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

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SemiSaneAuthor said:
You know, just had a look, it's been a while since I've read it ... But linking a World War Z fanfic about North Korea it's a one shot just over 8,000 words. Depending on how North Korea goes, having a look back at that fanfic might be interesting.
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I don't care for this, for like... a number of reasons. I don't love the prose, the guy who wrote it clearly doesn't really understand North Korea's relationship with its various neighbours (the soft underbelly of North Korea is not the coastline facing the Sea of Japan, genius.) and I don't agree with his interpretation of North Korea in WWZ.
 
Ignorance can in fact be bliss. Perhaps those IR Operators would have survived had they not taken up (or been forced to take up) those jobs, absent the crushing weight of the lives they heard lost, the suffering they were metaphorically witness to.

But who knows how many might have died without them?
 
Between this interview and the upcoming ones of Admiral Xu Zhicai and Terry Knox, I find it honestly weird that the more the people in this book focus on their experiences away from land, the better their quality tends to be. I could read surviving people's accounts of being at sea all day, there's very few of such that I can't enjoy. In a vacuum, you'd almost think this would be some sort of point about how distinctions between nations are mostly arbitrary and harmful, but that's clearly nowhere close to the reporter's intentions. It'd odd.

At any rate, this interview is among the best of the book, and it being in-between Mr. Cartoonish Englishman and the upcoming one is a travesty.
 
veteranMortal said:
I never read the civilian survival guide
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Its only worth reading for a laugh. There is a guy on here who has mentioned it before in detail, but it is incredibly american in its focus, to the point of being useless outside of america.

veteranMortal said:
Every once in a while, command would send out orders and someone would have go out and do something pointless and stupid - I spoke to a girl who said her squad was sent out to, like… a field?
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Ah yes, good old 'shit kicking' jobs. Seen a good few of those passed around over the years. Even done a few myself. Weirdest had to the time I was asked to go to this random old unused factory and be asked how long it would take to make it defensible. Had to spend the day wandering around the area and making a bunch of plans on how to defend the place in all sorts of random scenarios. Still don't know why I couldn't just have done it from photos and a map of the area...

BiopunkOtrera said:
they're already talking about trying to disarm the populous, or at least moving to zombie only weapons like shotguns and pistols.
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If they have any brains they'll leave it at just talking about it. The royalists don't have the manpower, basic equipment or will to actually enforce such a thing. It would be like the Troubles but no convenient sea to hide behind. Although these are the royalists we're talking about...

Jane Dough said:
Got bit by a quiesling once
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Holy hell, I'm impressed you're alive. You must have been well liked for people to spend the meds needed on you. As a bite off a Quisling is almost as bad as one off a ghoul. The key difference is you die slower.
 
DovaKit said:
If they have any brains they'll leave it at just talking about it. The royalists don't have the manpower, basic equipment or will to actually enforce such a thing. It would be like the Troubles but no convenient sea to hide behind. Although these are the royalists we're talking about...
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The point, I think, is to make it harder for gun dealers to travel around openly and attempt to restrict the flow of new bullets and weapons into the country, because a lot of the same channels that are used for small arms are used for heavier shit that they worry more about. Like, if someone wants an RPG and they have an arrangement with an independent arms dealer then they'll be able to get it, so they want to make that harder.

The big problem though is manpower. Specifically manpower that isn't easy to bribe. Maybe they're just hoping that Spain will sanction the Junta and it'll spike the value of the pound? Given that the pound is basically only good for bribing royalist cops.
 
veteranMortal said:
The Ural was a goddamn marvel - they coordinated the entire radio system through her computer banks, and you could barely detect a static hiss even in Britain, about as far from where she was moored up as you could get.

The satellites obviously were also pretty vital, but the Ural did so much in those first few years of broadcasts.
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It's an interesting choice to go with the Ural , because IRL the whole thing was basically scrap. By the time the book was written, she'd been decommissioned for 4 years (and as an ex-soviet ship, she wasn't exactly in a good shape before that), and by the time the events of the book actually unfolded, she was already been scrapped (but kept afloat, because they didn't have a dock to scrap her in).

So yeah, the book is wrong here.
veteranMortal said:
Unfortunately, she was also a white elephant, because her systems, they tell me, were too complicated even for her own crew. She had spent the majority of her career tied to a pier at the Vladi-vostok naval base, providing additional electrical power for the facility. I am not an engineer, so I don't how they managed to replace her spent fuel rods or convert her massive communication facilities to interface with the global satellite network.
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She was not tied to a pier, because they didn't have a properly sized pier to tie her too. She was just kept at anchor with the machinery running, same thing that happened with Kutzenov, IIRC.

A more likely basis for your satellite communication network would be one of the Chinese Yuan Wang tracking vessels, or maybe a ground station on an island. There aren't all that many (most are on far more populated islands like Japan), but the US has some on Hawai and Guam, and ESA has some on some remote rocks the French colonized.

veteranMortal said:
They were already in communication with Bristol by the time I was there; they wanted intelligence on what Britain was like, what we knew about the ghouls here. Every once in a while, command would send out orders and someone would have go out and do something pointless and stupid - I spoke to a girl who said her squad was sent out to, like… a field? There had been a rabbit warren there that the ghouls had dug up and they wanted to know what made this one different from all the others.

