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

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10ebbor10 said:
A super-version of rabies, basically.

Sure, it could exist, but that's not going to cause a zombie pandemic.
Not unless it also has a second, far subtler and far better method of spreading.
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I guess a something like the 28 Days Later virus with its second-long incubation followed by super-rabies could spread through a densly populated area quite well.

Not a global zombie plague, but a nearly depopulated city at least.
 
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I guess the question is how you spread it far enough while not dooming every single character in the story to eventually come down with it.
 
RiverDelta said:
Would it be possible for there to be a mundane virus that caused people to become violent, cannibalistic, mindless predators, but that didn't give them any supernatural powers or durability?

Say, something that screws with your brain heavily, but if you choke out a "zombie" or cause them to bleed out they still die.

We know that WWZ!Zombies are supernatural or nonsense, but could you write something like the above without it being supernatural?
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That is the case in the 28 Days Later universe. The zombies are caused by a purely biological virus with no supernatural effects, and aside from its impossibly quick effect (the infected are zombified within a couple of minutes) is mostly 'realistic' in that the zombies are mindlessly hyper-aggressive humans who don't feel pain but still die to all the things that would kill a human being.

The film follows this to its logcial conclusion and as a result the epidemic is self-solving; the infected are uninterested in hunting for food and too aggressive to do it effectively if they cared to, so they've all starved to death by the end of the first movie.
 
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Omicron said:
That is the case in the 28 Days Later universe. The zombies are caused by a purely biological virus with no supernatural effects, and aside from its impossibly quick effect (the infected are zombified within a couple of minutes) is mostly 'realistic' in that the zombies are mindlessly hyper-aggressive humans who don't feel pain but still die to all the things that would kill a human being.

The film follows this to its logcial conclusion and as a result the epidemic is self-solving; the infected are uninterested in hunting for food and too aggressive to do it effectively if they cared to, so they've all starved to death by the end of the first movie.
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Isn't there a sequel?
 
RiverDelta said:
Would it be possible for there to be a mundane virus that caused people to become violent, cannibalistic, mindless predators, but that didn't give them any supernatural powers or durability?

Say, something that screws with your brain heavily, but if you choke out a "zombie" or cause them to bleed out they still die.

We know that WWZ!Zombies are supernatural or nonsense, but could you write something like the above without it being supernatural?
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That sound a lot like the comic "crossed" exept for the mindless,they can be stupi due to a lack of self control but in this comic they still are able to think,wich is why the governmant kill as much people as possible that know how to make a nuclear weapon or make nuclear power plant go Boom
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Insofar as having commissars who would shoot your ass worked for the Soviets in the Red Army during the interwar/WWII period, for instance, it worked because the Bolsheviks phased it in and a lot of other stuff was going on. Stuff that just isn't in play in the early 21st century post-USSR Russia.
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There is also the fact that the commissars were usually more focused on the officers and making sure that they didn't break orders.
 
RiverDelta said:
We know that WWZ!Zombies are supernatural or nonsense, but could you write something like the above without it being supernatural?
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Firefly/Serenity also comes to mind with The Reavers. Who if you did a Reaver style transformation via virus? You have Zombies who can operate Spaceships. Which at that point you have a big problem with normal Anti-Zombie Tactics. They can think would be a scary thing.
 
Wow, just read through all of this. Amazing worldbuilding and commentary. Haven't read the book since I was a teenage egg so I forgot just how fucking deranged it was
 
Simon_Jester said:
I think that the belief that the zombies are necessarily supernatural is one of those things people in-story just disagree about. And since the official line of most of the big Redekerist governments that the author hates with the fire of a hundred suns is "they're not supernatural," the author is predisposed to believe "they're supernatural."

Arguing against the author's perspective on zombie blindness even in-universe:

1) I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure there are devices that integrate flashing lights and that work as zombie-distractors. If zombies were truly blind, in the sense of "100% unable to perceive electromagnetic radiation," the flashing lights would do jack shit. If they're merely supposed to be what we'd call "legally blind," as in "vision is imprecise and blurry and otherwise very limited," that's a different matter. But "legally blind" and "still able to respond to visual stimuli" aren't mutually exclusive.

2) I could be wrong, but zombies don't seem to reliably automatically home in on the living through walls. My understanding is that it isn't literally impossible to hide from them at short range. It's not a great strategy, because they're very sensitive to sound and can and will wait you out because sooner or later, you need food and water, and they don't. But if they have a "sixth sense" for living things, it's one that doesn't penetrate walls much better than the normal five senses do. Which doesn't mean such a sense can't exist, but does militate against the hypothesis.

