UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE FORTY-FOUR I’m just here for the gasoline.

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For more information, email [email protected] Editor in Chief Stu Horvath

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Design Stu Horvath UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE FORTY-FOUR

Contributors

Joe DeMartino

Michael Edwards

Stu Horvath

Kenneth Lucas

Ed Coleman CONTENTS

From the Desk of the EIC

Bad Shit by Joe DeMartino

Mad Max, Now More Than Ever by Michael Edwards

Eschatology by Stu Horvath

A Brief Apocalyptic Bibliography

Riding in the Wasteland by Ken Lucas

Surviving the Apocalypse? Fuck that Shit! by Ed Coleman

Biographies and Illustrations From the Desk of the Editor in Chief

Hi there,

I have been trying (ow) to write this (ow) for hours, but carpal tunnel or writer’s cramp or arthritis or some jerk with a voodoo doll is (OW) making it difficult. One more example of why I wouldn’t last ten minutes in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, I guess. I suppose this means I have to keep it brief. As has happened a few times in the past, we wound up with an accidental theme issue this week. Within, we discuss the horrors and hilarity and romance of the end of the world, just in time for the release of Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that by nearly all accounts revolutionizes the action movie and leaves other post-apocalyptic stories in the irradiated dust. First up, Joe DeMartino gives us nightmares by running down some truly awful ways the world could end without us having a hope of stopping it. Michael Edwards explains why the release of Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t just good, it is necessary. I pick at the reasons the apocalypse hold such appeal in popular culture (and provide a lengthy apocalyptic bibliography). Kenneth Lucas gets amped for cars, Fury Road and the forthcoming Mad Max videogame game. Finally, Ed Coleman leaves us (literally?) on a weirdly positive note, explaining why he wouldn’t want survive the end of the world. Special thanks to Aaron Lee Hawn for providing all the art for this issue. His desert landscapes are really something else. Make sure to check out his work (links in the credits at the end of the issue). (ow) That’s it for me. Try to survive the weekend without setting off a nuke, OK? Send your letters to [email protected] - I want to know how you like Fury Road. I’ll print the best of them.

Stu Horvath, Jersey City (ow), New Jersey May 14, 2015 Bad Shit By Joe DeMartino ost post-apocalyptic stories are, at their core, somewhat optimistic. The Mnukes have fallen, the zombies are rampaging and popular fashion tastes are trending toward skull necklaces and assless chaps, but somehow, life still exists – and may even be flourishing. A nuclear war doesn’t prevent humanity from returning to the stars in A Canticle for Liebowitz, nor does it stop nation-states from reforming in Fallout. Even the Mad Max films feature towns and the trappings of cultural development. If a little bit of life survives, they contend, it’ll only be a matter of time before we continue our grand march of progress. The following scenarios do not allow for such a rosy outlook:

RELATIVISTIC KILL VEHICLES

“The more efficient a reaction drive, the more effective a weapon it makes.” - “The Warriors,” by Larry Niven

Most every story involving an alien invasion or war in space has, in large part, lied to you. Something as complex as an Independence Day-level invasion or a Death Star is not necessary if your goal is to simply erase a particular planet from the star map. Civilizations capable of engaging in interstellar travel would need to be able to harness enormous amounts of energy, and with that ability comes the possibility of using said energy as a weapon. In short, if you’re able to move a ship at the speed of light, you’re able to move a missile at the speed of light, and anything moving at the speed of light is going to apply rather a lot of force to whatever it strikes. Even the word “missile” here is misleading – the ideal relativistic kill vehicle, as such a nightmare weapon would be called, could be something as simple as a small asteroid. Say a particularly nasty alien race decided that they’d rather not see what happens when a species as vicious as humanity takes to the stars. All they’d really need to do is strap a big enough engine to a big enough rock, point that rock at Earth (or where Earth will be when it arrives), turn it on, and then basically forget about it. Moving at the speed of light, something the size of, say, a tub of ice cream would be more than enough to wipe out a major city and cause devastating environmental damage. Scale it up to a car to wipe out a country, a city to make the planet totally unusable, and a state to crack it in half like a walnut. Even worse, since our theoretical killer rock is moving at the speed of light, you literally cannot see it coming. As soon as your eyes are able to perceive it, it’s already there. Barring technology far beyond what we’ve been able to reasonably conceive, there would be no way to stop it.

