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Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

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Simon_Jester said:
I'm a little surprised that the junta was bothering to evacuate state governments rather than abandoning them in place, but I could see it.
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When you're projecting "we are the legitimate government" you want to keep as much legitimacy as you can get away with.

Other state governments were not evacuated, but the ones that looked to be amenable to the new way of things - and that weren't already overwhelmed - were.
 
Just piping up to say that while the exact timeline of WWZ is fluid the most likely person to be Governor of California having the various evacuated state governments in exile crash on his couch is...Arnold Schwarzenegger, yes, THAT Arnold Schwarzenegger.
 
Fair.

It's just that state governments are pretty useless if you're planning to abandon the state in question to zombies.

"We couldn't save the bowl or the water, but we got the goldfish out of it before the bowl shattered!" isn't exactly an impressive claim.

Wade Garrett said:
Just piping up to say that while the exact timeline of WWZ is fluid the most likely person to be Governor of California having the various evacuated state governments in exile crash on his couch is...Arnold Schwarzenegger, yes, THAT Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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My honest impression is that Ahnuld was a relatively classy governor (about as good as one could plausibly hope for in a Republican) and he's been refreshingly opposed to actual fascist tendencies in the (R) party as those tendencies have risen up in the years since. His public persona as a political figure has long revolved around blunt sincerity and keeping things practical and focused on basics; I think that to a large extent he is actually non-ideological about material public policy considerations, as opposed to just having a strong ideology that refuses to admit that it is one. I could be wrong, but there it is.

I kind of doubt that Schwarzenegger would fare well in this timeline, because of that combination.

EDIT:

Actually, Ahnuld stepped down as governor in 2011, which I think is before the zombie apocalypse really hit in this timeline?
 
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Simon_Jester said:
My honest impression is that Ahnuld was a relatively classy governor (about as good as one could plausibly hope for in a Republican) and he's been refreshingly opposed to actual fascist tendencies in the (R) party as those tendencies have risen up in the years since. His public persona as a political figure has long revolved around blunt sincerity and keeping things practical and focused on basics; I think that to a large extent he is actually non-ideological about material public policy considerations, as opposed to just having a strong ideology that refuses to admit that it is one. I could be wrong, but there it is.

I kind of doubt that Schwarzenegger would fare well in this timeline, because of that combination.

EDIT:

Actually, Ahnuld stepped down as governor in 2011, which I think is before the zombie apocalypse really hit in this timeline?
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I don't think his centrism would be especially immune to the junta's "pragmatic" answer to elections. He's still an American politician.
 
OOC: The mention of meth gave me the absurd thought of what would happen if Breaking Bad was taking place during WWZ, and just the picture of Walter White making a fortune selling his blue meth to the Air Force has me in stitches.
tankdrop24 said:
Radio Entities, or REs
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IC: It really is fascinating. "Mets Fan" directs Christina to a rescue that Christina herself could not possibly have known was arriving, or where, or when. Even if you just assume the voice is her subconscious still making logical connections like going to an elevated highway after looking at a map, the fact that you add an helicopter that just happened to be in the area and see her is just way too many coincidences stacked up one after the other.

People are calling it a ploy by the Junta to imply that God Himself supports their legitimacy, but that doesn't make sense for the voice. If that were the case, why not a masculine voice for the hallucination? Or why not hints of a Biblical or angelic identity to the voice? "Mets Fan" is a weird choice for a name, until you focus on the "Mets for short" part: "Mets" sounds an awful lot like Metis, mother of the goddess Athena and goddess of wisdom and deep thought. And "Eliopolis" sounds like a name of Greek origin...

Or one can be boring and say she imagined talking to the angel Metatron hence the "Mets".
 
all fictions said:
"Mets" sounds an awful lot like Metis,
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I'd like to point out she should still be stuck in Zeus after he ate her. Unless Zeus was letting her talk, or maybe Zeus decided to answer for her in a female voice? ... You know, The Junta being backed with Zeus, patron saint of cultural differences between Ancient Greek Times and our times would make a bit of sense. Though the people who don't know their mythology would start blaming Hades for the apocalypse, which then leads to the point where I start hitting people in the knees with a wooden broom handle.
 
all fictions said:
Mets Fan" is a weird choice for a name, until you focus on the "Mets for short" part: "Mets" sounds an awful lot like Metis, mother of the goddess Athena and goddess of wisdom and deep thought. And "Eliopolis" sounds like a name of Greek origin...
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OOC: This is vaguely mentioned in the book, though it's presented there as though this is further evidence it is a hallucination of her mother. My reviewer certainly believes it's just a drug induced hallucination, but it is eminently feasible that it isn't, and I think WWZ is only improved by an increased tendency for the supernatural.
 
yes very much at least then the Solanum would make more sense hence why animals avoid the infected they know magic like that be fucked yo!
 
