John “Lofty” Wiseman, The SAS Survival Handbook Told as a mesmerizing fable, with all the poetry and none of the sentimentality, The Bear comes to terms quickly with its own premise: someday, we too, will go extinct, and all of human history will blink out as our distant descendant, our endling, takes her last breath. Not enough people have read this achingly beautiful novel about the last man on earth and the final journey he takes with his daughter to the sea. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is at the hopeful end of the “one adult/one child post-apocalyptic quest” genre than The Road is at the other ( The Last of Us is somewhere in the middle, leaning a little bit to The Road.) No zombies are necessary for McCarthy’s grim and hopeless End Times though: human desperation, and the depravity it engenders, provide horror enough. While The Mother Tree focuses on the mycorrhizal networks that enable underground communication, Sheldrake’s wide-ranging, near-obsessive look at fungi in all its iterations-including the infamous cordyceps-is perfect for anyone secretly rooting for the mushroom zombies. More so in the game than the show, The Last of Us contains some eerily beautiful renderings of fungal life, as once-human zombies gestate in a state of fallow overgrowth, gradually becoming more mushroom than humanoid. (There is a scene in the game version of The Last of Us in which Ellie encounters a herd of giraffes in downtown Denver it could very much be plucked from Islands of Abandonment.) Though Flyn’s book is a true catalog of worst-case scenarios, it also offers something like hope that life can go on even in the face of the unimaginable. Whether through environmental destruction (volcanic eruptions), man-made disasters (Chernobyl), or political hostility (the Korean DMZ), these places are more resilient than we think.
#Frank n zombie craft series#
Islands of Abandonment is a fascinating series of post-human case studies, in-depth looks at abandoned spaces and the people who dare live there. The Last of Us is a well-told story about people and the things they’ll do for each other (and to each other) when all else seems lost. Oddly enough, in both the game and the show, the zombies are kind of beside the point they are the reason for the post-apocalyptic hellscape, but they could just as well be a catastrophic weather event or a swarm of AI bots-gone-wild. Sure, some people are much kinder and more decent than others, but even the worst, most morally compromised characters are allowed glimmers of humanity.Ī large part of the adaptation’s success is due to the strength of its lead actors, Pedro Pascal (Joel) and Bella Ramsey (Ellie), who manage the necessary balance between pragmatic stoicism and deeply wounded vulnerability. The story itself is not an unfamiliar one: for vaguely plausible “scientific” reasons a zombie plague has swept the globe, leaving the human survivors to sort through the horror and chaos of post-civilization reality varying levels of authoritarianism and anarchy ensue.īoth the game (which I have played) and the show are reasonably thoughtful in their dedication to moral ambiguity, dispensing with any semblance of the traditional hero/villain dichotomy (at least so far as humans are concerned).
Whether or not you think it veers too far from the game (or hews too close, or is politically compromised), you’ve probably kept watching it, week in, week out. The Last of Us-HBO’s star-studded adaptation of the VERY popular video game of the same name-has been a huge hit.
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