 First edition | |
| Author | Kevin Brockmeier |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Archie Ferguson |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy, adventure |
| Publisher | Pantheon Books |
Publication date | 2006 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 252 (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | 0-375-42369-9 (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC | 60550844 |
| 813/.6 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3602.R63 B75 2006 |
The Brief History of the Dead is a fantasy and adventure novel by American writer Kevin Brockmeier, published in 2006.
The story takes place in the near future, with chapters alternating between two settings. Half follow Laura Byrd, an employee of The Coca-Cola Company dispatched on a research trip to Antarctica so as to assess the feasibility of the drinks company using the melting ice in their products. The world is gripped by rampant global warming, war, and bioterrorism. The other chapters describe various residents of an afterlife known as The City. This realm is neither a heaven nor a hell, containing both the pleasantries and annoyances of city life. The City appears boundless, and its geography changes to accommodate new arrivals. People appear to remain in The City for as long as at least one person remains alive who knew them. Each have a unique experience in their "crossing" (death), with one commonality: hearing the sound of a heartbeat.
In remote Antarctica, the radio transmitter which Byrd and two colleagues, Puckett and Joyce, used to stay in touch with their base fails. After some time without rescue, Puckett and Joyce undertake the several-day long voyage to the base. Byrd spends weeks alone without any contact, eventually deciding to travel to the base herself. After a difficult journey, she arrives to find all of the base's personnel are dead. She finds that they succumbed to the 'Blinks', the symptoms of a deadly, and probably synthetic, virus. This virus has recently swept the entire world, killing victims within hours. Byrd realises she may be the last person left alive, but nevertheless decides to make a dangerous trip to a powerful radio transmitter in the hope of reaching outside aid. After an even more arduous journey, she makes it to the transmitter, only to find it inoperable. She survives for a short time afterwards before succumbing to the freezing conditions.
In The City the virus results in a massive decrease in population – although large numbers of people appear most of these quickly disappear. After a while the population is reduced to a few thousand scattered individuals. These congregate in one district, and come to understand that they all had some connection to Byrd, some intimately, some only as a passing acquaintance. As Byrd travels the frozen landscape, winter falls on The City. The heartbeat the dead heard during their crossings becomes audible again to all, before ceasing. The previously boundless cityscape begins to reduce in size with intangible but impassible boundaries contracting on the remaining population. The novel ends with this shrinking bubble close to reducing to nothingness.
Brockmeier quotes James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me at the beginning of the book. The quote describes the belief of many African tribes that humans can be divided into three categories: Those still alive on earth, the recently departed ( sasha ), and the dead ( zamani ). When people die they are sasha while people are still alive who remember them. When the last person remembering them dies, they go to the zamani and are then revered and recalled by name only.
A brief afterword to the novel acknowledges a debt to Apsley Cherry-Garrard's Antarctic memoir, The Worst Journey in the World .
A reference is made to the Wandering Jew, a legend from medieval Christian folklore. One character, who believes this legend, speculates about what the emptying of The City could mean in light of this story.
In September 2003 Brockmeier published the book's first chapter as a short story in The New Yorker. [1]
The novel was first published in the United States by Pantheon Books in 2006.
The Brief History of the Dead received favourable reviews from various publications, including Publishers Weekly , [2] Salon, [3] and the Library Journal . [4]
The book was nominated for the 2007 New York Public Library Young Lions Award. [5]
On January 13, 2004, filmmaker Chris Columbus was set to direct and produce the film adaptation for Warner Bros. Pictures with David Auburn writing the screenplay. [6]
Anne Cécile Desclos was a French journalist and novelist who wrote under the pen names Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage. She is best known for her erotic novel Story of O (1954).
Resident Evil, known in Japan as Biohazard, is a Japanese horror game series and media franchise created by Capcom. It consists of survival horror, third-person shooter and first-person shooter games, with players typically surviving in environments filled with zombies and other creatures. The franchise has expanded into a live-action film series, animated films, television series, comic books, novels, audio dramas, and other media and merchandise. Resident Evil is the highest-grossing horror franchise.
Sasha is a unisex name which originated in Eastern and Southern European countries as the shortened version of Alexander and Alexandra. It is also used as a surname, although very rarely. Alternative spellings include: Саша, Сашо, Саше, Saša, Sasza (Polish), Sașa (Romanian), Sacha (French), Sascha (German), Sascia (Italian), Sasja and סשה.
Lincoln Ellsworth was a polar explorer from the United States and a major benefactor of the American Museum of Natural History.
Doomsday Book is a 1992 science fiction novel by American author Connie Willis. The novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and was shortlisted for other awards. The title of the book refers to the Domesday Book of 1086. Kivrin Engle, the main character, says that her recording is "a record of life in the Middle Ages, which is what William the Conqueror's survey turned out to be."