GAMMA RAY BURSTS I should specify that the chances of this actually happening are super, super small, but: we could be entirely obliterated any second now with no warning or chance of prevention by a giant death ray from a star thousands of light years away. Sorry. That’s called a gamma ray burst, and it’s not the super cool kind that gave the Hulk his powers of super anger. This is the kind that occurs when a super-massive star collapses, or is swallowed by a black hole. Imagine a beam of intensely radioactive particles emanating from the star’s poles, pointed directly at Earth. We’ve actually been hit by a few before, but we’ve been lucky in that they were smaller ones. A large enough burst – and remember, this is an incredibly rare event that would have to be pointed straight at us – would blow the ozone layer off the planet and give a lethal dose of radiation to everyone in its path. That’s the good news. If the blast is close enough – say, 1,000 light years or so – it’d set our atmosphere ablaze as a nice side benefit.

GREY GOO Imagine a robot – a tiny robot too small to be seen with the naked eye. That’s called a nanobot, and the potential benefits of something like that are actually somewhat extensive. Swarms of nanobots could undertake construction tasks, repair damaged arteries and heart valves, and just generally go places we can’t. You might not think that something that small would be that dangerous, but consider the following scenario: a nanobot with an instruction to create exact copies of itself, with no command to stop. Say it takes an hour to make another nanobot – now there are two of them, with instructions to make more copies. An hour later, four. Then eight, sixteen, 32, 64, and so on. Within a day, there’d be over sixteen million nanobots, each of them continuing to make copies and copies and copies out of any matter they can find -- metal, rock, even flesh. Within the year, the whole Earth would be a pulsating mass of nanobots, desperately searching for more material. The only recourse would be some kind of large-scale nuclear strike on the center of the mass, before it got too large. Of course, you’d have to make sure you got literally every single one – miss even a single nanobot, and the whole thing starts all over again. Grey goo nanobots would also work very well as a weapon if you don’t happen to be on the same planet at the time, or you lack access to a big asteroid and a big engine, or if you’re like a huge jerk.

THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER ACCIDENTALLY CREATING A BLACK HOLE THAT SUCKS IN THE EARTH Actually this is almost definitely not going to happen. See? A bit of good news. U Mad Max, Now More Than Ever By Michael Edwards o one could have predicted how badly the world would need a new Mad Max film Nin 2015. There’s a point in the lives of those passionate about pop culture when it all clicks, when the urge to seek things out becomes an obsession. The door opens and inside is a feast laid out on a table. Some things agree with you and you want to consume more. Sometimes it’s delicious pizza from that fancy little spot downtown and sometimes it’s crap from Domino’s. Doesn’t matter. You still want more. It was in the late 80s when my interests moved beyond Star Wars, cartoons and G.I. Joe comic books. I was in middle school, a particularly awful time of my life when I escaped headlong into other worlds. I started reading different kinds of books and comics. I sought out movies at the video store recommended by Starlog and Fangoria magazines. It was a period of boundless absorption in an era where the flow of information trickled out of the faucet. It was then that I discovered the world of Mad Max, a world where little in the way of resources were left. It was one Saturday afternoon on NY WPIX Channel 11 when I randomly caught a bit of Road Warrior, the second entry in the series. I remember later watching the movie as a whole at my friend’s house, but it was those initial glimpses of that world that stand out, as I was instantly baffled and intrigued. There it was, the barren wastelands of the Australian outback, where a tribe of biker punk survivors battled it out with a tribe of people in white for oil to power their jacked and junked-up vehicles. Stuck in the middle was a mysterious man named Max and his almost feral dog. It felt more mature than most of the science fiction I had watched up until that point. I hadn’t watched many post-apocalyptic movies at that age, but much of what I was seeing on the screen played out like the scenarios I would set up on the floor of my bedroom with G.I. Joe toys. My friend and I would eventually perform surgery on the Joes, transforming them into characters from the Mad Max series. It helped that the punky bad guy Dreadnocks were already almost there. Sometimes it all slams together on screen, and in the case of Road Warrior, it did so literally and metaphorically. I eventually watched all of them and nothing confused me at the time more than Mad Max, the first entry into the series. Some of my foolish complaints at the time were that “Everything’s too normal and boring in the first one, it’s not totally insane yet” and “There’s not that much Mad Max in the movie until the end!” I preferred Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome for years, simply because it went further into the weird world of this barbaric Australian future. Somehow I managed to block that middle section with the stranded tribe of kids out of my memory until rewatching the movie as an adult. Then Mad Max moved waaaaay ahead of Thunderdome. Rewatching the original Mad Max made me appreciate the movie as an incredible accomplishment for two young Australian filmmakers. Australians George Miller and Byron Kennedy met in 1971. They were friends; Miller a doctor, Kennedy an amateur film maker. Eventually the pair would form the production company Miller Kennedy and work on a number of small experimental films, until Miller directed and Kennedy produced their smash hit Mad Max in 1979. Australia was going through its own cinematic Ozploitation New Wave at the time, well documented in the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! Mad Max and the follow-up Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior broke out of that scene and wowed American audiences with impressive box office returns. Unfortunately, Kennedy died in a helicopter crash in 1983, which threw off the production for the big budget third movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome as the script had not been completed. After Thunderdome was released to a lukewarm reception in 1985, there wouldn’t be a peep from Miller for over a decade regarding his ground- breaking series. In the meantime he kept himself busy as a director, writer and producer of other well-known movies, including the Babe movies, which netted him some Oscars. It seemed like the Mad Max franchise had ventured out into the wasteland of the Outback, never to be seen or heard from again. Then, in 2003, there was the announcement of Mad Max: Fury Road. Mel Gibson was attached and shooting would begin in Namibia. Due to concerns that it wouldn’t be prudent to release a movie about battling for oil in the desert while the real life sequel to the Iraq War raged on, production was halted soon after. George Miller did the Happy Feet movies, was attached to a direct a Justice League movie that never happened and it was revealed that Mel Gibson had a lot more in common with his character than audiences realized. He got the boot and Tom Hardy got the Interceptor. In 2009, finally out of development hell, principal photography was underway. Six years later, it’s here. People involved with the production have said that the storyboards alone are a sight to behold. Miller stated in an interview at Comic-Con 2014 that he designed the film in storyboard form and that it came out to about 3,500 panels, almost the same amount of shots in the finished film. Apparently it is non-stop action, just judging from the visually arresting trailers. With Tom Hardy in for four movies, we have a lead that can carry on the franchise. Not to mention Charlize Theron as new robo-handed character Furiosa, who is set to be the focus of the already in-development sequel. It looks like Miller wants to slam us back into his crazed future world. Since 1989, there have been many comic book movies, thanks to that little film by Tim Burton about the guy dressed up like a bat. Some may say we’ve reached critical mass and that there’s something of a comic book movie fatigue in moviegoers. If I went back in time and wearily explained to a younger me what the state of the blockbuster cinematic world currently is, I’d probably die because the head of Young Michael would explode from imagining the awesome possibilities. I still think about that when I drag myself out to the umpteenth Marvel movie or DC disaster. It’s interesting to note that there’s been very little in the way of Mad Max related “expanded universe” materials and, much like the barren world he lives in, there’s no hint of oversaturation. A couple of so-so videogames (although the upcoming one looks great), maybe a comic book here and there. It makes the franchise unique in that, unlike all of the franchise sequels being released this summer, it’s one of the few that haven’t become the victim of geeky exploitation. Even Avengers: Age of Ultron looks to be more concerned with being a super hero vending machine. Unlike The Avengers, whose formula is becoming apparent, George Miller is going so far into his world that none of us knows what to expect. And it is a world we haven’t seen in the last 30 years, unlike many of the sequels coming out this summer (looking at you, Terminator: Genisys). The underlying theme of the Mad Max movies is also important, as we are still an oil-obsessed society in 2015 that is only one disaster or a few empty oil wells away from an anarchic dark age. So yeah, I’m excited for Fury Road. Although it’s a franchise sequel, it looks like it has a unique vision, more like an indy cult movie with a blockbuster budget. In some ways, Fury Road is more of a comic book movie than the comic book movies being released this summer. And there’s not one glimpse of a tribe of children in the trailers. That alone increases the chances of it being good by 99%. U Eschatology By Stu Horvath t is the end of the Cretaceous period. A massive asteroid has impacted the earth in Ithe area of what is now Chicxulub, Yucatan. Megatsunamis roil the seas. A cloud of debris from the impact is ejected outside the atmosphere and incandesces on re- entry, scorching the Earth’s surface. Volcanos erupt. Earthquakes rumble. Surely, this is the end.

It is 70 AD. Titus Flavius, at the head of an army of 70,000 Roman soldiers, has breached the walls of Jerusalem. The Temple of Jerusalem is aflame. Over a million of the city’s residents are dead and nearly another 100,000 enslaved. Surely, this is the end.