OOC: There pretty much has to be something supernatural about the zombies, both in that they work at all but also in that they are functional after being dead for a month or two; human flesh just doesn't last all that long when exposed to the elements the way it is by ambulatory corpses.

Some of this is explained away by zombie flesh repelling predators and scavengers, but we know they do rot, so there has to be some microbial action. It'd be interesting to see the effects of having a microbial flora specifically selected for eating zombie flesh, too. Fungal? Bacterial? Weird amoebas?
 
Wade Garrett said:
Just piping up to say that while the exact timeline of WWZ is fluid the most likely person to be Governor of California having the various evacuated state governments in exile crash on his couch is...Arnold Schwarzenegger, yes, THAT Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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I think most of the FedGov (and likely followed by the state govs in exile) removed themselves to Honolulu instead of Sacramento. So I guess whoever was the governor of Hawaii at the time would have them crashing on their couch.

Also, I definitely remember reading WWZ at a Barnes and Noble in the late 2000s and then buying it soon after (I think it was my first main book purchase after the last Harry Potter book). It still sits gathering dust in a bottom corner of one of my bookshelves in my bedroom and I hadn't thought about it in years before finding and reading this thread.

I do remember a high school friend based an Unknown Armies one shot (that was supposed to grow into a campaign, but that fell through) on solanium zombies in the first segment of the book in the Three Gorges Dam area around Chongqing/the village of New Dachang, that we played a year or so after I had bought the book, so I was metagaming like crazy (didn't hurt that my character was basically the Sniper from TF2 prior to knowing the setting details he had set up), because my brain doesn't work in a way that I can't not metagame when I know a setting, and tend to go out of my way to look deep into settings that interest me when I have the chance to.

I admit I had never thought through most of the political implications of the book, and just took it as a narrative of the "modern" late 2000s pre-Trump world dealing with a worldwide zombie outbreak that collapsed most of civilization. Then again, I've always been a very textual reader, and very bad at grasping literary implications and any by the most blatant underlying themes in a story and the like. So I can see that this Let's Read is very clearly written with a totally different conclusion and world building than what Brooks had in mind, but I can't say I don't find it interesting enough to keep reading it, even if I don't always agree with how it's gone worldbuilding wise.

Sure, Yonkers always kinda sat poorly with me once I thought about it more (a friend at the time who was more into zombie media who I discussed the book with after said above Unknown Armies campaign thought that Brooks had made the zombies way too dependent on headshots killing them and that the army should've mopped them up at Yonkers with artillery and air strikes, and being as into reading about military hardware and just dipping my toes into the SB constellation at the time, wasn't inclined to disagree once I started reading critiques of the book), and the effective Tuckerization of many of the celebrity cameos in the US sections with the names filed off struck me as weird (Larry the Cable Guy in the Long Island mansion? I had apparently missed that it was supposed to be Trump setting that up, and that it was Geraldo Rivera getting nommed by Zack at Yonkers when he tried to go Yosemite Sam on them when they broke the lines, but I did get the political references as well as Paris Hilton, Bill Maher, and apparently Ann Coulter were all at the Long Island mansion, and it stands out still in my mind that Brooks has his merc mention that the latter two buried the political hatchet and were apparently coked out of their minds and getting it on with Paris Hilton's dog watching them as the crowds broke though into the mansion).

I think the last time I thought about this book before packing it away during my home renovation 2 years ago and putting it back out was either when the movie was being made and comparing it poorly to the book. Also, I remember reading (and editing) it's Wikipedia page previously and seeing that Waino was voiced by Mark Hamill in the audiobook version and Sinclair by Alan Alda. Looking it up, Nathan Fillion voiced the Canadian soldier that was like the third interview covered, Rob Reiner did Howard Dean, Kal Penn voiced the Indian soldier dude that he used as a vehicle to show the "sacrifice" of General Ram-Singh, Simon Pegg as Grover Carlson the former White House Chief of Staff, Jeri Ryan as the female Russian soldier that he uses to show the Decimation, Martin Scorsese as the corrupt pharmaceutical executive who marketed Phalanx, and other big acting names like Masi Oka, John Tutturo, and Alfred Molina voicing characters we haven't met yet. Brooks putting those industry connections to work, I guess.

all fictions said:
"Mets Fan" is a weird choice for a name, until you focus on the "Mets for short" part: "Mets" sounds an awful lot like Metis, mother of the goddess Athena and goddess of wisdom and deep thought. And "Eliopolis" sounds like a name of Greek origin...

Or one can be boring and say she imagined talking to the angel Metatron hence the "Mets".
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The parts of the interview Mortal skipped over at the end mentions the pilot's mom grew up in the Bronx and was a Yankees fan. Also that the shrinks debriefing her brought up the Metis connection as well.

