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

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The Japan segments were just legendarily awful even to my twelve year old self and I'm so excited to see what this review makes of them.
 
Kadmus said:
And of course the Yank's happy to talk up the South Koreans; they're still the US's closest allies in the region, even if it looks like they're probably aiming to renegotiate the terms of the deal with the change in relative power.
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One has to wonder what the intent is here. I mean, this whole thing is at its core a project of the junta and the worldview of it and its remaining allies: it's obviously why he props up jackals like Wainio and Forbes, interviews so many generals and spooks, picks civilians with narratives and perspectives that are useful to them ... so what's the drive here? I don't get the sense the junta particularly wants to find out what's going on past the DMZ, but then why talk to this spook? The Deputy Director isn't exactly known for his measured opinions about DPRK, I'm sure our pal had access to other options if he, or his superiors, wanted to talk to them.

I dunno. Hyungchol Choi is a weird fucking choice to talk to if your goal isn't "elevate someone who thinks they should definitely cross the DMZ".
 
McFluffles said:
Even better, Japan is now an anime, Katanas for Everybody! Those zombie skulls just can't stand up to Glorious Thousand-Folded Nippon Steel.

At least, if I'm remembering those chapters properly. It's been a long, long time since I read World War Z.
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Insert joke here about the ultranationalist author of Highschool of the Dead finding himself facing actual zombies in Japan.
 
veteranMortal said:
Another argument is that the DPRK is clearly still kicking, if only just. Something's clearly gone wrong - you can't imagine they intend to stay in their bunker complex forever - but there's absolutely no fucking chance that any of their automated defences are still working after 20 years without maintenance - they can't even keep a pillbox or razorwire functional for 20 years without replacement parts, and you expect us to believe their SAM turrets are just ticking over fine?
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Anyone who thinks you could have an automated SAM site still functional enough to kill a cargo aircraft after 20 years has obviously never operated a radar set.

veteranMortal said:
Would you believe Japan and Korea don't get on now? I'm shocked. Shocked!

They play nice because America makes them play nice, but as it becomes clearer and clearer that America isn't going to come roaring back to prominence on the world stage, the claws are starting to come out. I give it a year before they're skirmishing over Tsushima and the Liancourt Rocks.
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The whole area is a powder keg, then again everywhere is but East Asia is especially bad. There's been quite a lot of East Asian men and Women of various types turning up in European arms markets lately from what I hear. A lot of them have good gear they want to sell (Chinese MANPADs are still the best in the world, and their drones and loitering munitions are basically the only non-Israeli systems on the market) but in turn want large batch small arms deliveries, ammo, shells, salvaged European military weapons etc. The guys in control of the old Thale Group factories are apparently making a great deal of bank selling things like high quality night vision systems.

The way I hear it the whole area is tooling up for when the WRPK, RoK, Japan, and various factions within China go at it. At that point maybe we'll find out what happened to those left in the DPRK.

It's a testament to the amount that global maritime trade has managed to recover now that some of them are smuggling it all the way from Europe and back
 
It's incredible to me that the WWZ game has been the best WWZ media we've gotten and it's barely associated with either the book or the movie.
 
Simon_Jester said:
So just to make sure I'm clear on the actual facts of the situation in the People's History of the Zombie War timeline...

North Korea factually did expel most of its population over the borders and herd a quarter of it (roughly) into the bunkers. The refugees were mostly if not entirely pushed over the northern border and are now a major element of the Worker's Republic of Jilin, which has established itself in, well, the eponymous Jilin, which is a Chinese province bordering on North Korea.

Meanwhile, South Korea is under the usual badly concealed iron fist of a bunch of KCIA spooks.

Do I have that right?
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Broadly, though the Workers' Republic prefers "Workers' Republic of Korea" or "Workers' Republic of Korea in Jilin"

Insofar as population counts are of interest, because I was thinking about them, they're sitting at roughly

- WRK: 9 million
- Republic of Korea: 10 million
- Democratic People's Republic of Korea: Somewhere between 500k and 3 million. People know they still exist, but nobody is sure how many of them are left down there.
 
So in summary, Kim Jong-Un did retreat underground with an insane number of people, but very far from the whole North Korean population, the remainder of whom were generally forced over the north border. At some point a "new" state was established, possibly not entirely made up of North Koreans given the "I could meet a 'North Korean' in a month" statement by the reviewer, but definitely including at least some of the refugees.

Am I missing anything?

Edit: Ah, I was Ninja'd by Simon Jester. Nevermind.

