how do plots like this get published?

[erastes]

 “A virus engineered for genocide has been released in Colorado Springs, leading to mass, and seemingly unexplained violence. Some of the survivors of the infection begin to evolve into something that is both less than and more than human. The race is on to prevent world-wide release of the virus.”

I mean – there is nothing original about that blurb – at all. Wasnt dustin hoffman in one of the versions?

Comments

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

My first through was the Wraeththu Chronicles...

[erastes.livejournal.com]

argh! don't remind me of that. I read half of the first one and haven't managed to bleach my brain since!

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

"Disease-turns-people-into-monsters" seems to be an accepted sub-genre of post-apocalypse fiction...but I'm with you. No pun intended, but it's been done to death. Look at all the films with that plot, according to Wikipedia:

28 Days Later--Ordinary citizens are forced to fight through hordes of rabid zombies after a virus ravages Britain.

28 Weeks Later--Sequel to 28 Days Later. During the efforts to repopulate Britain, the discovery of a possible cure to the "Rage" virus may also begin the apocalypse all over again.

Daybreakers--A virus changes most of the populace into vampires sometime around 2019. At the point where vampirism is considered "normal", the remaining humans attempt to escape being farmed for their blood, while also attempting to find a cure.

I Am Legend--In an abandoned New York City, military virologist Robert Neville tries to find a cure to a man-made virus that killed almost everyone on earth, while at the same time trying to survive against the vampiric zombies it left behind.

I Am Omega--Asylum ripoff of I Am Legend. This time, the virus has turned everyone on earth into a cannibalistic mutant.

The Resident Evil film series--all based on the notion of the T-Virus mutating humanity into something else.

The Last Man--One guy is immune to a super-strain of smallpox that blinds, deforms and drives those who survive it to insanity and cannibalism.

The Last Man on Earth--another version of I Am Legend, this one from 1964.

The Omega Man--another version of I Am Legend, this one from 1971.

The Zombie Diaries--British made movie in which a virus creates a plague of zombies, viewed entirely from the POV of a character's video camera. This film was made and completed before George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead which was shot in a similar POV perspective.

La Horde--Zombie-Apocalypse film. Directed by Benjamin Rocher. The film is set in one of French tower blocks, wherein a small group of people trying to make their way out of it thrusting through hordes of zombies.

Survival of the Dead-- On an island off the coast of North America, local residents simultaneously fight a zombie epidemic while hoping for a cure to return their un-dead relatives back to their human state.

(Oh, and Hoffman was in Outbreak. It involved, obviously, a killer virus, but not one that turned people into zombies or vampires.)

[baritonejeff.livejournal.com]

Hell, I think *I* was in one of the versions. :P

[catana1.livejournal.com]

That's so weird. A blogger I subscribe was talking about this book (The Passage) just this morning (or maybe it was yesterday)and I looked it up on Amazon. My first thought was oh no, not another one. And then I got to thinking about formula fiction. People prefer familiarity, with just the right amount of novelty to keep it from being too obviously just like a hundreds of other novels/TV series/movies.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

well, there's familiar and there's "taking a plot and repeating it exactly"! They should in this case have taken a bit of care with the blurb to make it clear what the novelty is, because this really doesn't show it.

[beckyblack]

The use of the word "evolve" is making me twitch a bit. Individuals do not evolve. And what the hell does "both less than and more than human" actually mean?

Yeah, if I invented a virus engineered to wipe out humanity I'd start in Colorado Springs. Those bastards have been asking for it!

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

And what the hell does "both less than and more than human" actually mean?

According to a paragraph from the author, the virus transforms humans into mutants. I'm fairly sure that this would make sense in the X-Men universe. I'm also sure that in the real world, mutation doesn't work that way.

[vamysteryfan.livejournal.com]

Wasn't that The Stand? but way more interesting?

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

I got to 'leading to mass,' and thought "a virus that induces religious ceremonies?" That would be different!

[smurasaki.livejournal.com]

Colorado Springs? Do the terrorists particularly hate the Air Force or Focus on the Family? All right, I suppose NORAD is still here. But it still seems like a very weird target, maybe because, in reality, Colorado Springs is a very small city. Either the author lives here, or has mistaken it for Denver.

Seriously, wouldn't you target a big city for something like that? New York, LA, Dallas, Phoenix, any one of the 81 metro areas larger than Colorado Springs, preferably one of the top 10, for minimal "Why there?" factor.

I suppose you could say picking a random small city is original. Just not in a good way.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Which reminds of a saying which I may be misquoting...
"The parts of your work that were original were not good, and the parts that were good were not original."
Which sounds horribly (from their own blurb) like an accurate description, in this case. Definitely a subgenre where the trail has been trodden heavily by folks like Robin Cook and their ilk.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

exactly--i'd say "work on the blurb" because you ain't selling it with this one.

[oceankitty1.livejournal.com]

I know curiosity killed the cat but all the same; what book does that blurb belong to?

[erastes.livejournal.com]

http://www.myspace.com/itwdebutauthors/blog/542623728

[oceankitty1.livejournal.com]

Hm. No. Not gonna read that one. I guess I'll stick to Jordan Castillo Price's "Hemovore". Then at least, if I survive the virus, I get to be skinny ;)

[jenniferkoliver.livejournal.com]

I think, for me, it depends who's writing it. ;)