JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Still photo from Dawn of the Dead.

This has to be my favorite title of the week: The mysterious equilibrium of zombies, by Samuel Arbesman in The Boston Globe.

I have discussed the entries to the Alternate History contest with our guest judge Din Atienza and we have agreed to declare the contest a failure.

Din: “This set me to thinking though: to write a subtle, brilliant alternate history, one would have to be conversant with all the players at the time. Which begs the question, does one have to be equally conversant in order to appreciate it?

“I personally would’ve liked to hear one where a theocracy headed by Jaime Cardinal Sin rises. Catholic school upbringing, ya know. Mike Velarde becomes a public relations wiz to rival Bobby Dacer. Socrates Villegas becomes Cardinal and Executive Secretary and later, when Sin dies, is tempted by Velarde to revive the Philippine Independent Church. . .

“All (the entries) only did a straight line extrapolation of the Marcos regime to the present. Entry #5 from william_tan_see did the homework and showed imagination—I would have been interested to see how he’d integrate all that into a story. Entry #8 from Qsdn: great choice of medium but the extrapolation was obvious and he admits it himself, calling it cliche.”

So there: No contest. However, to acknowledge the effort william_tan_see and Qsdn put into their entries, I will give them copies of the Cory book anyway. I’ll hand them over at the Good Ideas Forum to which you are both invited.