Animal Dreams is a 1990 novel by Barbara Kingsolver. A woman named Cosima "Codi" Noline returns to her hometown of Grace, Arizona to help her aging father, who is slowly losing his struggle with Alzheimer's disease. She takes a biology teacher position at the local high school and lives with her old high school friend, Emelina. Animal Dreams features Kingsolver's trademark—alternating perspectives throughout the novel. Most chapters are told from the perspective of Codi, while others are told from her father, Homer's, perspective. The book was dedicated to Ben Linder, who was killed by the Contras on April 28, 1987.
Sasha Bordeaux is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was at first primarily associated with superhero Batman, and she has subsequently evolved an association with Checkmate in two of its incarnations. Sasha Bordeaux was created by Greg Rucka and Shawn Martinbrough, and first appeared in Detective Comics #751.
Timewyrm: Genesys is an original Doctor Who novel, published by Virgin Publishing in their New Adventures range of Doctor Who novels. It was the first book in that series, and was thought of by some fans as a continuation of the television series; in effect, a Season 27 to follow the televised Season 26.
Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical novel by Charles Frazier which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks for months to return to Ada Monroe, the love of his life; the story shares several similarities with Homer's Odyssey. The narrative alternates back and forth every chapter between the stories of Inman and Ada, a minister's daughter recently relocated from Charleston to a farm in a rural mountain community near Cold Mountain, North Carolina from which Inman hails. Though they only knew each other for a brief time before Inman departed for the war, it is largely the hope of seeing Ada again that drives Inman to desert the army and make the dangerous journey back to Cold Mountain. Details of their brief history together are told at intervals in flashback over the course of the novel.
Kevin John Brockmeier is an American writer of fantasy and literary fiction.
Laurence McKinley Gould was an American geologist, educator, and polar explorer. He made expeditions to both the Arctic and Antarctic, and was chief scientist on Richard Evelyn Byrd's first Antarctic expedition, which Gould described in his 1931 book Cold: the Record of an Antarctic Sledge Journey. He served as president of Carleton College from 1945 to 1962, and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1964. His namesakes include the research vessel Laurence M. Gould as well as Antarctic features including Gould Bay, Gould Coast, and Mount Gould.
Ruslan and Ludmila is a poem by Alexander Pushkin, published in 1820. It is written as an epic fairy tale consisting of a dedication (посвящение), six "cantos", and an epilogue. It tells the story of the abduction of Ludmila, the daughter of Prince Vladimir of the Kievan Rus', by an evil wizard and the attempt by the brave knight Ruslan to find and rescue her.
The History of Love: A Novel is the second novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published in 2005. The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for fiction.
Rabies has been the main plot device or a significant theme in many fictional works. Due to the long history of the virus as well as its neurotropic nature, rabies has been a potent symbol of madness, irrationalism, or an unstoppable plague in numerous fictional works, in many genres. Many notable examples are listed below.
Resident Evil is an action horror film series based on the Japanese video game franchise by Capcom.
Jillian Tamaki is a Canadian American illustrator and comic artist known for her work in The New York Times and The New Yorker in addition to the graphic novels Boundless, as well as Skim and This One Summer written by her cousin Mariko Tamaki.
"Made to Suffer" is the eighth episode and mid-season finale of the third season of the post-apocalyptic horror television series The Walking Dead. It was directed by Billy Gierhart and written by Robert Kirkman, and aired on AMC in the United States on December 2, 2012. In this episode, Rick, Daryl, Michonne, and Oscar enter Woodbury in search of Glenn and Maggie. Meanwhile, a new group of survivors discover the prison.
The Kill Order is a 2012 young adult dystopian science fiction novel written by American author James Dashner and published on August 14, 2012 by Delacorte Press. It is the first prequel book in The Maze Runner series and the fourth installment overall. The book is set prior to the events of The Fever Code and 13 years before The Maze Runner book.
Fever is a 2013 young-adult dystopian novel written by Lauren DeStefano. It was published on February 12. 2012, by Simon & Schuster Book's For Young Readers. It takes place in a dystopian future where scientists have created a generation of perfect humans, who suffer from no illnesses or disorders. However, an unforeseen virus derived from the cure plagues the children and the grandchildren of the perfection generation and kills females at age 20 and males at age 25. This leads to a dramatic crisis in the population with the young dying and the perfect generation reaching old age, and a race to create a cure. It is the second book of The Chemical Garden Trilogy. The first book, Wither, was released in March 2011. The third and final book, Sever, was released in December 2013.
"The First Day of the Rest of Your Life" is the sixteenth and final episode of the seventh season of the post-apocalyptic horror television series The Walking Dead, which aired in the United States on AMC on April 2, 2017. The episode was written by Scott M. Gimple, Angela Kang, and Matthew Negrete, and directed by Greg Nicotero.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)