Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: geeky
  • Music: Taylor Swift, "Long Live."

BLACKOUT open thread!

To celebrate the release of Blackout, here. Have an open thread to discuss the book.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Seriously. If anyone comments here at all, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. So please don't read and then yell at me because you encountered spoilers. You were warned. (I will not reply to every comment; I call partial comment amnesty. But I may well join some of the discussion, or answer questions or whatnot.)

You can also start a book discussion at my website forums, with less need to be concerned that I will see everything you say! In case you wanted, you know, discussion free of authorial influence, since I always wind up getting involved in these things.

Have fun!
Tags: blackout, mira grant, zombies
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  • 357 comments

archangelbeth

May 24 2012, 00:43:45 UTC 5 years ago

*devours book in... a little over a couple hours, SCLORP*

My one complaint is... Not enough about the Zombie Hive Mind! I wanna know if the virus has some kind of telepathic neural resonance going on! O:D (Which, absent the brain-'cording bit, was my first speculation on how they'd gotten a self-aware clone with memories.)

But if there is/are future novella(s) planned, maybe my question will be answered there. O:>

wendyzski

May 24 2012, 01:33:22 UTC 5 years ago

I think the novella she is talking about is The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, where The Rising hits during ComicCon.

archangelbeth

May 24 2012, 02:05:01 UTC 5 years ago

!!!!!!!!!

wendyzski

May 24 2012, 02:08:49 UTC 5 years ago

She was auctioning off a couple of deaths in it a while back, but
I don't remember when or where it was due out

archangelbeth

May 24 2012, 02:12:58 UTC 5 years ago

Ahhh, I do vaguely remember that now. Eek.

chatworthy

May 24 2012, 03:56:31 UTC 5 years ago

Can't wait for that one. Life Imitating Art Department: There's gonna be a big Zombie Game at the football stadium a couple blocks from Comic-Con. Big. Pricey. Overproduced. Fun. Probably way too late to work into the novella, though.

Elapsed time, start to finish: about 10 hours. Gotta breathe now before I re-read.

And congratulations to Seanan on selling the film rights!

literateknits

May 24 2012, 13:26:45 UTC 5 years ago

Seanan could be talking about the novella she has slated for next year, I think it's called
"How Green the Sky, How Blue the Sea"

seanan_mcguire

May 24 2012, 14:40:42 UTC 5 years ago

That one's likely to deal a bit more with mob behavior in zombies, but honestly, the people in the world don't fully understand the mechanism, so it's not going to be explained clearly to the reader.

owenblacker

June 3 2012, 18:37:04 UTC 5 years ago

Well, it depends, I guess. Few people in that world didn't understand reservoir conditions until we did... ;o)

seanan_mcguire

June 3 2012, 18:56:37 UTC 5 years ago

True!

jammiesest

May 25 2012, 01:10:01 UTC 5 years ago

I hope that A. BPAL is vending that year and B. that Beth & Ted & co. make it out okay!

seanan_mcguire

May 25 2012, 14:29:57 UTC 5 years ago

No one makes it out okay.

jammiesest

May 25 2012, 15:26:22 UTC 5 years ago

In that case, I hope BPAL isn't there (or their fictional equivalent)!

vixyish

May 24 2012, 01:57:58 UTC 5 years ago

I don't think there is a Zombie Hive Mind, but I think the pack behavior of the zombies was based on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing

Which is not telepathic, but would sorta look like it.

When I first came across this I was like "SEANAN SEANAN OMG THE THING YOUR ZOMBIES DO IS AN ACTUAL REAL THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE REAL WORLD OMG!" And she was like "...um. Yes. I know." :D

archangelbeth

May 24 2012, 02:06:03 UTC 5 years ago

Interesting!

(Is it bad I'd love to see that described in-character? Probably be easier for me to process, too. (Or it may just be that I didn't get enough sleep and therefore cannot brain well...))

dormouse_in_tea

May 25 2012, 02:52:42 UTC 5 years ago

Yeah, this is honestly still bothering me, after having read it twice. Shaun's haunting/hallucination...has the correct eyes. Something is going on there. And while I can handle it not being *explained*. . . I do not find it believable at all Shaun never said a damn thing about it, once Georgia-clone was there.

seanan_mcguire

May 25 2012, 14:17:06 UTC 5 years ago

Honestly, my intent, although I may not have managed to get it across, was that Georgia-the-hallucination's eyes were like that because Shaun's mind was still, even as it was fracturing, trying to protect him. That was the big "SHE IS NOT REAL" flag that it was waving in his face, and on some level, he knew it.

If he'd gone all the way over the edge, her eyes would have gone black, to match what they "should" be. As for why he never said anything...you have a very limited slice of time, during most of which he's terrified that one of them will die. They'll talk it out in a year, in Canada.

dormouse_in_tea

May 25 2012, 14:27:20 UTC 5 years ago

This is fair. I think I was a little too distracted by the fact that KA as a reservoir for intelligence was a possibility that occurred to me, that never got taken entirely off the table (because, of course, no one in the book knew enough to disillusion me) to really pick up on that. So that, combined with how convenient it ended up being (don't get me wrong, "Wait, you guys can see her too?" was HYSTERICAL, I laughed out loud, which was a problem, since I was reading in the bathroom at work and wasn't even really on break) served to get in my head and bug me a little.

Of course, the way haunting-Georgia shifted, at the end, being more obviously madness, was totally in the text and does serve to illustrate your point. I'm just a hard sell once I have an idear in my head. >_>

seanan_mcguire

May 25 2012, 14:28:00 UTC 5 years ago

Totally fair!

archangelbeth

May 26 2012, 01:39:53 UTC 5 years ago

(What the dormouse said! I was on the "is there a telepathic bond because of the whole virus reservoir thing??" mode speculation for a while. O:>

Also, "You can see her too??" was so delightful!)

Charles Ellis

May 25 2012, 17:12:02 UTC 5 years ago

At one point I was wondering if she actually was real in a way. It occurred to me that while the CDC was implanting Georgia's memories into her clones, they could have done something similar to Shaun. They would be inducing an entirely plausible breakdown in Shaun that would drastically reduce any future credibility. Unfortunately for the CDC (in this hypothetical scenario) between Shaun handling it just well enough to function and the support of his friends it never became enough of a handle for them to use.

Until the big reveal, the main argument against this possibility was that I couldn't recall you setting up a likely opportunity for the CDC to carry out the procedure.

vixyish

May 25 2012, 20:39:08 UTC 5 years ago

Yeah, I don't think they ever had that kind of access to Shaun.

ladytinyhelm

June 3 2012, 23:20:49 UTC 5 years ago

Yeah, I had the exact same theory. It just makes sense! (for certain definitions thereof, anyway)