He's not saying that zombie epidemics as a topic are over, just that his take on it has been rendered obsolete by current events. It's sort of like a short short (either written by or edited by Isaac Asimov, I don't remember—I read it forty years ago) that proposed that Everest would never be summited because it had been colonized by Martians. Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited.

Another similar instance just popped into my brain—in college a friend wrote a piece for the college paper in which, writing about political changes in Eastern Europe, he wrote, "but don't expect the Berlin Wall to come down any time soon."

As you might have guessed, the Berlin Wall came down between the writing and the publication.

I recall a book in the bookstore in 1989 about how IBM was inevitably going to grow and take over the world. Wish I'd bought it. :-)

I stumbled upon a paper I wrote in high school in 1987 about European unification. I came to the same conclusion; thankfully no one but my teacher ever read it, and I doubt she remembered it 2 years later.

Sounds like the story was "Everest", which was indeed written by Asimov.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_(short_story)

That's the one. Thanks.

>Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited.

That's obviously what they want you to think!

He states in the article that the themes he wanted to explore in this novel aren’t worth exploring now that COVID-19 is making us deal with them right now. I wouldn’t say this is a “all zombie literature is over” post as much as a “my zombie literature project is over” post.

Zombie epidemics are over because the genre has been done to death (!), and is now simply boring.

I was very disappointed that Game of Thrones veered into just another zombie show.

> I was very disappointed that Game of Thrones veered into just another zombie show.

It wasn't a veer. The show was always about the seven kingdoms bickering among themselves instead of facing the actual threat that they could have unified against.

(Or at least it was until the last few seasons were written by someone other than the original author, said author having not even come close to finishing the book series.)

Just look at the first episode. It doesn't start in Winterfell or King's Landing. It starts north of the wall.

FTR the author was heavily involved in the show.

FTR the show runners and the author had a lot of creative differences throughout the show (and especially in the later seasons) [1]

> "It can be... traumatic. Because sometimes their creative vision and your creative vision don't match, and you get the famous creative differences thing — that leads to a lot of conflict," he told Fast Company.

1: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/10034023/george-rr-mar...

It started out as a zombie show, in the very first scene you had a Nightswatch patrol being killed by Zombies. The reason the Wildlings massed and marched on the wall was because they were being savaged by zombies.

I know. But it wasn't necessary to drop everything else but that storyline.

I’m not, in the end, a fan; but to me, that was the entire point. In the face of this crisis, their petty wants and desires, and even the more pressing matters of who and how they should govern themselves were irrelevant in the face of an ultimate threat, no matter how important they felt to those people or to the audience. The one person who held out against letting those lesser things go even temporarily was completely destroyed.

To me that's like setting up a complex and interesting WW2 story, and then just smiting the earth with an asteroid. Lazy and boring. Never mind recycling all the usual zombie tropes. Oh, and throw in the usual Star Wars trope of the mass enemy has a single weak spot that one person can attack to wipe it all out. Zzzzzz.....

Is the asteroid something that's known to the audience and characters involved from the beginning of the story? Is the asteroid something they could unify against and push back if they'd just get over their differences? Is the asteroid something that experts are claiming is coming but laypeople deny first as a fairy tale, then as not as big a deal as people claim, right up until it meaningfully affects their own lives?

It's an important story to tell, and I think your dismissals are indicative of the same flaw as the characters: thinking the petty struggles they face are more important than the survival of the species.

> thinking the petty struggles they face are more important than the survival of the species

It's a flaw of these characters, and also of the contemporary society. There's a kind of distance towards "petty struggles" of everyday life that I'd consider a part of being mature.

Related: this is why I like science-fiction, especially the older one that's written/directed by people who focus on ideas, and not people. I hate the modern critique of sci-fi that characters are "flat". If I wanted to read about character development, petty squabbles and love affairs, I'd pick literally any other genre.

> this is why I like science-fiction, especially the older one that's written/directed by people who focus on ideas, and not people. I hate the modern critique of sci-fi that characters are "flat". If I wanted to read about character development, petty squabbles and love affairs, I'd pick literally any other genre.

I don't think that they're mutually exclusive. Much of the sci‑fi and fantasy I've enjoyed over the years does both.

Certainly there's more tolerance for flat characters in sci‑fi than in other genres because you can focus on ideas, I agree with that.

But if all the characters in your story are flat, it does impact the quality. You can have good sci‑fi with flat characters, but great sci‑fi requires both interesting ideas and interesting characters. (And that's not quite enough either, but that's a tangent we don't need to get into)

I think the real issue was that they got out in front of GRRM, at which point the show was essentially mediocre fan fiction.

GRRM's novels will deal with the same undead hoard, but I highly doubt they will read like 'just another zombie book'. That's what separates legendary artists from the nameless commercial hacks--the ability to take something that has been done to death and make it feel fresh and exciting.