Last night’s scifi book club meeting was a little smaller, only four people, but I suspect that’s because a) the book didn’t appeal to the broader scifi crowd and b) it was voting day. We read Brains, A Zombie Memoir, by Robin Zecker. It’s a slim volume, only 178 pages, and it’s an almost-parody of the zombie genre.

The consensus among us was that it was an entertaining read, fast-paced and often very funny. It’s chock-full of pop-culture references, the perfect inner monologue for a self-aware zombie who knows how deep into cliche he’s falling. Zecker did a really good job with the main character, showing by turns his pre-zombification personality (total jerk) and his totally alien nature as a zombie. There are vestiges of human feeling in their little zombie posse - a sort of family bond - coupled with a bizarre lack of empathy for the living.

But the ending was a little strange. In broad terms, there were several climaxes to the story, as though the author lost track of the arc of the action. And specifically, [[spoiler alert] the final confrontation with the scientist who created the zombie virus felt very deus ex machina - there was no real reason for him to come out to meet the zombies and talk with them, and his death was pretty anti-climactic.]

We spent most of the rest of the meeting comparing and contrasting other zombie media and the differences between zombies and other paranormal fiction. The dominant paranormal theme is always the price you would pay for immortality. But with vampires, the metaphor is sex and death. With werewolves, the metaphor is the symbolic death of the ego, subsumed in animal awareness - not so much immortality as not caring about the possibility of death. But with zombies, the metaphor is alienation - to become immortal, you have to become one with death, and the dead cannot retain their humanity.

We voted on the books for the first half of next year:

- January (Modern) Darkship Thieves Sara A Hart
o Ppb 4/1/10 - Space opera political/thriller style – a woman who hates space is forced into space adventure
- February (Classic) Brain Teaser (That Sweet Little Old Lady) Mark Phillips
o 1959 - funny short novel – psionics are real, FBI investigation
- March (Modern) The Search for Wondla
o hb 9/28/10 - YA - young girl is forced to flee from her underground home with only a mysterious piece of cardboard
- April (Classic) Pirates of Venus Edgar Rice Burroughs
o 1934 - “astronaut Carson Napier crashes on Venus and is swept into a world where revolution is ripe, the love of a princess carries a dear price, and death can come as easily from the blade of a sword as from the ray of a futuristic gun”
- May (Modern) Shades of Gray by Jasper Fforde
o ppb 3/1/11 - “a screwball comedy future in which social castes and protocols are rigidly defined by acuteness of personal color perception”)
- June (Classic) The Mysteries of Udolpho Anne Ward Rudcliffe
o 1794 – Ultra-gothic – prelude to modern horror/fantasy genre

Join us December 7 to discuss the Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon: a very dark tale of a boy with secret abilities escapes from his abusive home to join the carnival