It is 1353. Death has walked the Silk Road to Europe and the Middle East. Once great cities are now stinking open graves. 200 million people have turned black and died.

Surely, this is the end.

It is 1945. There is a brilliant flash of light followed by a loud boom. In moments, a firestorm like nothing the world has ever seen consumes a city. Surely, this is the end.

It is 11 o’clock on December 20, 2012. The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is about to run out. Depending on your particular flavor of New Age belief, we are about to be beset by: a solar maximum, a polar shift, a black hole, an alien invasion, a collision with an astronomical body called Nibiru. Surely, this is the end.

It is 20XX. Advances in Strong AI have created an intelligence explosion. Machine thinking is now faster that the human mind can comprehend. Surely, this is the end.

There’s more.

The fall of Tenochtitlan.

Y2K.

The Ghost Dance.

Pompeii.

The Great War.

he idea that the world will end, and that end is likely imminent, has been with us Tfor thousands of years. The Norse myths of Ragnarok and the Jewish scriptures detailing the Deluge are testament to that. In fact, most ancient myth cycles include a story involving a catastrophic flood, so, perhaps our fascination with the destruction of our species may be a deeply held genetic anxiety. Whether a spiritual or temporal concern, as self-centered as humans are, the apocalypse really is about us. The world will keep on spinning once we’re gone. I think that thought drives us a little crazy.

We are fragile creatures, bound to our surroundings by necessity. In the early days of our history, when a mud slide or a fire wiped out our village, it wiped out all we have ever known. We may escape with our lives in the short term, but the loss of our security and prosperity was potentially just as deadly.

Thanks to exploration and communication technology, the world has grown smaller over the centuries, but no safer. War and disease walk the roads of civilization along with progress. These threats are more immediate than extinction and so, when we talk about apocalypse, we are actually talking about change, often violent and final, visited upon a place, a culture or a way of life.

In this way, the Book of Revelation, perhaps the most famous account of the coming apocalypse, is actually a thinly veiled history, a lamentation of the decadence of the

Roman Empire and the depredations it visited upon Jerusalem. That holy city was irrevocably changed by the sack. The historian Josephus claims the city was razed to the foundations so that, “nothing was left that could ever persuade visitors that it had once been a place of habitation.”

Is that not an apocalypse for the residents who likely knew little of the world beyond the city? For the million dead in its streets? For the hundred thousand slaves who would never return?

Yet cultures, groups and cities do not think or experience things. Only their smallest constituent part, the individual, can experience and express the disquiet brought about by widespread upheaval. Thus, the apocalypse is a personal matter.

Cartesian, even. If you are no longer alive to experience the world, does the world still exist?

here are two broad categories of end of the world yarn: those that take place Tas it happens, usually with a focus on prevention, and those that take place in the aftermath and deal with themes of survival in extreme circumstances. Very few straddle both scenarios, with good reason. Stephen King’s The Stand does and its two halves feel dissonant, the tone inconsistent. From there, both types are divided into further sub-genres organized by the cause of the apocalypse. Divine wrath, alien invasion, the sun extinguishing, ecological collapse, war, virulent disease, even dragons can be the source of disaster, as in the (terrible) movie Reign of Fire. Sometimes, as in the best hard sci-fi, the cataclysm is an elaborate “what if?” used to examine a real world fear in the safety of fiction, like the extreme climate changes in J.G. Ballard’s The Burning World. Sometimes it is just an interchangeable prop, a mechanism through which to pressure the characters into behavioral extremes, as are the zombies in The Walking Dead. In all cases, the world is hugely depopulated. Society is forced, through necessity, to change in dramatic, ugly ways. A descent into violent, territorial behavior is the norm. And yet, apocalyptic fiction is generally optimistic. Despite it all, there are survivors. There could be no story in a true extinction event. No, in stories and movies and games, the apocalypse is rarely an apocalypse at all. These are hopeful wishes in the face of devastating change: that we will persevere, that we will retain some semblance of the morality that defines our humanity, that we won’t just cease. It’s kind of funny, when you think about it.

s with everything else, we romanticize the apocalypse. We can’t help it – Awe simply can’t conceive of a universe without us. It is probably a genetic compulsion. How else can you explain our insistence at monkeying around with split atoms and particle colliders? Be honest. You can’t really conceive of a life without showers. Without coffee. Without booze and music and videogames and flushing toilets and supermarkets and doctor’s offices. I sure as hell can’t. For all the fun I’ve had dreaming up elaborate survival plans, the truth is I wouldn’t last ten minutes out there once civilization falls apart. Neither would you. After the bombs, there will be no Wasteland to wander. After the oil dries up, there will be no savage biker gang to stand against. After we strip mine this planet to the core, there’s no place for us to go.

