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

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Novus Ordo Mundi said:
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?)
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I am looking forward to having a finished project on my resume, as it were. When I finish the book, I'll call it there, I think.
 
veteranMortal said:
I am looking forward to having a finished project on my resume, as it were. When I finish the book, I'll call it there, I think.
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Honestly? If you were to write something original about Zombies and publish it? Through say Patreon and such, then possibly Kindle? I'd be tempted to actually start fiddling around with Patreon. Because this is very, very, good.
 
Managed to stumble onto this and I just.

Thank you.

Too many people are too willing to deepthroat the boot of the junta just so they can pretend at some sense of normalcy. Even (god, sometimes especially) people who you know should know better. It's so crushing to have the people who helped make you who you are, who taught you to keep your eyes up, keep your ears open, and to always pay attention even when it would be easier to look away, decide to disconnect and just ... christ, I hate to call it 'give in', but I don't know how else to describe it. Finding this helps me feel seen, helps me feel a bit less crazy.
veteranMortal said:
I smashed my radio the first time I heard something like this. I hadn't used it for coming up on a month - the government stations played the same thing over and over; "Shelter in place, wait for relief, do not panic, do not flee." and the Bristol station was still just asking people to come to Bristol on repeat - but I was bored walking on the A 34, and I decided to play with the dial, looking for a channel playing music. I thought there probably had to be one, left on repeat or something.

Instead there was a little boy sobbing down the line. His dad had pushed him into the attic of their house, pulled away the ladder and told him to wait for daddy to come back, but Daddy was back, and he was "not right" and he was scared, and there wasn't any food and someone had to come help him, come help him please.

I was only fifteen, and my radio couldn't even transmit, it was just a receiver, but the guilt still clings. I could've done something.

Instead I threw my radio off a bridge and kept walking. I try not to think about it.
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This hits home pretty hard; my grandfather was a fire department officer back in the day, and after he retired he kept an old police scanner, to listen in, I guess? He was the kind of guy who never got rid of anything if it could conceivably be useful, so who knows for sure. It was never on, so I just assumed it didn't work, and he just used it as a lampstand ... until my niece switched it on one day during the Panic (you know how kids are with switches, knobs & dials) and it picked up traffic. It's lucky she wandered off to find her mom and me and tell us she 'turned the funny radio on', and we realised what she'd done in time -- she just caught some garbled chatter, nothing scarring. Her mom kept her busy outside while I scrambled inside to disable the fucking thing. She didn't need to hear the things I did while I tried to get it off.
I love the work you've done with this! it is so good and so much better than the source material, which I'm only somewhat ashamed to admit I liked once upon a time (I appear to be in good company here, at least). I hadn't revisited it in a long time, and I definitely didn't realise/remember how much Yikes radiated off of it.

I also like how your narrative manages to make a lot of the weird and/or stupid things make sense from the other side (a personal pet peeve has always been that Wainio gets described as "chronologically, at the beginning of his life" despite that he'd need to be at least 40 by the time he was being interviewed for any of his alleged backstory to be true) and your reinterpretation of Redeker is just...it's just wrenching.

I know I'm eagerly awaiting the ISS, as well as Paris, and for the rest of Wainio's storyline to get ripped apart.
 
Given that in A People's History of the Zombie War, Wainio's entire thing is that he goes around claiming to have Been There and Done That, probably not least for propaganda purposes, I can only imagine how badly his descriptions of the March East are going to get taken apart.
 
I'm torn between whether I'd want a hypothetical People's History of the Zombie War as a direct response to Brooks or whether I'd want to to be an independent work that is an indirect response to Brooks (since that would allow more freedom with the worldbuilding and such)
 
ZabetTheRabbit said:
I'm torn between whether I'd want a hypothetical People's History of the Zombie War as a direct response to Brooks or whether I'd want to to be an independent work that is an indirect response to Brooks (since that would allow more freedom with the worldbuilding and such)
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Keep the direct response to SV and other places online. Publish the indirect response in book format.
 
I mean, any realistic treatment of Brookes' virus is going to run head long into the issue that what the Chinese were doing at the start of WWZ would have been itself enough to eventually smother the virus. Hell, it gets mistaken for rabies but a different let's read I was reading noted that rabies quarantine is about 90% of what you need to deal with Brooks-style zombies in the early-days: if bite mark or crazy, then remove from the population and restrain. It won't work once you get to the "swarms overwhelming entire cities phase", but before that rounding up and restraining the infected would prevent it from reaching that stage to begin with. And by rounding them up like it's rabies, they'd have plenty of zombies on hand to experiment on and figure out what's really happening.