… Apparently the rabbits had myxy. Poor things were blind and helpless, unable and unwilling to run. That's why the ghouls were able to chase them down. Not sure what information that gave them, though.
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Probably trying to see whether deliberate infection of rabbit populations with the disease could serve as a suitable distraction.

We've only deliberatly introduced Myxy with terrifying local consequences 4 times. Fifth time will work for sure.
 
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IC:
I remember them doing some basic First Aid courses over the radio, didn't personally help much, since I already had much more comprehensive training, but I met quite a few survivors who were either saved by, or saved someone with, the knowledge they got from those broadcasts.

I never knew what happened to those Operators. I can't imagine what they went through. I rarely had a radio with me, and more often than not, it was a shitty one salvaged from Junta equipment that only technically functioned more often than not.

God, North Korea. If you believe the rumors, it's either overrun with Ghouls, a Nuclear Superstate, or some underground Dystopia out of the Metro books. I wonder if the OP actually has anything reliable to talk about.

OOC:
veteranMortal said:
Let me know what you think of it.
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I think it's actually pretty good, definitely one of the better chapters you've written.

Keep up the good work.
 
OOC: Anyone know any famous Argentine singers from the 2000s whose popularity extended into the 2010s? Or are we going with the assumption that they were "famous" for that final broadcast?
 
InquisitionAI said:
God, North Korea. If you believe the rumors, it's either overrun with Ghouls, a Nuclear Superstate, or some underground Dystopia out of the Metro books. I wonder if the OP actually has anything reliable to talk about.
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I mean, the book is all rumours on that front.

"Ooooh, what if NK had giant bunkers hidden in the mountain like we thought that other guy had, and what if they got fucked up, I wonder what would happen then, OOOOH!"

It's all the fears of the late 2000's and Pre-Zack 2010's about one nation condensed into a book and carried forwards 2 decades. It's so bad.

Literally anything the OP says will be at least as valid as the goddang book, if not more.

OOC: No like seriously, even when I was younger and took a lot of the book at face value, the North Korea scenario the book puts forward always read as incredibly stupid, or at the very least fantastical.
 
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The3rdCorinthian said:
I mean, the book is all rumours on that front.

"Ooooh, what if NK had giant bunkers hidden in the mountain like we thought that other guy had, and what if they got fucked up, I wonder what would happen then, OOOOH!"

It's all the fears of the late 2000's and Pre-Zack 2010's about one nation condensed into a book and carried forwards 2 decades. It's so bad.

Literally anything the OP says will be at least as valid as the goddang book, if not more.

OOC: No like seriously, even when I was younger and took a lot of the book at face value, the North Korea scenario the book puts forward always read as incredibly stupid, or at the very least fantastical.
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Brooks was pretty clearly using the actual military constructions North Korea has done as inspiration. Along with stuff like the rumors surrounding Beijing or Moscow Metro's and maybe Hoxha's bunker projects?

That it inspired him into a "national-scale Vault from fucking VaultTech, Juche Edition[TM]" is... quite unfortunate.
 
I think Film World War Z handling of North Korea was a lot less worse then Brook's. But honestly I can see the Kim family doing it, that particular dynasty were......Big on big projects.
 
Also, wow, I just realized I misinterpreted that ending in the Redeker section all of these years (in the OG book that is, not this reinterpretation). Admittedly, I was totally ignorant of the whole "name translation thing" but even after reading that last night, I didn't piece it together until literally just a half-hour ago. I thought that the nature of Redeker's nervous collapse was that he just shut down or went all giggly-nuts-oh or something Hollywood like that and the reason the interviewer was talking to this other guy despite being there to ostensibly see "Redeker" was because Redeker's mental state left him incapable of coherent communication.

And then when I did read the stuff pointed out in this let's read, I thought that the Azania = Redeker statement was just the canon for this particular reinterpretation. It was only upon reading a different let's read critique which began pointing it all out that I realized "oh, no... wait, Azania was Redeker all along!"

Me very smart. :V
 
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@Mazeka said:
OOC: Anyone know any famous Argentine singers from the 2000s whose popularity extended into the 2010s? Or are we going with the assumption that they were "famous" for that final broadcast?
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OOC: Everytime i picture the last broadcast from Baires is always with a different latin american artist in mind, maybe one of the guys from Soda Stereo or Fito Paez could work

As for the song, is not a lullaby per se, but La canción del Adios that is sung by scouts in Argentina seems like a very good candidate for hitting hard the national psyche if its the last thing they will hear from survivors in their capital
 
OOC: I was always of the opinion that the book was a bit mid but you've pointed out a bunch of flaws I didn't even notice before, basically everything about that chapter with the British guy for example.

At least we got a awesome zombie horde fps out of the franchise. Seriously the game's Poggers.
 
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DovaKit said:
Its only worth reading for a laugh. There is a guy on here who has mentioned it before in detail, but it is incredibly american in its focus, to the point of being useless outside of america.