A Brief Apocalyptic Bibliography A collection of stories, movies, comics, TV shows and videogames I believe to be of particular interest to the Armageddon enthusiast. Annotated as necessary.

Books, Stories and Comics

The Book of Revelation (likely circa 70 AD)

The Last Man, by Mary Shelley (1826) – savaged by critics at the time, the novel was largely unknown until republication in 1965. One of the earliest examples of apocalyptic fiction, this time at the hands of a plague.

After London, by Richard Jeffries (1885) – a rare example of a story tackling both the apocalypse and its aftermath.

The Purple Cloud, by M. P. Shiel (1901) – A “last man” novel whose titular death cloud has weird religious overtones. Adapted to film asThe World, The Flesh and the Devil in 1959.

When Worlds Collide, by Philip Wylie (1933) – Here the instrument of armageddon is a rogue planet that will smash the Earth to pieces. Adapted to film in 1951.

“By the Waters of Babylon,” by Stephen Vincent Benet (1937) – Written in response to the fascist bombing of Guernica, the story’s reference to a “Great Burning” is eerily prescient of atomic weapons.

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham (1951) – Humanity is pushed to near-extinction by an invasion of carnivorous plants of mysterious origin. Adapted numerous times.

“The Nine Billion Names of God,” by Arthur C. Clarke (1953) – A short story in which Tibetan monks use a computer to transcribe the names of God, heralding the end of creation.

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (1954) – A story of a calamitous vampire plague, the novel hugely influenced the rise of zombie movies. Adapted to film three times asThe Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007)

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter H. Miller (1959) – A curiosity in that, after the nuclear holocaust, society has reverted to a medieval model and humanity’s knowledge is preserved by the Catholic church.

On the Beach, by Nevil Shute (1957)

Hothouse, by Brian Aldiss (1961) – Here, the earth has stopped spinning and has been overrun by all manner of bizarre plants. A notable inspiration for the TSR role-playing game Gamma World.

The Drowned World, by J. G. Ballard (1962)

No Truce With Kings, by Poul Anderson (1963)

Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut (1963) The Burning World, by J. G. Ballard (1964)

Damnation Alley, by Roger Zelazny (1967) – Adapted to film in 1977

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” by Harlan Ellison (1967) – Humanity is reduced to a few survivors by an artificial intelligence. Adapted as a videogame in 1995.

Lucifer’s Hammer, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (1977) – A noteworthy entry into the apocalypse by comet category.

The Stand, by Stephen King (1978) – A rare book that tackles both the apocalypse and its aftermath. The former is caused by a viral outbreak. The aftermath is decidedly more supernatural. Adapted as a TV miniseries in 1994.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1979) – Not really a post-apocalyptic novel in the traditional sense, but one of the very few in which Earth is irrevocably destroyed.

Ridley Walker, by Russell Hoban (1980)

Le Transperceneige (Snowpiercer), by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette (1982) – Adapted to film in 2014.

Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1985) – A curious book set so far after the apocalypse that no record of it remains (think our relationship to the dinosaurs), it is less a novel than it is an anthropological study of a new society.

The Children of Men, by P. D. James (1992) – The novel cause of the apocalypse here is infertility. Adapted to film in 2006.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki (1982-1994) – Adapted for film in 1984

The Postman, by David Brin (1985) – Better than you think. Adapted for film in 1997 (also better than you think).

Signal to Noise, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (1989) – In this case, the apocalypse is personal, following the last days of a filmmaker with a terminal illness.

The Coming Global Superstorm, by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber (1999) – The text book for wild climate change theories. Adapted for film asThe Day After Tomorrow in 2004.

Y the Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra (2002-2008) – A semi-apocalypse caused by the mysterious death of all but one man. The women of the world, however, are fine.

The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, Charlie Adlard (2003-present) – Adapted for TV starting in 2010

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (2006) – one of the most brutal depictions of the post-apocalypse – definitely not optimistic. Adapted for film in 2009.