Have a comment @veteranMortal
So far as "how" the infection got in - I think it was probably the South Korean spies. Recall that this was before the outbreaks had really gotten going; only China and North Korea knew, at this point. If a South Korean spy got through the initial screening to get into the "let us all become mole people" meeting, they'd be assumed to be clean of the zombie taint. If they'd slipped out a side exit to try and contact Seoul, though… Been bitten by a homeless person whilst doing it? Do you think they'd tell anyone in the bunker? People would ask questions, like "what were you doing out there". So they didn't tell anybody, and then eventually they turned within the bunker complex.
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Before I read the rest of the paragraph I was expecting her to suggest it to be an intentional assassination-by-infection from South Korea, given that it hadn't really gotten going and therefore South Korea wouldn't realize how bad an idea propagating it was, morals and ethics aside. Not to mention the burgeoning KCIA.
 
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veteranMortal said:
And we know more than they hint. A couple of years into the crisis, when South Korea was looking at its most dire, there was a broadcast from Pyongyang calling for South Koreans to rise up against their government, promising that the Korean People's Army would cross the DMZ in force to defend them against the living dead and their government both.

This broadcast told us an awful lot about what was going on down there, because it was delivered by Supreme Leader Kim Yo-jong.
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Hm. Sounds like both South and North Korea are currently run by dictatorships, so I suspect even if the South folk listened to Yo-jong it wouldn't have changed much overall re: quality of life for the average person.
 
InquisitionAI said:
Ooc:

The Infector was added because a bunch of people found 'God Spots' where they were effectively Invincible, since Zeke couldn't get to them.

Boosters, on the other hand, are the factual bane of every player's existence and are entirely just a gameplay thing to make it harder.

Fuck those gaseous bastards.
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I just let the team handle that while i kill normies. Infectors just seem to have the ability to fuck me over when I am low health every single gods damned time. Like no matter what when I am ten percent and i have slaughtered enough normies to make a pile an infector is what kills me
 
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.

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.
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That's certainly how the Americans seem to handle it in People's History, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised if that's what happened in China, too. Though in that case you'd want to spell it out more aggressively in the narrative to make it a message of the work... and in the context of THIS thread... Well, I suppose the narrator has her reasons not to want to do that, because it would feel too much like giving into the official Sinophobia of the original book.

bookwyrm said:
(even something as basic as just fucking off like all the ancient Roman towns Renaissance Europe abandoned as seasonally uninhabitable due to the "bad airs")
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In fairness, this issue was somewhat complicated by malaria, a disease that is very real and is spread by mosquitos, who are much more prevalent in some seasons and areas than others. There were some really bad malaria outbreaks in Europe around the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the early modern period.

Stardust&Scotch said:
One has to wonder what the intent is here. I mean, this whole thing is at its core a project of the junta and the worldview of it and its remaining allies: it's obviously why he props up jackals like Wainio and Forbes, interviews so many generals and spooks, picks civilians with narratives and perspectives that are useful to them ... so what's the drive here? I don't get the sense the junta particularly wants to find out what's going on past the DMZ, but then why talk to this spook? The Deputy Director isn't exactly known for his measured opinions about DPRK, I'm sure our pal had access to other options if he, or his superiors, wanted to talk to them.

I dunno. Hyungchol Choi is a weird fucking choice to talk to if your goal isn't "elevate someone who thinks they should definitely cross the DMZ".
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I think it's just to generally play up the spookiness and "wrong kind of foreigners bad, communism bad because look what it did to North Korea" angle.

Plus, the junta consists of people who to some extent haven't gotten over their own prewar brainbugs, and North Korea was taken a lot more seriously back then.

BiopunkOtrera said:
Democracy seems to be basically dead in most of the WWZ earth, be it the original or People's History of the Zombie War.
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On the other hand, given how teetery and fucked up a lot of the postwar post-Redeker governments are, one may yet hope that democracy will claw its way out of a shallow grave, moaning and yearning to feast upon the brains of tyrants!
 
BiopunkOtrera said:
Democracy seems to be basically dead in most of the WWZ earth, be it the original or People's History of the Zombie War.
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The Let's Read version seems a bit better, though! Comments by the in-verse reader have mentioned that various nations are trying out non-capitalism methods of... economy? And democracy seems to be held by a few nations, I think? Presuming that's what a worker's republic is, anyway.
 
the fact it took a zombie apocalypse to bring it down should be seen as a badge of honor, whereas Communism kinda fell because it failed to account for well...People being People, it took a literal supernatural event and people being people to topple Democracy after a long good run.
 
