"The Best the Zombies Can Hope For is Draw" - [zombies] redditors interview John Joseph Adams

Zombie and Sci-Fi guru John Joseph Adams was generous enough to share some time with [zombies] reddit and has answered the top questions from [zombies]. He weighs in on all your the burning questions, including fast vs. slow, the perfect melee weapon, and why the Zombies can never win. Full Q&A is posted below and in [zombies]. Big thanks to John Joseph Adams for sharing his time and big thanks to [zombies] mod Zom_B for helping to coordinate this interview.
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Q: In recent years, there has been an influx of fast moving zombies
over the traditional slow shambling type. Do you prefer one type over
the other, and why?
- NakedTonyDanza

John Joseph Adams: I prefer the slow zombie, and not just because of tradition. There's something just much more satisfying about the dread caused my the slow shambling hordes overtaking you with sheer, single-minded persistence.

There's no denying that the fast zombie is much more terrifying, but of the two varieties, I have to say that they seem much less realistic. I mean, if I'm going to suspend my disbelief and accept, for the moment, that the dead can reanimate, and when they do, they hunger for human flesh, then the idea that they'd move slowly makes sense to me. After all, they're dead, they're rotting, their muscle tone probably isn't what it used to be. I don't see why they would suddenly become *super fast,* especially not if the supposed cause of the zombism is a *virus*. Of course, if we're talking purely supernatural reanimation, anything goes, really.

Q: Zombie themed movies and literary works have traditionally been
used to express social commentary (corporate corruption, government
ineptitude, lack of social cohesion, etc).

Do you believe this commentary is an integral part of the genre? If
so, do you believe a work lacking this commentary could make your
personal top-10 list?
- reallythateasy

JJA: I don't know that I'd say it's *integral,* but I'd say in most cases it adds some depth to stories that would otherwise be pretty simple. Of course, when you're talking zombies and survival horror, simple works pretty well. So, no, I don't think it's integral, and in some cases, I think it probably even does more harm than good. I think the later Romero films suffer from that a bit, like after getting all this acclaim for the first two including all the social commentary, he felt like he had to keep that going, and so it feels more forced in the later films.

Q: What intrigues you about Zombies or the idea of a Zombie Apocalypse?
- robobama

JJA: Well, first of all, I'm just plain intrigued by apocalypses--my first anthology, Wastelands, was all about post-apocalyptic fiction. My interest in that sub-genre stems from a couple video games I played years ago--first, an old game called Wasteland (from which I got my title), and later, Fallout & Fallout 2. After playing those, and after getting interested in science fiction reading, I sought out books and stories on that topic. Eventually I wrote an article about it, which involved a lot of research, and in the writing of that, I became an expert of sorts, expert enough, at least, to edit an anthology on the subject.
As for zombies--zombies are an extension of that. Zombie fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction are in many ways the same sub-genre, except that in zombie fiction the cause of the apocalypse is, well, *zombies*. But I think the reason we're drawn to a monster like the zombie so much is that in the zombie we see ourselves, because, well, they *are* us--just dead, rotting versions of us. And I think the zombie allows characters to experience a lot of personal turmoil as they're forced to confront their friends and neighbors who suddenly want to devour their flesh. So zombies afford the writer many opportunities for drama that are almost exclusive to that type of fiction.

Q: Some of the undead featured in the stories published in "The Living
Dead" have qualities that don't conform to the typical "Romero" style
of modern zombie (e.g., characters in The Skull Faced Boy). Aside from
being undead, what quality would you say then is the sine qua non of
being a zombie, if there is one?
- Zom_B

JJA: I'm not sure if there's any one characteristic. They're almost always reanimated corpses, but that's not always the case (as in many voodoo zombie stories). They're usually somewhat mindless, but not always. They usually hunger after human flesh, except when they don't.

I think the trouble with pinning a single characteristic down is that we've taken the term zombie and applied it to other things in other contexts, and that's expanded the scope of what can be considered a zombie.