3) Zombies have lots of other pseudo-biological capabilities, things that the normal logic of human biology would suggest they "shouldn't" retain, and none of the others are supplemented with magic. For instance, zombies can walk, grab, and bite, even though basic principles of human anatomy and how human corpses decay as we know them suggest that the shouldn't be able to do any of those. But if their legs are broken they cannot stand, if their hands are lost they cannot grab, and if their mouth is blocked or muzzled they cannot bite. In none of these cases does an explicitly supernatural capability take over to let them do what they have lost the ability to do.

No supernatural ability takes over for their ability to walk when they do lose the mechanical ability to walk. So why should we assume that a supernatural capability is taking over for their ability to see, when only pre-Z reasoning is telling us that they've lost the mechanical ability to see?

...

One possibility that occurs to me is that we know zombie brains (or some analogous structure) process information in some way. It may be that their visual processing is radically altered. Perhaps this makes their processing better at compensating for damaged eyeballs, so long as some degree of light-sensitivity is maintained.
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I mean honestly the "zombies are blind" thing I pretty much took from canon? There's a PoV who notes very explicitly that all the zombies in the reconquest have their eyes absolutely scratched to fuck by dust and shit because they don't ever blink. I think it is feasible, sure, to claim that they can still see, but if they can still see, it isn't using their eyes - in which case this is not meaningfully distinct from a mysterious sixth sense, you know? It is one of the oddities of the canonical book, where Brooks keeps insisting they aren't supernatural at all, and then describing some extremely supernatural shit.

The flashing LED thing is from the extremely bad fanfiction about a cool SAS dude investigating North Korea. I have nothing kind to say about it.
 
veteranMortal said:
The flashing LED thing is from the extremely bad fanfiction about a cool SAS dude investigating North Korea. I have nothing kind to say about it.
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One of these days, you might as well give the play-by-play about everything wrong with that fic, even if one leaves aside how it relies too much on taking Brooks at face value. Put it in apocryphal maybe.
 
veteranMortal said:
The flashing LED thing is from the extremely bad fanfiction about a cool SAS dude investigating North Korea. I have nothing kind to say about it.
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Huh. Shit. Then I'm misremembering. Sorry about that.

With that said, there's a big uncertainty there- how much accumulated scratch damage means how much accumulated vision damage? Zombies' vision would progressively degrade over time. Since it's not like they need to be able to read a newspaper or anything, a certain amount of degradation wouldn't be a serious practical problem for them even if they do rely on eyesight. It might well be that freshly turned zombies can see fine or at least "good enough," while three year old zombies mostly can't apart from maybe a vague ability to distinguish light from dark and a sense of when something's moving in their field of view.
 
OOC:

Since the topic of most zombies depicted in the media not actually having the ability to collapse society realistically keeps coming up, how would you folks rate Walking Dead style Zombies given the whole "you die (and have most of your brain intact) you're just going to become a zombie, period" thing?
 
King Washington said:
OOC:

Since the topic of most zombies depicted in the media not actually having the ability to collapse society realistically keeps coming up, how would you folks rate Walking Dead style Zombies given the whole "you die (and have most of your brain intact) you're just going to become a zombie, period" thing?
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Society wouldn't collapse, but everything relating to funeral rites worldwide would be radically altered.
 
I think the magic ingredient that really spices up vaguely non-supernatural rage virus zombies into a proper zombie apocalypse would be swerving into the "we live in a society, bottom text" lane of zombies as a commentary on the world as it is. COVID lockdown shit where people fall into conspiracy theories and kill themselves drinking bleach, or simply refuse to accept necessary precautions and act as super-spreaders, while governments wildly vacillate between focusing on the expression of control and state power with cops enforcing curfews and shit and then keeping the system itself running and trying to save normality and endangering people by getting them back to their 9-to-5. Suburbia cut off from the web of industrial civilization becoming a massive deathtrap where like most people die from cholera and exposure and starvation more than the zombies. Even Brooks of all people has a line about wannabe "Rambos" being almost as dangerous as the zombies and how a bunch of mall ninjas and like militia types would just go on sprees, treating anyone not like them as a zombie or potential zombie (Brooks here fails to extrapolate into how this would also absolutely tie into the neo-Nazi race war and turner diaries day of the rope shit).
 