Plague Year, by Jeff Carlson (2007)

East of West, by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta (2013-present) – A science fiction yarn tied to the Book of Revelation, presumably working up to the actual end of the world. Television and Film

The Time Machine (1960) – The first movie adaptation incorporates many elements of post- nuclear anxiety (London consumed by fire, the Morlock air raid siren) that are absent in the original book.

La Jetée (1962)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Zardoz (1974)

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Mad Max (1979)

The Road Warrior (1981)

The Terminator (1984)

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

12 Monkeys (1996)

The Matrix (1999)

28 Days Later (2002)

Jericho (2006-2008)

WALL-E (2008)

Adventure Time (2010-present) – for those not in the know, the cartoon series takes place 1,000 years after a cataclysmic war.

Noah (2014)

Games

Wasteland (1988)

Fallout (1997)

Left 4 Dead (2008)

Metro 2033 (2010)

I Am Alive (2012)

The Last of Us (2013) U Riding in the Wasteland By Kenneth Lucas I love the Mad Max movies and the apocalyptic, dystopian landscape that infests them.

What’s not to love? The movies have a young, pre-meltdown Mel Gibson playing the ultimate anti-hero (though it’s not until the second film,The Road Warrior, that he settles into that characterization). They have one of the baddest cars to grace the silver screen, the Interceptor, AKA the Ford Falcon XB Coupe - Australia’s answer to the Mustang. They also contain a cast of colorful villains that show up vivid against the desolate landscape.

At E3 2013, I previewed gameplay from Mad Max, the upcoming free-roaming car combat game from Warner Brothers Interactive and Avalanche Studios. Avalanche previously dabbled in open world games with the Just Cause series, and the open world is where Max belongs – where Max is going, he doesn’t need roads. There hasn’t been a game about the original road warrior since the NES days, unless you want to count Outlander. What took everyone so long?

It is hard to say where the videogame fits in to the existing franchise, though.

While it is set to be released in September of this year, no doubt to coincide with the release of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the developers deny any correlation to the film franchise. They stated numerous times that the game is its own beast, but I find it hard to believe that we won’t get to run into some old friends like the

Gyro Captain or Aunty Entity. And looking at recent gameplay footage, many of the gang members strongly resemble the scavengers of Fury Road. Whatever the case,

Avalanche is staying tight lipped.

In the filmMad Max, our hero is a high-speed vehicular cop in the Australian outback who loses his wife, child and best friend/partner to a depraved biker gang that are exacting revenge for the death on him for killing a legendary member called

Nightrider. At the end of that movie, Max obtains his iconic vehicle, the Interceptor, and his infamous leg brace after his leg is shot and run over by the gang. Only then does he begin to seep into his role as anti-hero.

When we get to The Road Warrior, the apocalypse has already happened. Our anti- hero is roaming the wasteland, scavenging for shotgun shells and gasoline. I’ve always wondered what happened between those two movies and I think this game will finally shed some light on at least one of Max’s adventures. he premise of the game is that, somehow, a group of marauders swipes Max’s Tprized Interceptor out from under his nose. Max gives chase across the barrens of Australia searching for his ride with his trusty mechanic, Chum Bucket, in tow. Their chariot is a new, highly upgradeable vehicle called the Magnum Opus. The desert is stark and the Magnum Opus has that same bashed together look of the movie vehicles. Since the game is open world, Max gets to step outside his car and use his trusty sawed-off shotgun and the Thunder Stick, which was basically some dynamite strapped to a spear. It was the car combat scenes that transported me back into the movie theater. They captured the essence of post-apocalyptic warfare as depicted in the films. The developers said that the game would contain 50 cars that have been in the movies. Does that mean I can drive Pappagallo’s Lone Wolf Machine or Lord Humungus’ F100 torture rack or even the sand-toting Mack truck Max brings back to the compound in The Road Warrior? One can only hope. Max is the Australian equivalent of Eastwood’s Man With No Name and Bronson’s Harmonica – low on words and high on action. I’ve been dying to relive moments from these movies in games. Twisted Metal and Vigilante 8 can’t replicate those intense car chases. Fallout, Rage and Borderlands all borrow from the aesthetic, but nothing compares to the real deal.

t’s been 30 years since we saw Max after the fall of Bartertown and George Miller’s Ifourth film in the series is about to hit theaters. We know that Tom Hardy plays a younger Max Rockatnasky alongside Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. The villain is the skull-masked Immortan Joe, played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also played the baddie Toecutter in Mad Max. The Interceptor is in the mix, too. That could place Fury Road right before The Road Warrior. On the other hand, at the beginning of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, we see Max driving a caravan of horses, pulling the beat up Interceptor, so this could very well take play after The Road Warrior and just before Thunderdome. Who knows for sure? What I do know is that the film looks stunning, filled with garish colors and vicious raiders. When does the movie take place? Who cares? All that matters is that Max is back. Make way for the warrior of the wasteland, the ayatollah of rock and rolla! U Surviving the Apocalypse? Fuck that Shit! By Ed Coleman hat an exciting time we’re living in! Our entertainment industry possesses Wthe technology and imagination to create terrifyingly realistic depictions of people struggling to survive after the world as we know it is completely destroyed.

