Zombies

Friends on Facebook are talking a lot about The Walking Dead. One in particular laments her lack of preparedness for a Zombie Apocalypse.  With Zombieland and 28 Days/Weeks Later and the CDC's Zombie Preparedness site it feels like a very Fourth Turning attitude. Something is coming our way, we can't stop it, we'll be lucky to understand it by the time it gets here, if we make the wrong choices the whole world is hosed.

And yes, I know that zombies are not exclusive to the 4T. Night of the Living Dead was solidly in the Awakening. Mr. Niven did a short story (Night on Mispec Moor) that managed to have a single person taking on zombie hordes without any hope of rescue while not being apocalyptic. While not literal zombies, the adversely affected neighbors in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and It Conquered the World (both 1956, First Turning) show a different aspect of the same fear: What if everyone around you became an enemy that could appear out of nowhere, couldn't be reasoned with, and had no clear vulnerabilities?

But back here in the Crisis...I think it's no coincidence that the first (or at least first well-known) classic literature/horror mashup was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . Written and presumably set in the late 1790s, the original Jane Austen novel is Crisis literature. Mr Wickham and his fellow redcoats aren't just some random militias wandering the English countryside: They're being called up to fight in the French Revolutionary and/or Napoleonic Wars.( Mrs. Bennet mentions that she had an eye for soldiers before she was married,  about 25 years earlier - presumably they were preparing to fight in the American colonies.)  The story itself is a survival story. Coming up quickly on their mid-20s, Elizabeth and Jane have literally a handful of years to find husbands. If they don't, they'll be on their own when their father's estate passes to Mr. Collins. And not only do they have to deal with the ticking clock of their advancing age, acts outside of their control - their sisters' foolishness being a big one - could eliminate any chance for success. Adding zombies probably has only the slightest impact on the story's tone.