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King Washington said:
OOC:

Since the topic of most zombies depicted in the media not actually having the ability to collapse society realistically keeps coming up, how would you folks rate Walking Dead style Zombies given the whole "you die (and have most of your brain intact) you're just going to become a zombie, period" thing?
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That's probably the closest you could get to actually collapsing society. Might even manage it if it's a bit more explicitly magical and every corpse in the graveyards get up in one go as the opening act.
 
Weren't some of those shitty WW2 swords fitted with real blades under the mass-produced hilts? I don't know if it was real but I think I read something at some point to the effect of inter-family disputes between the families of American soldiers who brought back officers' swords and the families of the former officers who want their ancestral sword back. Not sure about the hilt-swap, might be they just took the whole thing off to war and lost it.

Wasn't sure if trying to turn bedsheets into climbing ropes was anything but an elaborate form of suicide but no, people have actually done that successfully.

Still, even at face value. Trying to fight zombies with a katana seems like an extremely terrible idea.
Also the old man, that seems... idk the language exactly but it feels like the Daredevil thing where people try to turn disabilities into superpowers. Feels kind of sus.


I haven't read the book in like 15 years or smth, and never been one for the sorts of analytical dissections some people do, and haven't been reading it independently now either, and I'd forgotten most of it, but my recollections of this section were actually fairly positive (probably from having forgotten lmao) in that it's IIRC the only part of the book that talks about the experience of someone surviving inside a city. If very vaguely.

Was going to say something about how the reviewer sometimes seems to read interviews maliciously re: the guy not sleeping but then I looked up the actual interview and no, he does say that or near enough, it just isn't quoted here.
K von Carstein said:
You're talking about « The way is shut » or something like that? I liked that fic.
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IIRC there's at least two. There's that one, and then there's another without the occult stuff where I think it's just filled with water or smth.
King Washington said:
OOC:

Since the topic of most zombies depicted in the media not actually having the ability to collapse society realistically keeps coming up, how would you folks rate Walking Dead style Zombies given the whole "you die (and have most of your brain intact) you're just going to become a zombie, period" thing?
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Noting that I haven't actually watched that: IMO that sort of thing, or CDDA's blob, are much better, yes. The zombies being symptoms of the infection rather than the vector means it spreading and causing societal damage makes a lot more sense than shamblers somehow spreading out of control. Cataclysm also has the feature I like in that the zombies themselves aren't (zombie) infectious, so them biting you is just a regular horrible sewer-mouth human bite. More of an environmental/combat threat than the fear-of-contagion thing.

CDDA/Project Zomboid also have the parent infection already widespread before the game itself starts and the majority of afflicted people just simply die outright and stand back up, so it really is 'one day all hell breaks loose', instead of the plague spreading from a handful of shamblers.

Of course, it's entirely possible other, better-known media has done that already and I just don't know the reference, because I've never watched a zombie movie to begin with.
 
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King Washington said:
OOC:

Since the topic of most zombies depicted in the media not actually having the ability to collapse society realistically keeps coming up, how would you folks rate Walking Dead style Zombies given the whole "you die (and have most of your brain intact) you're just going to become a zombie, period" thing?
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Honestly a big part of what makes The Walking Dead work as a zombie apocalypse setting is the fact that Rick just kind of coma'd his way through said entire apocalypse kicking off. We don't have all the World War Z stuff that requires things like every government simultaneously deciding to never release any info about the zombie pandemic starting up in the background, we don't have the bullshit that is Yonkers to try and explain how zombies would stand even a ghost of a chance against something as over-equipped as the US Military, Rick just wakes up to "zombies already broke everything, go find survivors."

And even beyond that? Over time, TWD slowly establishes that the main issue with trying to rebuild civilization isn't really the zombies, after a certain point. Once you have enough people in a fortified position and ready to do things like clear the fences on a regular basis, and already know the twist of "everyone is already infected so anyone who dies will rise up", civilization starts to rebuild pretty quickly and the real issue becomes the less friendly survivor groups with people like The Governor or Negan.

Basically, while a Walking Dead style of zombie would be slightly more believable than World War Z since it has the additional infection vector brought on by things like people rising up after dying of starvation, disease, or suicide, I think it would still require some fancy author magic behind the scenes to reach total collapse of worldwide civilization.

You want a zombie virus that does feel like it could bring about some major collapses, you probably want something like Left 4 Dead where it's a rapidly mutating virus that creates fast zombies, mutated super zombies, and can infect with things like airborne vectors and immune survivors who will unknowingly carry it into remaining bastions of civilization.
 
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