Ah yes, good old 'shit kicking' jobs. Seen a good few of those passed around over the years. Even done a few myself. Weirdest had to the time I was asked to go to this random old unused factory and be asked how long it would take to make it defensible. Had to spend the day wandering around the area and making a bunch of plans on how to defend the place in all sorts of random scenarios. Still don't know why I couldn't just have done it from photos and a map of the area...


If they have any brains they'll leave it at just talking about it. The royalists don't have the manpower, basic equipment or will to actually enforce such a thing. It would be like the Troubles but no convenient sea to hide behind. Although these are the royalists we're talking about...


Holy hell, I'm impressed you're alive. You must have been well liked for people to spend the meds needed on you. As a bite off a Quisling is almost as bad as one off a ghoul. The key difference is you die slower.
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Well, like I said, almost had to amputate. I am... intimately aware of that fact that normal human bites are nothing to sneeze at without antibiotics.
And yes! I was well liked! I was the one who knew how to work the moonshine still!
(Made the ethanol we used to douse the wound myself, sometimes prewar hobbies paid off lol)
 
OOC:

veteranMortal said:
Oh yes. You could see it was clearly written by an American, the references to SUVs and personal firearms. There was no taking into account the cultural differences…the various indigenous solutions people believed would save them from the undead.
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I find it very amusing that Brooks himself is like "yeah that guide is hopelessly american and borderline usless"... and then does the exact same thing in this very book.

10ebbor10 said:
A more likely basis for your satellite communication network would be one of the Chinese Yuan Wang tracking vessels, or maybe a ground station on an island. There aren't all that many (most are on far more populated islands like Japan), but the US has some on Hawai and Guam, and ESA has some on some remote rocks the French colonized.
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Western navies do have tracking ships similar to the Ural too! Not nuclear powered-ones though, so that might explain why he didn't go with it.
 
BiopunkOtrera said:
Everyone's heard the stories about the 'guy who can't let go of their infected kid' but in my experience there were also some sick freaks who wanted to control zombies and figured zombie kids would be more manageable. I remember one time we were running a salvage op in rural Cornwall and we ran across this cabin with a seriously unfriendly dude in it. He was being very cagey, but also trying to keep us talking. Any time we'd try to leave he'd re-engage, open up. He was definitely trying to keep us there for something. After a bit, we decided to just leave before it got dark.

It turned out that the sick fuck had like, a dozen zombie kids in buried cages, and he let them out on us once night fell. Unfortunately for him, we were a lot better armed and trained than the average refugees by that point, so after we'd got rid of them we returned and knocked on his door with a grenade. We never found out if he'd infected the kids himself or just found them or what. He wasn't in much of a position to answer questions after we were done breaching his house.
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I can't wrap my head around any of this, OOC or IC. Could you go into logistical detail. If it's a cabin, I'm assuming it basically has no basement, just 1 floor. So we're the zombies in the living room in cages? How'd he let them out without also being mauled? Why would he try to keep you around with words if the ultimate plan was to sic the kids on you? He could have done that without talking, no? Also, how would he get them back into the cages once loose?

I may be reading your IC story wrong, but I'd love more details.
 
Caelleh said:
I can't wrap my head around any of this, OOC or IC. Could you go into logistical detail. If it's a cabin, I'm assuming it basically has no basement, just 1 floor. So we're the zombies in the living room in cages? How'd he let them out without also being mauled? Why would he try to keep you around with words if the ultimate plan was to sic the kids on you? He could have done that without talking, no? Also, how would he get them back into the cages once loose?

I may be reading your IC story wrong, but I'd love more details.
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I'm guessing he had a decently secured house and Ghoul-cages were buried in his garden or general area around?

That way he could unleash them remotely without risk to himself?

Still crazy though.
 
Cellars are a thing in the UK. I mean, it's not say a Cellar Flat in a town or city, but you can have a Cellar out in a cottage somewhere.
 
And now I'm current, and Jesus Christ this is even better then I expected!

I won't lie, I loved World War Z when I was younger. I loved the idea of telling stories via interviews. Of course, now with a lot more context, more knowledge about how Yonkers made no sense, and some things IRL, I can easily see that WWZ has a lot of issues and problems.

I kind of want to try my hand at a WWZona (is that the right term), but I'm not even sure where to begin.

Oh, question for @veteranMortal, what will happen when you finish the book (and I'm supposing the other in-verse short stories?) Will that be the end, or do you have plans to continue?)
 
Ooc:
Novus Ordo Mundi said:
WWZona (is that the right term), but I'm not even sure where to begin.
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Please don't. 'WWZona' sounds very strange and looks bizzare.

As to how to start, well, I and several others just kinda picked a spot to drop, and just started talking.

Though I had the benefit of being able to respond to chapters as they were written, you could also go back and pick some bits to respond to.

A good example is the 'Near Miss' bit, or even do what I did and start off with just getting access to the thread.

My guy spent a decent amount of his 'time' completely off the grid.

Also, stealing bits from pop culture can be helpful, there's a reason why I have Baba Yaga just laugh whenever someone asks about her history. Or the whole side bit with the Pike, when the Lobo was brought up.
 
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