Still, the Mets fan thing read purely as sports rivalry stuff to me as motivation tying it more clearly to her mother (see the crack about her mother motivating her to get to the top of the interstate); at least that's how I saw it when I read that bit. Being a native New Yorker helps with that.
 
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OOC: If Brook really wanted to stick with the idea that Zombies a)had no supernatural or alien cause and b)have actually existed throughout history, he really should have gone with a different sort of Zombie. Rigid adherence to slow, shambling zombies that operate in complete contradiction to our understanding of biology kinda hampers the book in my opinion. I understand he wanted to have the book be pretty grounded in reality (well, his understanding of reality, at least), but when you're starting with the conceit that "Zombies exist" I think you have room to introduce some more supernatural elements. Even if it's literally just having people say "yeah, we have no idea how these Zombies exist, it's a mystery". It once again makes me wonder what a book with a better approach to worldbuilding and storytelling (...and a better understanding politics and military affairs) would look like.
 
ZabetTheRabbit said:
OOC: If Brook really wanted to stick with the idea that Zombies a)had no supernatural or alien cause and b)have actually existed throughout history, he really should have gone with a different sort of Zombie. Rigid adherence to slow, shambling zombies that operate in complete contradiction to our understanding of biology kinda hampers the book in my opinion. I understand he wanted to have the book be pretty grounded in reality (well, his understanding of reality, at least), but when you're starting with the conceit that "Zombies exist" I think you have room to introduce some more supernatural elements. Even if it's literally just having people say "yeah, we have no idea how these Zombies exist, it's a mystery". It once again makes me wonder what a book with a better approach to worldbuilding and storytelling (...and a better understanding politics and military affairs) would look like.
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IIRC, the zombie survival guide said that the Solanum virus was weird enough to be suspect. So like yeah the zambinos are created from a virus, but the virus itself is a mystery to the point of potentially being eldritch.

But I haven't read that book in well over a decade, so I could be wrong.
 
Whachamacallit said:
IIRC, the zombie survival guide said that the Solanum virus was weird enough to be suspect. So like yeah the zambinos are created from a virus, but the virus itself is a mystery to the point of potentially being eldritch.

But I haven't read that book in well over a decade, so I could be wrong.
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I happen to have a copy of the Survival Guide as well, and looking through it (not exactly a close reading, so I could've missed something), while the origin of the virus is unknown, there isn't any speculation of a non-natural origin. It seems to assume that more research is needed and that there will eventually be an answer in line with our scientific understanding. Not to say that there isn't room to speculate about WWZ zombies having a supernatural origin, but I think it's safe to assume that Brooks intends them to have a "natural" origin.

Something interesting to me though is the fact that he notes that almost all micro-organisms avoid infected bodies. Given that the guide also asserts that there are records of outbreaks dating as far back as 60,000 BC, the fact that there aren't entire swaths of microorganisms evolved to deal with zombies is an...interesting take. Not to mention that he is trying to assert a version of history where zombies have existed for basically all of human history AND still have it so that the whole world was taken by surprise by the outbreak. Like, honestly given the worldbuilding here there should have probably been some major global outbreaks waaaaay earlier in the timeline. Not necessarily WWZ levels but like, there really isn't a good reason for there not to be smaller "zombie wars" sporadically throughout history.

Oh, also, one of his examples of a "historical outbreak" is, of course, Roanoke. Writers stop treating Roanoke as some great unsolved mystery with supernatural causes challenge 2023.

Edit: small grammatical fixes
 
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all fictions said:
IC: It really is fascinating. "Mets Fan" directs Christina to a rescue that Christina herself could not possibly have known was arriving, or where, or when. Even if you just assume the voice is her subconscious still making logical connections like going to an elevated highway after looking at a map, the fact that you add an helicopter that just happened to be in the area and see her is just way too many coincidences stacked up one after the other.
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Some of the coincidences resolve quite easily. The helicopter did not happen to be in the area at random, it's regular flight route followed the highway. As long as she stayed on that highway, a heli would have passed by sooner or later.

Still, it's quite improbable for one person to survive long enough for that to occur, until we consider that we're not talking about one person here. The airforce lost a lot of planes, and a lot of people. We only hear the stories of those who survived miraculously, because there was no regular rescue service. If you weren't the right person, landing in just the right place at just the right time, you died.

Only tremendous luck allowed you to live, and hence all survival seems improbable.

It's the Swiss cheese model, only for survival, rather than accident prevention.
 
ZabetTheRabbit said:
I happen to have a copy of the Survival Guide as well, and looking through it (not exactly a close reading, so I could've missed something), while the origin of the virus is unknown, there isn't any speculation of a non-natural origin. It seems to assume that more research is needed and that there will eventually be an answer in line with our scientific understanding. Not to say that there isn't room to speculate about WWZ zombies having a supernatural origin, but I think it's safe to assume that Brooks intends them to have a "natural" origin.

