VAMPIRES CAN'T EXIST

VICTOR RENQUIST WOULD NOT LIKE THIS ONE BIT. (Less in fact than he likes how he’s neither a graphic novel nor a major motion picture.)

“One of the most totally fun areas of publishing in recent years has been the emergence of books that probe the scientific bases of fictional universes. Among popular conclusions? Vampires can't exist. Why? Because they'd quickly depopulate the earth. To prove it, the scientists do some calculations by picking a random year in history -- 1600, specifically -- and imagining what would happen if one vampire suddenly appeared on earth. They assume, for the sake of argument, that a vampire needs to feed "only once a month", and that in the course of feeding, the vampire turns its victim into another vampire. They note that the global population of humans was 536,870,911 in the year 1600. They note that the global population of humans was 536,870,911 in the year 1600. Then the calculations begin. If a single vampire fed on a single human in the first month, this would create two vampires -- and decrease the human population by one, leaving it at 536,870,911 - 1 = 536,870,910. In the second month, those two vampires would each feed, transforming two people into vampires -- so you get four vampires and a human population of 536,870,911 - 3 = 536,870,908. So you can see where this is headed. The vampire population is increasing in a geometric progression, and the population of humans is similarly decreasing -- and at that rate, the authors calculate, the entire human population would be transformed into vampires in only 30 months. QED!”

For chapter and verse read Clive Thompson’s Collision Detection (also permanently linked on the right.)

All this arithmetic does, however, explain why so many once and future vampire authors like myself go such extreme trouble to make the conversion of a human to a vampire or nosferatu state much more complicated than one bite per customer. Also most of us knew that the whole idea of the exponential spread of Vampirism had been totally worked out in Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend that also became the Vincent Price movie The Last Man On Earth and was also the basis of The Omega Man with Charlton Heston (and a lot of guns.)

The secret words is Crypt