Oswalt - Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: A Book by Patton Oswalt

ALSO BY
PATTON OSWALT

NOVELS

The Brannock Doom, Devils Brain-Collector Series

The Forgotten Tomb of the Worm-Serpent

The Remembered Citadel of Screeching Victory

The Lost Mage-Pit

The Discovered Witch-Keep

The Falsely Recovered Troll-Bog Memory

The Thane Star-Mind Series

The Nothing Ray

Song of the Cyrus-5 Dream Hunters

Sand-Riders of the Fifth Sigil

Andro-Borg-Bot

Solar Star

Galactic Universe

CHILDRENS BOOKS

The Candy Van

A Ewe Named Udo Who Does Judo and Other Poems

Everyone Resents

SCRIBNER

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010025144

ISBN 978-1-4391-4908-9

ISBN 978-1-4391-5627-8 (ebook)

Credits can be found on p. 193.

For Alice and Michelle

my spaceships away

from the zombie wasteland

She cries black tears!

Cindy Brady, The Brady Bunch

Were trying to survive a nuclear war here!
Yes, but we can do it in style...

Howard and Marion Cunningham, Happy Days

Theres nothing in the dark that isnt there in the light.

Major Frank Burns, M*A*S*H

Contents

ZOMBIE
SPACESHIP
WASTELAND

In middle school, I started reading.

Id been reading since kindergarten. It was dutiful and orderly. Point B followed Point A.

But something happened in middle schoola perfect alignment of parental support and benign neglect. The parental support came from keeping me stocked in Beverly Cleary, John Bellairs, The Great Brain books, and Daniel Pinkwater. Also Bridge to Terabithia, The Pushcart War, How to Eat Fried Wormsand the parallel-universe, one-two mind-crack of The Bully of Barkham Street and A Dog on Barkham Street.

And then there was the blessed, benign neglect.

The neglect grew out of the same support. My mom and dad were both busy, working jobs and trying to raise two kids during uncertain times. In the rush of trying to find something new for me to read, theyd grab something off the shelf at Waldenbooks after only glancing at the copy on the back.

Whoever did a lousy job writing copy for books like Richard Brautigans The Hawkline Monster, H. P. Love-crafts At the Mountains of Madness, Harlan Ellisons TheBeast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, and Anthony Burgesss A Clockwork Orange (Its about a teenager in the future! said my mom)thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. You gave me some tangy, roiling stew under the golden crust of the Young Adult literature I was gobbling up.

So yes, I still love Bellairss The House with a Clock in Its Walls, but I always imagine the two bounty killers from The Hawkline Monster in its basement, armed for bear and fucking the Magic Child on a rug. And somewhere beyond John Christophers White Mountains are Vic and Blood, hunting for canned food and pussy. And who prowled the outer woods of Terabithia? Yog-Sothoth, thats who.

Its a gift and an affliction at the same timeconstantly wondering how the mundane world Im living in (or reading about) links to the darker impulses Im having (or imagining I have). The gift-affliction followed me (or was it guiding me?) through my teens, in 1980s suburban Virginia. The local TV station still showed The Wolfman on Saturday morningsbut Id already read Gary Brandners The Howling. So I couldnt watch Lon Chaney, Jr., lurch around the Scottish countryside without wondering if he craved sex as much as murder. I would recontextualize lines of sitcom dialogue to suit darker needs, the way the Surrealists would obsess over a single title card When he crossed the bridge, the shadows came out to meet himin the 1922 silent movie Nosferatu.

Then the local TV station gave way to the early years of cable TV. My parents working hours were such that it was impossible to police my viewing habits. Scooby-Doo and his friends unmasked the Sea Demon and found bitter Old Man Trevers, trying to scare people away from his harbor. But they missed, under the dock, the Humanoids from the Deep, raping sunbathers. Did Harriet the Spy and the Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear run afoul of Abel Ferraras Ms. 45, Paul Kersey from Death Wish, or the Baseball Furies from Walter Hills The Warriors? The Pushcart War took place on the same New York streets where Travis Bickle piloted his taxi. And it sure was cool how the Great Brain could swindle Parley Benson out of his repeating air rifle by pretending to make a magnetic stick. You know what was better? Knowing that, one state over, the bloody slaughter of Heavens Gate was swallowing up John Hurt and Christopher Walken.

Maybe that makes my generation uniquethe one that remembers before MTV and after... and then before the Internet and after. The generation I see solidifying itself now? They were born connectedplopped out into the late nineties, into the land of Everything That Ever Was is Available from Now on. What crass acronym will we slap On the thumb-sore texting multitudes of the twenty-first century? The Waifnos? The Wireds? Anythings better than Gen X, which is what we got. Thanks, Douglas Coupland. We sound like a team of mutant vigilantes with frosted hair and chain wallets. Actually, thats not completely horrible.

And neither was being Gen X. Well always cherish the stark, before-and-after culture shift of our adolescence. We had isolation... and then access. Drought and then deluge. Three channels and then fifty. CBs and then chat rooms. And our parents didnt have time, in the beginning, to sift through the Where is all of this new stimulus coming from? and decide what was beyond our emotional grasp. Thus, the mishmash. Six-color cartoons, but with an edge of gray and maroon. YA literature laced with sex and violence. A generation gifted with confusion, unease, and then revelation.

Not anymore, I guess. It seems that every TV show, movie, song, and website for the generation following me involves protagonists whove been fucking, killing, and cracking wise about fucking and killing since before anyone even showed up to watch them. Im sure that will yield some bizarre new films, books, and musicstuff I cant even imagine. Doesnt matter. By the time that comes around, Ill have long had my consciousness downloaded into a hovering Wolf Husbandry Bot. Ill glide over the Russian steppes, playing Roxy Musics