You'd have to go for a different style of zombie to get anything remotely close to where you'd require fighting a genuine war against them.
 
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obssesednuker said:
You'd have to go for a different style of zombie to get anything remotely close to where you'd require fighting a genuine war against them.
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Well, either an author introduces zombie variants like in Left 4 Dead, or the book becomes a non-apocalyptic anthology of how zombies are now considered another facet of human civilization (illegal cheap labor, biological weapons of war, etc).
 
obssesednuker said:
I mean, any realistic treatment of Brookes' virus is going to run head long into the issue that what the Chinese were doing at the start of WWZ would have been itself enough to eventually smother the virus. Hell, it gets mistaken for rabies but a different let's read I was reading noted that rabies quarantine is about 90% of what you need to deal with Brooks-style zombies in the early-days: if bite mark or crazy, then remove from the population and restrain. Before that, rounding up and restraining the infected would work fine. And by rounding them up like it's rabies, they'd have plenty of zombies on hand to experiment on and figure out what's really happening.

You'd have to go for a different style of zombie to get anything remotely close to where you'd require fighting a genuine war against them.
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I mean, the logic is that the Chinese weren't actually interested in smothering the virus, they were interested in using it as an excuse to crack down on dissidents, because, for Some Reason, the job was given to the 'crack down on dissidents' people. That I can imagine letting things escalate - they tolerate outbreaks because that gives them a ready-made excuse, and then... some slip through the cracks.

Add a bit more incompetence and utter disinterest in what is actually happening in the 'homeward periphery', and things just keep getting worse and worse.

Like the narrative that seems to be developing is less that zombies are an apocalyptic threat and more that zombies were merely the method chosen to purge a restive population to pave the way for fascism.
 
BaseDeltaZero said:
I mean, the logic is that the Chinese weren't actually interested in smothering the virus, they were interested in using it as an excuse to crack down on dissidents, because, for Some Reason, the job was given to the 'crack down on dissidents' people. That I can imagine letting things escalate - they tolerate outbreaks because that gives them a ready-made excuse, and then... some slip through the cracks.
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Sure, but they were clearly still handling the outbreaks, as established in the account by the doctor. And the way they were doing it in the doctor's report would have led it to it happening regardless, unless they were actively ignoring reports of some zombie outbreaks but not all of them for some reason.

Like the narrative that seems to be developing is less that zombies are an apocalyptic threat and more that zombies were merely the method chosen to purge a restive population to pave the way for fascism.
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That's one area that does stretch my suspension of disbelief, because it requires virtually every major power made up of vast institutions to pretty uniformly agree to cripple themselves. But while it may be implausible, it's still less implausible than the individualistic garbage where nobody acts in a consistent manner that Brooke's sets up. So I roll with it.
 
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obssesednuker said:
That's one area that does stretch my suspension of disbelief, because it requires virtually every major power made up of vast institutions to pretty uniformly agree to cripple themselves. But while it may be implausible, it's still less implausible than the individualistic - yet inconsistent - "everyone's incompetent" garbage that Brooke's sets up. So I roll with it.
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See it as a combination of incompetence and malice.

First you assume that the occasional zombie-attacks are not a big deal, no need to diverge from business as usual.
Then let the kind of agencies handle it who see disease-control not as a goal in itself, but as an excuse to purge dissenters.
Then wonder how it could spiral out of control like this.

That doesn't take a conscious wish to support the rise of fashism, just a bad combination of relativly plausible behaviours.
Add in that weird brainbug that people shouldn't know about Zombies to prevent panic, disorder and bad election-results for the ruling goverment...
 
obssesednuker said:
I mean, any realistic treatment of Brookes' virus is going to run head long into the issue that what the Chinese were doing at the start of WWZ would have been itself enough to eventually smother the virus. Hell, it gets mistaken for rabies but a different let's read I was reading noted that rabies quarantine is about 90% of what you need to deal with Brooks-style zombies in the early-days: if bite mark or crazy, then remove from the population and restrain. Before that, rounding up and restraining the infected would work fine. And by rounding them up like it's rabies, they'd have plenty of zombies on hand to experiment on and figure out what's really happening.