And what a happy coincidence that humanity seems determined to bring about these conditions as soon as possible, whether through senseless warfare, the inability to deal with outbreaks of deadly infections, or our total indifference to a rapidly changing climate! I mean, does art imitate life or does life imitate art, am I right?

When you get down to it, the real answer is, “Who gives a shit? We’re all going to die.”

It’s time to face facts everybody, the apocalypse is coming.

I’m not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow, but if Hollywood has taught me anything, it’s that it is entirely plausible that it could happen tomorrow. Why wouldn’t the world blow up just because the Mayans couldn’t conceive of a date beyond

December 21, 2012? I mean, statistically speaking, at some point the apocalypse just has to happen, which probably helps to explain our cultural obsession with the concept. We love watching entertainment about the aftermath of alien attacks, or ape/robot uprisings or the zombie-fication of everyone. I guess it’s fun to imagine what will happen the day after everything is completely fucked - or 28 days after everything is fucked, as it were. But this genre of entertainment always forces me to face a hard fact about myself.

If the apocalypse arrives, I have absolutely no interest in participating in humanity’s survival.

Maybe you enjoy watching the heroes in these films bravely facing impossible odds and barely avoiding death. Maybe you imagine yourself in that role. Chances are you’re an idiot who would die in ten minutes, but I understand picturing yourself as the determined hero. You know who I picture myself as? I’m the dude the hero finds hanging lifelessly in a closet as he walks through a deserted house, causing the movie-going audience to jump when he opens that closet door. I’m the corpse at the bottom of the murky, blood-red tub because I drew a warm bath, calmly slid into the welcoming water and slit my wrists to end my life. Sorry, I guess that’s a bit grim. I promised Stu this would be light hearted. I’m just trying to be honest.

The point is, you guys are all on your own. I guess it would be nice if some of you maniacs decide to spend the rest of your (probably short and miserable) lives trying to extend the clock on the human race, but I am letting you all know right now you can count me out.

You can imagine how surprised I was when a friend recently told me that if the shit hit the fan and the world descended into a chaotic and violent hellscape, that she would seek me out. I guess that means she thinks I’m smart and resourceful and dependable and a natural born leader and super charismatic and a great person to spend the end of the world with. I don’t disagree. But when facing a future filled with murderers or monsters or people pretending to be postal carriers, I say: Fuck that shit.

Here are some facts about my personality to consider:

I’m Sort of a Neat Freak I’m not a germaphobe, but I prefer not to be dirty. I don’t have any real OCD traits, but

I like my stuff to be where it belongs. I recently started living by myself for the first time in my entire life (yay, divorce!) and I find myself spending a lot of time doing things like swiffering the entire apartment because I noticed a single dust bunny under the credenza. When I reach into my bag and my keys are not in the pocket they’re supposed to be in, I have a mini panic attack.

This is not the kind of person you want watching your back when we’re low on ammunition and there is a shamble of undead coming through the door. I’ll be too busy trying to figure out where I left the last flare because it’s not in my fanny pack while you’re being attacked, screaming in pain, eaten alive.

Yes, I would wear a fanny pack in the apocalypse. It seems like it would be useful.

I wish I could wear one now, but that’s an accessory that requires 90% of the world to be dead before you can pull it off. In my defense, I did just decide that a group of zombies should be called a shamble. If that’s not already a thing, it should be.

I’m a Creature of Habit I love routine. There is nothing I enjoy more than doing the same thing, every day, over and over. I wake up, walk my dogs, shower, walk the same way to work, get the same thing for breakfast, drink the same number of cups of coffee, etc., etc., until someday, I’ll die. And that is comforting to me. Here’s an illustrative example of my love of routine that is truly embarrassing.

When I order in, I get the same thing from whatever restaurant I’m ordering from.

