September 1st, 2009
by
Liz Henry
An unusually tall, strong young girl with no name grew up miserable in an institution, and tried to kill herself. She wakes up, not quite dead, smarter and with a zombie-worker pack installed in her brain, piled in a stack of other corpses in the hold of a spaceship.
On a freezing cold mining planet she lives in the zombie barracks pretending to obey the remote control helmets of the overseers while sabotaging the factory and stealing stuff to feed the ooppressed and almost extinct frog aliens who have psychic powers.
Meanwhile, she talks to and cares for her fellow zombies very tenderly, interpreting their personalities and their lives and histories, protecting them and helping them resist the pointlessly sadistic bosses. The zombies are a diverse crew and she cares for them whether they’re repulsive and rotting or whether or not she likes them. As she analyzes the situation she’s in as an oppressed worker she compares the misery of the lives and deaths of her fellow zombies to their state now in a fairly radical way. I get the impression she was in the institution or asylum because she had Downs or some other mental challenge, but she doesn’t go into any big exposition there – it’s all contained in scattered throwaway statements about how people didn’t listen to her before because she was stupid and now because she’s a zombie, they don’t even notice that she’s not really dead like the others.
She also notices the messed up things happening between the bosses with power and gender – for example Bates, the boss who’s the nicest to the zombies, is constantly sexually harassed by Peterkin, who’s kind of evil. Peterkin notices something’s weird about this latest batch of zombies. He starts to kill them off. Zombie fight scenes with crowbars! People sizzling into giant vats of molten metal! Full of awesome!
The big strong compassionate witty zombie girl helps the frog aliens steal an enormous engine or mini-nuclear-reactor from a warehouse so that they can start to melt the ice and grow their crops. Yay!
The book is usually marked as by Curt Selby but that’s the pen name of Doris Piserchia, one of my favorite oddball 70s feminist SF writers!
I liked this book when I last read it, but it’s even better now when I read it with more of a feminist marxist eye and some disability rights and human rights consciousness.
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- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
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Filed under assorted | Comments (3)
Liz,
Excellent review! I thought I had read nearly every zombie book out there, but this one is new to me. Your review makes it sound like a must have.
Thanks,
Joe
I love Doris Piserchia and had no idea about the Curt Selby pseudonum, thanks!
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