But though our knowledge is immense, our collective political will is not strong. The energy for change—and thus our preservation—will have to come from grassroots networks, which is where it’s most often come from.

  One of Rachel Carson’s recent indirect descendants may seem unlikely: Bug A Salt, a toy rifle filled with table salt and used to shoot flies. A crowd-sourcing campaign just raised half a million dollars for its inventor: seems like a lot of folks want to shoot bugs, just as we 1940s kids wanted to shoot the Flit gun.

  Bug A Salt has two green selling points: it needs no batteries, and it uses no pesticides. I’m not sure it’s the answer to widespread forest infestations covering hundreds of square miles: that would take a lot of table salt. But still, Saint Rachel would applaud its core values: no bird is ever likely to be silenced by Bug A Salt.

  The Futures Market

  STORIES WE TELL ABOUT TIMES TO COME

  (2013)

  The future—not the afterlife but the real here-on-Earth future—was once very beckoning and bright. When was that? Maybe in the nineteenth century, when so many utopias predicting a shining future were written that it would take days to list them all. Maybe it was in the 1930s, when not only science fiction magazines but ordinary magazines and also the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–1934—subtitled “A Century of Progress”—were filled with the promise of all things streamlined, toasters included. We fondly believed we would soon be wearing Flash Gordon skin-tight outfits, using ray guns, and zipping around in our own teeny jet-propelled air vehicles.

  Similar promises are appearing today, though they tend to focus on bioengineering. Soon we will have the ability to choose our children’s genes, much as you’d choose a wardrobe, and we ourselves will be able to live, if not forever, at least for a much longer time than people live now. Then there are those who think it would be a good idea to get your brain changed into data, uploaded and shot into outer space, where you will dwell forever and ever in a simulacrum, minus your body. But hey! You will not notice the difference, until some other simulacrum pulls the plug on your server. Other than those sorts of cheerful fantasies, we are finding the future more than a little foreboding these days. What with Hurricane Sandy, climate change, a new rash of mutated diseases for which antibiotics no longer work, biosphere depletion, rising sea levels, and levels of methane in the atmosphere, we no longer imagine the future as a stroll in the park. It looks more like a slog in the swamp.

  Then there is the Zombie Apocalypse, another item situated in the future. This coming event seems to be much on people’s minds, at least in the world of popular culture. Like the genetic engineering and the prolonged life and the uploading of your brain, this cluster of memes concerns our relationship with our bodies and thus with mortality—something that’s always preoccupied us as a self-conscious species—only the other way around. Instead of overcoming mortality as zombies and also as zombie victims, we will be possessed by it or overcome by it. The human being running away from the zombie figures forth a hunt in which your own death is pursuing you.

  I became interested in zombies because I initially failed to grasp their charm, though others seemed to have grasped it. So an investigation was in order: What was I missing? Part of my investigation turned into a two-hander serial zombie novel, The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, written with zombie expert Naomi Alderman and residing on the Wattpad.com story-sharing site. I have to say that this story, although reasonably entertaining, has attracted perhaps a disproportionate amount of attention. I just hope that this particular title is not what is going to be carved on my tombstone, supposing I stay put once underground. Possibilities abound.

  There are other monstrous things you can turn into, in the world of literature and other plot-driven human modes of communication, such as films; and these other forms of monstrosity provide at least some benefits to those so transformed. You acquire superpowers of various kinds, whereas with zombies you get subpowers. In order to plumb the depths of the zombie apocalypse, to dig, as it were, deeper into its subtext, we need to do a tear and compare. So I will attempt to give some perspective on, (a) literary monsters in general, with various types—most of which are ancient, or at least old—itemized, and (b) plagues of zombies in particular, which are a recent phenomenon and pertain to the future.

  * * *

  —

  Before talking about zombies, their form and function, I offer the following observations on the future. We might subtitle this part of my remarks, with a nod to Raymond Carver, as “What we talk about when we talk about the future.” The short answer is “the present,” since that’s all we have to go on. Surprise piece of information: The future doesn’t really exist. Therefore, it is up for grabs because unlike the past nobody can fact-check the future. If you are a novelist, that’s a good thing. If you’re a stock promoter, it’s also a good thing. In fact, it’s probably to everyone’s advantage that we cannot predict in every single detail what is really about to happen. It would deprive us of our sense that we have a free will, which, whether it is an illusion or not, is in my opinion absolutely necessary to being able to haul yourself out of bed in the morning.