Every time. I lived in downtown Jersey City for 10 years. There was a Chinese food place that eventually only needed to ask my address to know everything I wanted to order. Then I moved away for over two years before moving back to the same neighborhood. The first time I ordered from that Chinese food place, I gave them my address and placed my order. When I told the guy what I wanted, he literally said,

“You used to live at 708 Jersey Ave., right?” This man not only knew it was me by my order, but two years later he still remembered my old address.

Is that the kind of person who should be living in a world where every moment presents a new, unique way of ending your life? Some people say they like being spontaneous. To me, those people are crazy and potentially dangerous. But when the apocalypse arrives, they’ll surely love the opportunity to leave everything behind at a moment’s notice because a band of psychopathic cannibals happened upon your camp. Not me. I’d just give up and become dinner because I couldn’t bear to abandon the lean-to that I finally got set up the way I like it.

I’m a Pacifist This trait is probably my worst for attempting to live through the apocalypse. I always try to appreciate the other person’s point of view in an argument. I always strive to de-escalate tense situations. I cringe at violent scenes in movies and I just want to give everyone a hug. That crap is not going to fly when people are murdering their own mothers for scraps of food because the planet has become an unforgiving desert or water world or whatever the hell winds up happening on July 14, 2028. Oops, ignore that date. It means nothing and I have no foreknowledge of any terrifying hypothetical events that may occur on or about that date. I am not a member of the

Illuminati and I do not have a ticket for a seat on a spacecraft currently being built by

NASA to ditch this shithole when it becomes unlivable.

Anyway.

I just want people to get along. In the face of the apocalypse, I’d be the guy saying,

“Hey, let’s just give him all the gasoline. He said he’d let us live. Why would he lie?

Sure he and his friends dress weird, but they’re probably just a close-knit group of former leather fetishists who banded together for comfort and security. What’s that? You’re put off by his metal hockey mask? You may have a point, but again, I’d just as soon avoid all the drama of a confrontation. Let’s just grab whatever we can fit in our fanny packs and split.”

he bottom line here is that I don’t want to be involved in surviving when the Tapocalypse happens, and I’m pretty sure after reading this you don’t want me involved either. If you do feel so inclined as to come looking for me when the apocalypse occurs, you’ll find me lying serenely in my bed with empty bottles of Tito’s vodka and the valium my dentist prescribed me when I got my tooth pulled. But I wish you the best of luck in all your horrifying endeavors! I sincerely hope you manage to survive long enough to reflect on the choices you’ve made and realize that I was right. I trust that when that moment comes, you’ll say to yourself, “Fuck this shit!” And I would say I told you so, but I will, happily, be long dead. U Joe DeMartino doesn’t believe videogames cause violence. He does believe in aliens but doesn’t believe they’ve ever visited Earth because they’re too far away, in space and/or time. He doesn’t believe in bunting or the intentional walk except under very specific circumstances. The extent of his beliefs can, sadly, be found on Twitter @thetoycannon.

Michael Edwards is a jack of all trades. While possibly the greatest hitchhiker in the galaxy, he also likes to write and play music. He is working on some music and weird fiction at the time of this writing. Follow him on Twitter@EdwardsDeuce .

Stu Horvath is the editor in chief of Unwinnable. He reads a lot, drinks whiskey and spends his free time calling up demons. Sometimes, he plays with toys and calls it “photography.” Follow him on Twitter @StuHorvath.

Kenneth Lucas is the A/V producer for Unwinnable, producing and appearing on the shows Unlistenable and Eye of the Beerholder. By night, his alter ego Kursse, takes control as he DJs for Unmixable and talks about the weird on his forthcoming show, Unearthly Remains. He also makes music. Follow him on Twitter @Kursse.

Ed Coleman has a B.F.A. in film and worked for nine years as a professional video editor before losing his mind and becoming an attorney. Ed is the Official Unofficial General Counsel of Unwinnable and a fair weather contributor to the site. If you are so inclined, Ed can be followed on Twitter @edcoleman78.

Aaron Lee Hawn is a photographer and musician who lives in Joshua Tree California. In 2012, after cycling the back roads of Louisiana and Texas, he released a book of photography called, Warm Dome. Hawn’s images frequently feature barren and personal landscapes. View his photography and download or stream his newest ambient drone solo album at aaronhawn.com. Follow him on Twitter @aleehawn.

Illustrations: Aaron Lee Hawn CLICK A PLANETARY BODY TO GO TO A DESTINATION

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