Some folks, I know, are zombie purists, and so would rather I had confined my definition to the Romero-style zombie, but I wanted to showcase the variety that zombie stories have to offer. I think that all of the zombies in the book are clearly zombies of a sort, in one way or another. I kind of wanted to explore the boundaries of the term.

Q: What fortifications and weaponry would you use in the event of a
zombie apocalypse?
- insert_name_here

JJA: I think your most important weapon is a good melee weapon you're comfortable with. I'd go with an aluminum baseball bat. I like the bat because it's familiar; I've never swung a bat at a person's head before, but I have swung a bat many times, and I understand how I would go about it. Other blunt objects can work too, but ultimately most other things are not weighted properly for swinging, as a bat is. Crowbar might be handy--it'll pack a wollop, and you can use it for other things, like prying open doors or whatever--but it's unwieldy, and, again, it's probably not familiar to you as a weapon. Something like a machete might be tempting, but you've probably never swung one of those either; it's actually really easy to hurt yourself with a blade like that if you don't know what you're doing. Plus, it could get stuck in a zombie skull or something, and then you're fucked.

I'm not saying don't take a gun; do take one, definitely, but don't rely on it as your primary weapon. Guns are another thing that seem like a good idea because you can keep your distance, but if you don't know how to use it, it won't be very effective. If you can only take on gun, and you have your choice of anything, go for something like a shotgun. It's the easiest weapon for an unskilled person to use and hit his target, unless you think you'd have trouble with the kick, in which case, a rifle might be a better bet.

As for fortifications, I love the idea Robert Kirkman explores in The Walking Dead comic--holing up in a prison. Of course, you need to clean the place out, which can be tricky, but it's basically a fortress designed to keep people in, but equally effective at keeping people (or zombies) out.

Ultimately, I'd try to get in touch with my brother-in-law, who is in Army special forces, because he could definitely kick some zombie ass, and would know how to fortify the shit out of a dwelling, I bet.

Q: Slow or Fast?
- ungood

JJA: I think I covered that above.

Q: Why can the zombies not win in movies?
- BattleRoyale

JJA: Because humans are always writing the movies. If zombies ever write movies, they'll probably win. But another reason the zombies never win is because they can't *really* win. If them winning means the total defeat of the human race, what would they eat? Ultimately, they'd all starve or un-animate or whatever zombies who can't get any human flesh do, and thus we all lose. So the best zombies can hope for is a draw, I think.

Q: Have you played Left 4 Dead, and if you have, how'd you like it?
- daggity

JJA: I have played it, and it's awesome. It does have fast zombies, rather than slow zombies, but that does make sense for a video game, after all. But it's also got some other zombie-like monster things that bear very little resemblance to anything traditionally called a zombie. So zombie purists might have some problems with it. But as a first person shooter, it's gold. The teamwork aspect of it is really innovative, and the multiplayer online play just makes the game exponentially more fun, especially when you can get all four characters being run by actual humans.

The only real problem with it, to me, is that there's not really any story in any of the four scenarios--it's just get from safehouse to safehouse and survive--but it's still a lot of fun.

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Coming up next for John Joseph Adams, in May, is a new anthology called Federations, which contains stories set in interstellar societies. It's a mix of reprints and originals, featuring stories by Orson Scott Card, Lois McMaster Bujold, Robert Silverberg, Alan Dean Foster, Allen Steele, and many more. In August, his mammoth anthology of vampire fiction, By Blood We Live, is scheduled to be published. It's a reprint anthology that will include the best vampire fiction of the last 30 years or so, including work by Stephen King, Harry Turtledove, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, and many more. And in September, Night Shade Books will publish his as-yet-unnamed Sherlock Holmes anthology, which will include stories of both mystery and the fantastic, involving the great detective. You can keep up with John and all these interesting projects at johnjosephadams.com.