You'd have to go for a different style of zombie to get anything remotely close to where you'd require fighting a genuine war against them.
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Mm, the attachment to Romero-Style Slow Zombies is fine, but they originally just kinda happened everywhere as an unexplainable horror and anyone who died for any reason turned. Hell was full, the dead walked the earth. It being a ultra-deadly, very-fast-onset, plague that has to actually spread via slow zombie just runs into that not working very well, even with the organ harvesting silliness.

IIRC, the Last of Us has a similar problem for spreading the Zombiceps via "infected grain shipments", but at least there it's a much longer initial incubation, uses initially-fast zombies, and the fungus clearly has some kind of human-independent ability to spread via sporulation. 28 Day's Rage Virus basically burns itself out in the UK just from how its crazy fast incubation prevents any plausible vehicular transit... barring a very silly scene from the sequel of them popping up in Paris out of a totally undefended tunnel. Hard to say if the Rage Virus could be contained if it was on a continent, short of natural barriers like mountains slowing them down enough to be wiped out by time and the elements, but it certainly isn't spreading across an ocean.

The Newsflesh books, for all their many, many flaws, does a pretty good job of it - well-intentioned bioterrorism released the virus into the upper atmosphere, so everyone has a passive form of it that prevents cancer and which activates upon death - or upon exposure to the active virus in even the tiniest amounts (such as blood spatter from shooting, aerosolised virus from burning, rubbing your eyes after a fight, etc), creating an initially-kinda-fast zombie that also grows more intelligent the more of them there are in a pack - to the point that they become able to lay the "then suddenly a zombie" traps that are so common in the genre. The resulting society is so intensely germophobic that constant paranoid murders of the uninfected becomes totally normalised.

...wait, I went on a wild tangent there. Anyway, slow zombies could work, since it's a setting where the humans won decisively enough to maintain some form of terrible post-Z governments. It just needs a slightly more convincing way to spread - even a random doomsday cult would work, "yeah this dude convinced his 200 cultists to shoot up zombie juice and fly around the world, moving on...". Or screw the pseudo-biology torment of plausible zombies - it's just magic radiation from a meteor shower.

Hmm, perhaps this is the wrong angle. Rather than starting with "how to plausible zombie apocalypse" it should be "what kinds of zombies might best support the material conditions needed for this political critique?" - so, for example, if it wanted to critique cultishness then more magical/impossible zombies help with that. If it wanted to criticise those space-wasp bastards from Beta Rigel-4 then it could be an alien terraforming probe that infects the local lifeforms to start building their weird vacation hives and produce space honey.
 
The problem with zombie media, as a genre, is that you need something that can both create an apocalypse and also be defeated by a band of hard men making hard choices in the aftermath (while hard). These are, needless to say, somewhat antagonistic towards each other. So you just get the actual fall waved off under a cloud of liberal weakness, while the survivors survive because they're TOUGH and BRUTAL and MANLY. Material realities like 'how zombie kill tank' doesn't matter, only the triumph of the will.

General Apocalyptic media doesn't generally have quite the same problem because the initial apocalypse and the threat to survivors are not the same thing. They may be second order consequences but you're not going to get the Whole Thing coming down on you. Like nuclear war stories may deal with radiation but rarely have the post-exchange survivors fight an ICBM with a crowbar.
 
BaseDeltaZero said:
The problem with zombie media, as a genre, is that you need something that can both create an apocalypse and also be defeated by a band of hard men making hard choices in the aftermath (while hard). These are, needless to say, somewhat antagonistic towards each other. So you just get the actual fall waved off under a cloud of liberal weakness, while the survivors survive because they're TOUGH and BRUTAL and MANLY. Material realities like 'how zombie kill tank' doesn't matter, only the triumph of the will.
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Well, there is the option of making the zombie outbreaks a secondary aftereffect to an even larger supernatural apocalypse involving monsters more deadly and dangerous to humanity than the shambling undead. In that scenario however, it's no longer considered a "zombie apocalypse".
 