  Earlier this fall I watched a movie on a plane, as I often do. That’s how I saw Kung Fu Panda, which I recommend. On another flight, compelled by the need to do some serious research about the future, I chose Men in Black 3. Here is the description: “Agent Jay travels back in time to 1969 [needless to say, from the future], where he teams up with a younger version of Agent Kay to stop an evil alien from destroying the future.” On the way to being allowed to view my movie selection (parental supervision recommended), I was treated to some delightful advertisements. I always watch the ads, having come of drinking age not two blocks from Marshall McLuhan, who began his career with The Mechanical Bride, a psycho-social-literary reading of some popular ads of the late 1940s. My favourite of these is probably “Deep Consolation.” The title is a Joycean play on words, the hidden subject being corpse burial. The 1940s liked those Joycean plays on words. In the picture, a young woman is looking out the window at the rain with a serene expression that signals, “I don’t care if it’s raining because I have done the right thing.” What is being sold? The Clark Metal Grave Vault, a coffin container in which you could place your dead loved one so that he would not get wet in the rain. It must have been that quite a few people were buying this item, or enough so that the company could afford the magazine ads.

  McLuhan’s sidebars read, “How dry I am,” “I cried until they told me it was watertight,” and “More stiffs are turning to the watertight brand.” His message was that people would sell anything and people would also buy anything, in that Mad Men ad-ruled age. McLuhan expected us to find it mildly hilarious that anyone would think their loved one could be kept “safe” inside such a contraption. Did they have any idea of what was going on in there, from a microbiological perspective? But that was the point—to evade and obscure such exact knowledge by making death a fuzzy cosmetic affair only, and by enforcing the fairy tale that your loved one was in some sense still alive and would be very appreciative of your watertight efforts on behalf of his embalmed remains. At least his suit would not get wet, with rain in any case.

  However, with my new-found zombie knowledge and having seen Night of the Living Dead back in 1970 (who knew that it would have such an influence?), I discern a more sinister subtext to this pricey, coffin-shaped tin can. Perhaps the Clark Metal Grave Vault was not to keep the loved one safe from the elements outside. Perhaps it was to keep the loved one in, so he could not dig his way out and go wandering around as a zombie. This makes more sense. I’d pay for that.

  The pre-movie ad on my plane, however, was perkily future-oriented, as it was hoping to get me to use that company for my share purchases. It told me that I needed to be part of the possible because the present didn’t really count. It is the “next” that counts, the future. Now is only the prologue, it said, morphing Shakespeare, who said more accurately, “what’s past is prologue.” Of course, if now is only the prologue, then the future, when we get there, will be now, and thus merely a prologue, which won’t count, since only the next next will count, and so on, ad infinitum. Thus, buying shares—when you consider it—is an investment of something that never actually exists.

  * * *

  —

  For the Christmas of 2011, I received a charming calendar put out by Cabinet magazine, dedicated to predictions of the end of the world. The end of the world has been predicted with amazing frequency, though never so far accurately. Here is the pitch for the marvellous calendar:

  When the current cycle of the Maya Long Count calendar concludes on 21 December 2012, the world will end. Of course, this is hardly the first time the planet’s demise has been prophesied. And so Cabinet offers you, doomed reader, a guide to the brief time that remains. This oversized wall calendar, featuring artworks by Bigert & Bergström illustrating twelve methods of divination, ignores the familiar holidays in favour of more than sixty significant dates in the history of apocalyptic prophecy. Starring comets, aliens, floods, returning messiahs, and more, The Last Calendar will be with you for all the days of the coming year, and ends—as will you—on 21 December 2012.

  Among the methods of divination, some are familiar—animal entrails, for instance—and some not. Divination by coffee grounds? We know about tea leaves, but…coffee? Then I came to “potatomancy,” which is divination by potatoes. Mancy is from a Greek word for prophecy. The term also gives us manic and maniac, as earlier prophets went into raving trances about the future, unlike Forbes magazine. The potatomancy photo showed some very twisted potatoes, with little sticks stuck into them for legs.

  They made this up, I thought. Well, yes and no. Turning to the Internet, that modern-day equivalent of consulting the oracle, I did find two entries on potatomancy. The first is from an Abracadabra forum, which told me how to do potatomancy: “Select a blue potato and move your knife around until the point of insertion feels right. Cut the potato in two. Gaze into the potato slice until you see a pattern and dip it into dye if this helps. Interpret the pattern according to inspiration.” I do not intend to try this at home, but you may wish to. Maybe it would be a good cure for writer’s block: after days of gazing at a potato slice, returning to our discouraging manuscript might look attractive.

  The second is from a Wikia [now Fandom] scratchpad:

  Masters of Potato Energy are known as Potatomancers…[they] are said to draw power from an object known as “The Black Potato.” One presumably exists at the core of every planet, and in time of need when the whole race is threatened, a potatomancer may call upon the powers of every potatomancer to raise the charred potato from the center of the planet, and hurl it at an opponent. The superheated potato is unstoppable and explodes on contact.

  The world being what it is, I expect that in the future workshops devoted to the teaching of potatomancy will arise, and perhaps a cult. This cult will be funded by Frito-Lay, or possibly the more purist Kettle Chips, on the theory that anything that raises potato status is good for their business. There is a franchise opportunity here. Remember that the present is prologue: it’s the Next that’s important and then the NEXT next, and the next.