BiopunkOtrera said:
Democracy seems to be basically dead in most of the WWZ earth, be it the original or People's History of the Zombie War.
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I think it's also selection bias, every nation that used the Redeker plan wants to prove that the Redeker plan was necessary, so they have a unified propaganda goal. So the guys mostly fluffing up places that used the Redeker plan, and none of those places are going to be democracies. There may be a decent number of them out there still, just not getting focus.
 
my OOC comment on this chapter is I can't fucking believe Brooks had them go back to being the KCIA...

Like come on guys. Do you not know what the KCIA represents.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
That's certainly how the Americans seem to handle it in People's History, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised if that's what happened in China, too. Though in that case you'd want to spell it out more aggressively in the narrative to make it a message of the work... and in the context of THIS thread... Well, I suppose the narrator has her reasons not to want to do that, because it would feel too much like giving into the official Sinophobia of the original book.
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I'll just note we haven't actually returned to China since the first chapter. I've spoken about it, but "What happened in China in the war" is still somewhat up in the air.

veteranMortal said:
And here we reach the crux of the failure of the PRC's response; they gave the work to the Guoanbu. They did a good enough job, those StateSec creeps, but spooks never met a crisis they wouldn't exploit. It didn't take long for them to start purging dissidents - Uighurs and the like - under the guise of their counter-ghoul protocols.
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But they did fuck around with using the zombie apocalypse as cover for purging dissidents, yes.

random_npc said:
I think it's also selection bias, every nation that used the Redeker plan wants to prove that the Redeker plan was necessary, so they have a unified propaganda goal. So the guys mostly fluffing up places that used the Redeker plan, and none of those places are going to be democracies. There may be a decent number of them out there still, just not getting focus.
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There's a fair few pre-war democracies still kicking about in a democratic manner - Spain and Italy are both still democratic, the Republic of South Africa still holds about half its territory and remains democratic, Czechia is still hanging in there, Ireland is thriving...

But like, there's a reason he went to Ireland and didn't speak to any Irish people, you know? Dude doesn't want to talk to non-redeker countries.
 
Makes sense, despite all the focus on transforming the Junta as something apolitical and apart from the deathly failure of the pre-war republic as the source of all ills, and all the heaps and heaps of American exceptionalism twisted into "pre-war America was the Tower of Babel and likewise it takes the most extraordinary fascist hard men to recover from our biblical fall", giving a clear and open voice to countries that simply choose to not abandon their citizenry to die is just a step too far in terms of keeping this tract on message and and tied together as a thematically coherent enough narrative of Junta propaganda, while still maintaining the documentary style.
 
How is Ireland thriving, it thought it got invaded by the British? Also I get the gist that the various Worker's Republics are less dictatorial forms of socialism/communism.
 
Simon_Jester said:
In fairness, this issue was somewhat complicated by malaria, a disease that is very real and is spread by mosquitos, who are much more prevalent in some seasons and areas than others. There were some really bad malaria outbreaks in Europe around the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the early modern period.
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Oh sorry that's what I meant, that even as the then contemporary field of medicine failed to come up with a cure or a vaccine or even much of an understanding of its mechanics beyond being somehow the action of miasmas in wetlands, just not being there any more worked pretty okay-ish. Much as a hypothetical post-zombie society "solving" the apocalypse just by abandoning the current system of car-centric seas of suburbia funneling into highway-bifurcated mega metropolitan areas, and maybe even perpetuating most of capitalism in its old-new townships and parishes.
 
Late to the party to talk about this rather than the completely braindamaged depiction of North Koreans, but one of the things that always struck me as a lad reading this story was the Lobo. Because it definitely seems like an idea that when Brooks came up with it, he high-fived himself, but I had read the Zombie Survival Guide as well and I never understood from that book why such a weapon would be such a good idea against zombies, even under Brooks's weird rules. Thinking about it now, my best guess is that it has to do with Brooks's odd affection for the monk's spade, and the Lobo might be an attempt to reflect a reverse-engineered version of the same idea: that being, a polearm with a wide, double-edged blade. Which... yeah, I guess that's not the worst idea for an anti-zombie weapon? Nonetheless, I still struggled to think of why you would actually need it to look like a shovel when the book had made it quite clear that trench warfare was a moron's game against zombies.

The more pertinent thing about it is that when I googled depictions of the weapon, I recall from my misty youth that I couldn't find one that fully matched the book's description and didn't look either completely off from its description in the source material or didn't just look like a regular battleaxe. The version in the game looks like this:



Which doesn't seem completely mismatched from the book's descriptions, at least? I am ill-equipped to explain why this thing would be a piece of shit in the highly scientific and widely-applicable field of anti-zombie warfare, though.
 
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