BaseDeltaZero said:
The problem with zombie media, as a genre, is that you need something that can both create an apocalypse and also be defeated by a band of hard men making hard choices in the aftermath (while hard). These are, needless to say, somewhat antagonistic towards each other. So you just get the actual fall waved off under a cloud of liberal weakness, while the survivors survive because they're TOUGH and BRUTAL and MANLY. Material realities like 'how zombie kill tank' doesn't matter, only the triumph of the will.

General Apocalyptic media doesn't generally have quite the same problem because the initial apocalypse and the threat to survivors are not the same thing. They may be second order consequences but you're not going to get the Whole Thing coming down on you. Like nuclear war stories may deal with radiation but rarely have the post-exchange survivors fight an ICBM with a crowbar.
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Yeah, that's why, as much as it's eyebrow rising for everyone to have been that stupid in WWZ, it's not too bad of a solution to do a "well the collaspe wasn't as much because of the zombies themselves as because all the official responses were really abysmal"
 
Mazeka said:
Well, there is the option of making the zombie outbreaks a secondary aftereffect to an even larger supernatural apocalypse involving monsters more deadly and dangerous to humanity than the shambling undead. In that scenario however, it's no longer considered a "zombie apocalypse".
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You could also have it simply be a "conventional" airborne disease with associated incubation periods, high-mortality rates, and carriers and all that. And the survivors just have the luck of the draw in being immune or maybe even get sick-but-survive because god forbid we have a zombie disease that is NOT 100% lethal. And the zombies would be a post-apocalyptic issue, but not the apocalypse itself.
 
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NGL, I prefer Zombie viruses that aren't 100 percent lethal as a matter of course.

1: Because my creative endeavors are mostly running tabletop RPG campaigns and if I'm gonna run a Zombie RPG, 'Oops, you got bit, your character is now inevitably doomed' frankly just isn't fun. Having a chance of survival, however low, is just better for player fun.
2: It actually adds more drama? Now hiding a bite isn't just being profoundly selfish about something that can't be helped, but is an actual survival strategy, there becomes tradeoffs like 'Can we afford to keep sick people around and treat them, but they might (probably) turn into Zombies', and it raises the question of if someone is bit will survive (actual Tension, instead of 'Oh well, guess they're just dead').
 
BaseDeltaZero said:
The problem with zombie media, as a genre, is that you need something that can both create an apocalypse and also be defeated by a band of hard men making hard choices in the aftermath (while hard). These are, needless to say, somewhat antagonistic towards each other. So you just get the actual fall waved off under a cloud of liberal weakness, while the survivors survive because they're TOUGH and BRUTAL and MANLY. Material realities like 'how zombie kill tank' doesn't matter, only the triumph of the will.
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Funnily enough, Project Zomboid - a game whose entire premise is "This is how you died" - has a zombie virus that actually fits the criteria. Well, almost. The lethality of the initial strain is a touch high for there to be enough people to rebuild, barring some kind of statistical anomaly and a LOT of luck. But anyway, the 'Knox Infection' has two strains: the mass-lethal airborne variant the player character is immune to and the traditional virus that's spread via bodily fluids which the player very much is not immune to. The second variant also rarely infects VIA scratches from the infected, but that could also be explained as the % chance is just the chance a zomboid has infected fluids on their digits.

With all that said, I... Appreciate the attempt by Brooks explaining how Solanum spread worldwide, but also wow does he lean a little too hard into the whole black market organ thing. Although VM did a good job taking that apart, and giving better explanations.

veteranMortal said:
I never read the civilian survival guide - we didn't have many copies in Britain, but as I understand it, the stupid thing was actively harmful to most people who did, so.
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And I'm very happy to see the tradition of taking potshots at the Zombie Survival Guide is alive and well. I'm not sure when the joke of in-universe zombie survival guides being, well, jokes started but I do know it'll never cease to amuse me.
 