  Methods of divination that counted for something in the past have been many and varied. Kings of olden days employed prophets, with whom they had a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, the kings did not want bad news: they wanted good news. On the other hand, they did not want false good news. Either way, they certainly did not want prophets who denounced the wicked ways of kings. That is a problem in today’s world as well, except the kings are called by other names, such as corporate presidents. The bad news that they do not want has to do with things such as climate change drying up the Midwest, and toxic leakages destroying the ocean…little details like that.

  But prophets were not the only vectors of news about the future. Other ancient methods included flights of birds; meteors and signs in the heavens; books of divination, such as the I Ching; and cards and horoscopes—these last still doing a brisk business in daily newspapers. Greek oracles, of course, had a reputation for speaking ambiguously. For the most part they seem to have told people more or less what they wanted to hear, with a slippery-worded out-clause just in case. All of which gives us an idea of how undependable predictions about the future can be.

  * * *

  —

  Now, as promised, here come the zombies. Zombies were originally associated with Haitian voodoo: they were living people who’d had will and memory removed, courtesy of some sort of mixture containing, possibly, a neurotoxin from pufferfish. After undergoing a mock interment, they became mindless slaves. You couldn’t remember a thing, including who you were; and certainly you had no worries about what was going to happen tomorrow.

  But in their most modern iteration, dating roughly from the first Night of the Living Dead film in 1968, zombies are quite different. The condition is caused by a plague of uncertain origin, which is spread, like rabies or vampirism, by bites. One crosses the life-death threshold by dying, then one crosses it the other way by coming to a sort of life again, only to snack upon the living—the result of which snacking is to spread the plague.

  As is the way with folk motifs, the imagery for this recent kind of zombie has cannibalized a number of other folk motifs. Some of them are from the art inspired by the original Black Death, or the Great Mortality of the Fourteenth Century, including crowds of the living dead as in the Dance of Death motif, gruesome colours, such as blue and greenish flesh, bad teeth, skeletons with rags of flesh falling off of them, tattered clothes, and so on. It’s what you might see if the Clark Metal Grave Vault were to be opened after the loved one had been inside it for a while. One point that the Dance of Death images were making is that Death was the great equalizer and leveller. Princes were forced to partake, as well as rich townspeople, soldiers, and paupers. The zombie apocalypse makes a similar point: when it comes to zombiehood, there are no social hierarchies and wealth means nothing.

  But surely some of the sources of imagery for the zombie apocalypse are more recent. This event is increasingly imagined as a mass phenomenon that will cause widespread social collapse and physical infrastructure destruction, as in the 2002 film Twenty-Eight Days Later. The infected in this film are not exactly from The Walking Dead, but apart from that, the social-collapse scenario and the scenes of wreckage and corpses are very similar.

  Why do we have such imagery at our fingertips? Maybe we were drenched in it throughout the twentieth century. Listen to the following description: “…this is all that can be seen….Corpses, rats, old tins, old weapons, rifles, bombs, legs, boots, skulls, cartridges, bits of wood & tin & iron & stone, parts of rotting bodies and festering heads lie scattered all about.” This is not a film-set description of a zombie apocalypse. It is the poet John Masefield’s description of a First World War battlefield. Whoever lived through the last nine-tenths of the twentieth century was and is familiar with such imagery. Anyone who lived through the middle of that century and the Second World War got another dose of it, via photography, and especially the images of the death camps when the almost-dead were liberated from them. Just as the Black Death gave rise to Black Death art, and then to a spate of tombstones featuring skeletons and hourglasses—that last a symbol of time running out—so, surely, the twentieth century’s two big horrors underlie the popular zombie apocalypse imagery of today.

  This package of images has been combined with a plot that is essentially that of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, The Plague, as well as of various other widespread-disaster novels and films in which mass infections take place and a small, beleaguered saving-remnant group holds out. One thinks of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros and of the Portuguese writer Saramago’s novel Blindness, as well as, on a less literary level, of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the 1953 film Invaders from Mars. In some interpretations, these constructions, especially those that date from the 1950s, are metaphors of a political kind: awful ideologies such as Nazism and Communism are spreading like germs, taking over people’s minds, and only a few holdouts remain either to combat them or to survive the bad patch.

  Zombie stories are always told from within the small, beleaguered not-yet-infected group. As is emphatically not the case with other kinds of monsters, the infections are always mass. It is not a case of a single vampire having his way with nightgown-clad lovelies by night, nor of a single werewolf cavorting in the woods and taking chunks out of passers-by. The danger is in the hordes. Zombies, unlike vampires and werewolves, are not strong and quick; they are weak and slow. But there are a lot of them, and even though they shamble around in a feeble and witless manner, they can corner you. Note that in some recent iterations, such as The Walking Dead, they’ve become smarter—necessary if one is to keep the plot going—and in the film Warm Bodies, zombies have even done the impossible: they have become sexy. Only by becoming human again, mind you. There are limits.

  But back to basics. Here is a good description of zombie hordes, from what may perhaps be an unexpected source.