#zone one

[quotespile]

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

[artbyblastweave]

And I mean like, when the looting stops and it’s safe to begin legitimate trade as people begin to rebuild some

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There are at least two prose works I'm aware of that dig into this. World War Z is the more famous of the two, with an aside about what a pain in the ass it's been to wrench everyone back off the barter standard to a cash economy, and what a pain it's been to convert the remnants of the original cash economy to the new system when it's super difficult to tell who had the foresight necessary to hang onto their financial records and who's just good at breaking into bank vaults; this is a brief aside, but it makes WWZ notable as being one of the only stories I can think of to politely cede that both outlooks on this issue can be totally reasonable even in the heat of the moment.

The other, and significantly bleaker take on this, was in Zone One by Colson Whitehead, which centers on a showy, quixotic and farcical attempt by a provisional government to resettle Manhattan after the worst of the hordes have been cleared, despite not having anywhere near enough survivors to populate it. The new government is characterized as aggressively corporatist and insistent on leaving as many of the material and financial goods within the city as untouched as possible until they can be absolutely 100 percent sure that there are no plausible inheritors or successor organizations hanging out in any of the refugee camps; in practice this mostly results in their scutworkers on the ground getting yelled at for breaking into vending machines for stale candy.

[brightbeautifulthings]

"New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example."

— Colson Whitehead, Zone One

[litsnaps]

[guillotineeny]

From Zone One by Colson Whitehead

[transxfiles]

The Last Man On Earth by Wayne Barlow // Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel // A Quiet Place: Part Two dir. John Krasinski // Zone One by Colson Whitehead // Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

[quotessentially]

From Colson Whitehead’s Zone One