cakes & Crunk, and bright green cocktails made by yours truly. You can have one for free if you come in a good eco-horror costume, so don’t forget the green paint.

Not only that, we’ll also have (real) carnivorous plants taking over the bar for the night!”

Art Love World Live!

Norwich Arts Centre, Norwich 7.30pmSome of you may not have resigned yourself to being left on Earth to suffer through the tribulation as your more deserving friends are whisked off to eternal bliss.

If this the case, you may want to score some last minute brownie points, and there’s no better way to do that then giving money to charity, is there?

“Art Love World will be hosting its first ever live event as part of this year’s Norwich Fringe Festival at the Norwich Arts Centre on May 20th. The event is being held in aid of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and all profits will go straight to a charity providing relief for Japan. 

The event will showcase some of the finest talents from East Anglia, including fantastic live bands, comedians, poets, beatboxer, magician and DJs so you can get your groove on for the evening, in addition to a host of other spectacular treats in store on the night. 

Music acts will include the rock, funk and jazz fusion of The Fuzz, the Lou Reed-esque sound of Axel Loughrey, the stunning singer-songwriter Gracie Wright, the talented and soulful Jordan Jackson, the diverse acoustic duo Cielo and, last but not least, the fantastic Norwich Ukulele Society. 

Other acts include the hilarious and talented comic poet Tim Clare, the acerbic hippie wit of comedian Andy Bennett and Chris Farnell, one of Norwich’s finest wits. As well as some surprising walkabout performances. “

Yeah, I didn’t say that bit about being one of Norwich’s finest wits by the way.

Saturday

Saturday is the day of the actual apocalypse. I actually recommend you keep this day free, although if you start drinking at breakfast it’s not necessarily a bad idea.

Sunday

The Beta Males presents The Bunker

Kings Place, London, 7.30pmTo celebrate the aftermath of Armageddon, and mourn those of your friends who, it turned out, were leading much better lives than you, why not check out this great comedy double bill, featuring Pappy’s All Business and (more thematically) the Beta Males giving their last ever performance of post-apocalyptic sketch show, The Bunker.

“Take your place in The Bunker; humanity's last refuge beneath the scorched soil. Witness a society living in the guttering light, 30 years into a mutated future. Hilarity – but mostly doom – ensues as we sketch the last 273 humans alive, and the last punchlines they'll ever share... “

Don’t believe me? Ask Beta Male Guy Kelly: “This was my favourite show in Edinburgh last year - I saw it several times and howled with laughter each night. Now I'm in the damn thing. I can't express quite how happy that makes me. The humour is pitch-black and the pace is unrelenting: I'm so glad we get to perform it one last time. Having that last time be the day after the end of the world is the icing on the horribly, horribly irradiated cake.”

Wednesday

To be honest, if you’re still alive by Wednesday, you’ll probably be feeling a bit silly about this whole apocalypse thing. If the world hasn’t been thrown into turmoil by now (you know, more than usual) than it’s finally safe to assume that God probably doesn’t exist and write off the beliefs of everyone who isn’t Richard Dawkins as idiotic.

Just because the world is safe from Biblical catastrophe doesn’t mean you’re safe though. There’s always the risk that we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief, only to be wiped out by a Vogon Constructor Fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

That’s where this comes in handy:

Vogon Poetry Slam

The Miller Pub, London Bridge, 7pm
This event, run by Whippersnapper Press and one of our favourite zombie arrestees, Hannah Eiseman-Renyard, is to mark International Towel Day. So make sure you bring a towel.

There will be two categories:
* Nerdcore
* So-Bad-It’s-Good

There will also be:
* The most bureaucratic voting system we can devise
* Pan-galactic gargleblasters to drink
* Some damn snazzy costumes

Last I heard, the voting forms will also double up as vomit bags, so by the time the poetry’s been read, if the world hasn’t ended, you’ll wish it had.