Something interesting to me though is the fact that he notes that almost all micro-organisms avoid infected bodies. Given that the guide also asserts that there are records of outbreaks dating as far back as 60,000 BC, the fact that there aren't entire swaths of microorganisms evolved to deal with zombies is an...interesting take. Not to mention that he is trying to assert a version of history where zombies have existed for basically all of human history AND still have it so that the whole world was taken by surprise by the outbreak. Like, honestly given the worldbuilding here there should have probably been some major global outbreaks waaaaay earlier in the timeline. Not necessarily WWZ levels but like, there really isn't a good reason for there not to be smaller "zombie wars" sporadically throughout history.

Oh, also, one of his examples of a "historical outbreak" is, of course, Roanoke. Writers stop treating Roanoke as some great unsolved mystery with supernatural causes challenge 2023.

Edit: small grammatical fixes
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The historical bits of the Survival Guide aren't canon to this Let's Read, but my interpretation is that many cultures were aware of zombies and had traditional memories of how to combat them, and that these traditions were all wiped out by colonialism and modernism. There are a lot of incidents that go "some colonizing asshole is warned by the natives not to fuck with zombies, he fucks with zombies, he dies". Europe's ignorance is attributed to some bad pop history about the Dark Ages and the loss of knowledge, but I could easily massage that into cultural memories being disrupted by the social disruptions of the Early Modern Period.

It's also pointed out that zombie outbreaks have been happening with increased frequency due to globalization, in the premodern era outbreaks would have been fairly sporadic and spaced out over time and distance.
 
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ScottishMongol said:
The historical bits of the Survival Guide aren't canon to this Let's Read, but my interpretation is that many cultures were aware of zombies and had traditional memories of how to combat them, and that these traditions were all wiped out by colonialism and modernism. There are a lot of incidents that go "some colonizing asshole is warned by the natives not to fuck with zombies, he fucks with zombies, he dies". Europe's ignorance is attributed to some bad pop history about the Dark Ages and the loss of knowledge, but I could easily massage that into cultural memories being disrupted by industrialization.

It's also pointed out that zombie outbreaks have been happening with increased frequency due to globalization, in the premodern era outbreaks would have been fairly sporadic and spaced out over time and distance.
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That's more or less how I'd interpret all this as well. Keeping the historical parts of the Guide non-cannon is probably the best course of action if you want WWZ to make sense. Colonization/Industrialization being the reason this information was forgotten is a great angle to explore, and you could probably write a whole book with that as a theme. If you aren't Max Brooks.

Outbreaks happening more frequently due to globalization makes sense, yeah. My thoughts are just that, given how interconnected the world has been since, say, the late 1800s, I'd expect there to have been major outbreaks at least a few times before the 2010s. Outbreaks that'd be harder to ignore/forget and that would've had some sort of impact on history. That said, this is just me being overly pedantic and taking these kinda contradictory ideas to their logical conclusion. As it stands, I'm just fine with how this Let's Read is treating all all this.
 
ZabetTheRabbit said:
Outbreaks that'd be harder to ignore/forget and that would've had some sort of impact on history.
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Or you go write some actual alternate history unlike Brooks half assing it and replace The Spanish Flu with a Zombie Apocalypse in a world weary of War after World War I.
 
Nyvis said:
I don't think his centrism would be especially immune to the junta's "pragmatic" answer to elections. He's still an American politician.
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Well, I think he'd be fairly likely to keep his mouth shut and his head down and basically retire quietly, with the question being whether the junta would let him. Being an ex-governor is a good time to take a bow and leave the stage of high politics entirely, and the junta plays for keeps so you don't cross them if you don't have a strong motivation to try.
 
The interplay between the various posters here has really enhanced the story. I've no confidence to try and add anything myself but you lot have made this one really fun thread to explore.
 
I'll probably never make another in-character post:

Met a guy at a bar once who insisted that it isn't a zombie war we're fighting, but a vampire war. And y'know what? I was actually willing to entertain the idea that the ghouls could be, like, a mutated vampire virus, or a bunch of rogue vampire servants, or something. But then he started going on about how the ghouls were acting on the orders of their masters to reduce the human population so they could put all the survivors under their control, and how they were in control of both the pre-war elites and the USAmerican junta, and how all the people dying of ADS had actually been paralysed and sent to be eaten by the vampires, and how the Christian States had been destroyed in order to remove the protection of God from the American people, and all this other conspiracy theory bullshit. And I was just like, "Oh, this is blood libel. This is just rebranded blood libel." I went to a different bar after that.
 
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