This re-examination is important now because I Am Legend has remained in print for almost 70 years since it was published in 1954, and has been translated into more than two dozen languages. Many of the book’s later imitations seem to have been written or filmed in a manner that is stripped of the book’s place, context, and ultimate subversion of the zombie metaphor. Given the ongoing reckoning with global racial dynamics-many of them exacerbated by American cultural hegemony-it is vital that we re-examine these sorts of myths. I would argue that perhaps unwittingly, this novel-and its later imitators-present a narrative that helped America justify to itself patterns of segregation and disenfranchisement, and thus perpetuated them. Disch wrote in his Hugo-winning history of the genre, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of.Īmong the lies that America has chosen to believe about itself over the past 70 years, few have had as lasting-or as pernicious-effects as those wrought by Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. “America is a nation of liars, for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe,” Thomas M.
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