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Mazeka said:
What were the issues with the Newsflesh trilogy? I've only read the secondhand summaries.
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Well I've just read the first two books (this LR series gave me a taste for zombie), and won't read the third, so it's a bit fresh:
  1. Repetitive, deeply repetitive. "Character sipped his Coke", "the Coke was sweet", "because my employees knew I would punch them in the face if they mentioned blah", "the needle stung" - constant reuse and reiteration of well-established setting and character elements throughout the book.
  2. Unlikeable protagonist. Perhaps a result of the repetition, but the viewpoint character of the second book, Shaun, is an incredible fucking asshole. His sister died a year ago, and he is now in charge of the company. He has been ignoring it for that year, and frequently mentioned to have been beating his employees when they try to get him help - he has a persistant hallucination of his dead sister talking to him, and he talks back, sometimes he punches holes in the walls. His employees all put up with it, and seem to like him, but are also afraid of him. This is not resolved, but it his threats to punch his friends are constantly repeated.
  3. The Incest Stuff - it's foreshadowed by the sheer codependency, but it just feels cheap.
  4. The Clone Stuff - that's not how cloning works. The clones in this keep the original memories, and at the end of the second book, the dead sister is resurrected by the villains. Apparently multiple times in the third ala the Resident Evil movies. It's a cheap cop-out. Oh, and apparently the President is forced to follow their plans because they kidnapped and cloned his wife so now she's evil or something.
  5. There are barely any zombies. The zombies turn up for a fraction of the pagecount of the books, and while they're interesting zombies, that's it - the story briskly glosses over them, doesn't bother with much description, and then moves on to other things.
  6. The politics are incredibly important to the characters, but barely addressed. The first book follows the main cast on a presidential campaign as the Cool Blogger News crew following a Republican senator. His politics are just not present. He's a "nice person" who'd be a "genuinely Good President", and he has a horse ranch so he doesn't want large animals to be culled (large animals can zombify), and... that's all I can remember. Later the second book focuses more on the culture of fear created by the zombie plague, and the loss of basically all liberties, but it just doesn't seem to matter much - they have magic hacker powers and can go anywhere they want they break into heavily guarded CDC fortress-laboratories three or four times.
  7. They're Super Cool Bloggers - the most prestigious social celebrities of the era (The Truth of the virus was spread by a blog, and everyone stays indoors so they live vicariously through social media), and they have both Discovered Pretty Fucking Dark Secrets and have Mad L33T Skills. They don't just... post it - it all came from public information that's very easy to check and understand - and they have video of the villains monologuing!
  8. The culture is potentially interesting but never shown. Due to a constant zombie threat the population are stated to be massively paranoid germaphobes - blood and voice test to get in your house (fail or take too long and the flamethrowers pop out and instantly incinerate you), blood test to get in the supermarket (fail and burn), blood test to get to work (fail and buuuuuuurn), to get in your car, to get out of your car, etc. Like Gattaca but with outright murder. But the only people we see are the main cast, who are all wealthy bloggers one of them becomes vice president, another is the billionaire heiress of a pharmacorp, one is a leet superhacker and tech genius who can out-spy the CIA or whatever.
  9. The tech is a bit... iffy. Some well grounded, some basically techno-thriller magic. Much of the idea of adapting to zombies - new houses having no ground-floor windows, etc, make sense - though as usual everyone is paranoid but forgot to wear their kevlar gorget when the zombies finally show up, somehow bypassing all the defences. But even twenty years on, if the zombies apocalypse was such a problem, how do they have the industrial and scientific capacity to just make armoured roadways across the US, billions of blood tests (they're all single-use, and used constantly), and constantly build fancy new buildings with armour and gallons of bleach and napalm and airlocks for the AI security? It would make more sense if it were just a traditional plague, and it feels at times like that's what it was originally written to be and the zombies were tacked on afterwards.
  10. The main characters - Georgia and Shaun, only care about each other. Nobody else is even slightly important to their internal narrative, Georgia has Ideals but no reasons, Shaun has anger and the sweet sweet taste of Coke.
Edit: I still read the first two books mind - the second was developing actual promise and a couple of the tweeests were genuinely good, but I was skimming through it by the end from the sheer irritation of rereading the same plot points and Shaun being awful... then the final tweeest the clones retain memory just instantly toppled it into absurdity.
 
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obssesednuker said:
You could also have it simply be a "conventional" airborne disease with associated incubation periods, high-mortality rates, and carriers and all that. And the survivors just have the luck of the draw in being immune or maybe even get sick-but-survive because god forbid we have a zombie disease that is NOT 100% lethal. And the zombies would be a post-apocalyptic issue, but not the apocalypse itself.
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greendoor said:
NGL, I prefer Zombie viruses that aren't 100 percent lethal as a matter of course.
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But if it isn't 100% lethal how will we show that DICK HARDMAN is a good guy for killing all those children?
 
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