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

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Honestly its a shame that, at the time at least, one of the rarer big breakout attempts at doing the zombie genre not as an individual man vs. nature or lifeboat ethics individual band of survivors stuff, just immediately pivots instead into an unthinking worship of the authority of the American government and the chosen priesthoods of the American civic religion in the military and in the right sorts of politicians. Cause like granting your zombie America permission to be wrong in anything but tactical considerations, bringing that to the fore in the possibility space of your setting really allows you to not just grapple with better pathos and philosophical and moral dilemmas and everything, but to bring your America to life.

Like that whole bit of continuing to have elections in the middle of organizing continuity of government safe zones and abandoning most of the country and everything- that could have been so so beautifully American in the idealistic optimism sure, but also in the formal facade of elections granting democratic mandate to basically unilateral extra-constitutional executive action, and in the growth of blursed Tammany Hall political machines out of community elders and fucked-up strongmen reigning over enclaves like the return of the 1900s meets the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and, in the push-and-pull in these factors squashing a great deal of democratic input but allowing some to continue in a debate as to what it means to correctly perform America and be American and all the wild and interesting places that could try to co-opt or reject that label and the loose radio- and airdrop- (and airstrike-) based suzerainty of the "real" government.
 
bookwyrm said:
Honestly its a shame that, at the time at least, one of the rarer big breakout attempts at doing the zombie genre not as an individual man vs. nature or lifeboat ethics individual band of survivors stuff, just immediately pivots instead into an unthinking worship of the authority of the American government and the chosen priesthoods of the American civic religion in the military and in the right sorts of politicians.
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"It's one of the rare big breakout attempts at not doing an individualist zombie story, and it immediately embraced the kind of politics you see in Americans who make a big deal out of individualism."

It is a shame, but it's not a surprise.
 
Now I'm wondering what a truly collectivist take on the Zombie apocalypse would look like. Centering the story on the survival of communities, I suppose. Could fit nicely in the hypothetical "A People's History of the Zombie War" that's been discussed on here before.
 
ZabetTheRabbit said:
Now I'm wondering what a truly collectivist take on the Zombie apocalypse would look like. Centering the story on the survival of communities, I suppose. Could fit nicely in the hypothetical "A People's History of the Zombie War" that's been discussed on here before.
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Take care-trying to make a leftist/"alternative" take on the Zack attack was how we got Newsflesh. I will never really forgive McGuire for making the CDC, of all government agencies, the core of her evil conspiracy.
 
Not to mention the GROSS SPOILERS surprise brother/sister incest twist at the end of the very last book which was presented as like, completely fine. Why, McGuire. Why
 
ZabetTheRabbit said:
Well, that's a new series for me. I will, uh, probably not be reading that.
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Yeah, it starts out great, but it is oh-so-clearly meant to be a "we're so cool and special and world-saving" take on early blogging culture on sites like Tumblr, where McGuire made her meat in the mid-2000s. Rapidly, blogs become the only real news, because they're sO mUcH MoRe hOnEsT than the ol' reliable MSM, who of course are all in arms with the government conspiracy to cover up Zack.

While wishes are still fishes, I think it'd be cool to get a military thriller take on zombie affairs, kind of a Tom Clancy approach. Aside from Adam Baker's Juggernaut, all the way back in 2012, everything else is composed of right-wing goo. My dream idea is a combined UN-USAMRIID/CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service type task force, confronted with something either parasitic or hemorrhagic coming out of either the ocean or the thawing arctic (yes, I know that Back For Blood used that as their hook too but they wasted it. My city plot contrivance now.

Edit: Johnathan Maberry's Joe Ledger books are goofy centrist pulp fun somewhat in the Zombie Thriller mode, but I started and stopped with 2009's Patient Zero because of its...well it's got a lot of the same problems as WWZ with a side order of paranoia re: terrorism. However, its Obama and Michelle Stand-Ins are depicted as cool and capable in the face of a zombie terrorist attack on Philadelphia that slices through multiple secret government agencies and the Secret Service.
 
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ZabetTheRabbit said:
Now I'm wondering what a truly collectivist take on the Zombie apocalypse would look like. Centering the story on the survival of communities, I suppose. Could fit nicely in the hypothetical "A People's History of the Zombie War" that's been discussed on here before.
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I imagine the running theme would be something like "The lone wolf dies but the pack survives".

First, the community endures threats which devour individual survivors. Then, the community comes into conflict with communities that reject some important aspect of the community's communal values; bandit gangs united by nothing but mutual self-interest, or nomads who reject/expel anyone deemed useless to the Convoy, or wannabe plantation owners trying to build a fortune by enslaving other survivors. The community comes away stronger from each conflict, because it accepts anyone who needs a home.

Perhaps the "final boss" could be a warlord with his own community ideals; only the strong pack survives, therefore he needs to make his pack strongest. So the warlord enforces a hierarchy; the generals support the warlord, the soldiers support the generals, the civilians support the soldiers. A military dictatorship focused on empowering the community and its leaders. Pure authoritarianism versus pure egalitarianism.


This would probably work best if there was enough of a threat that the reader could understand why people would find that authoritarianism appealing. Which, in my opinion, a classic zombie apocalypse isn't well-suited for! Most of the world gets turned, but the zombie threat only ebbs as zombies get killed faster than they turn more people (and existing zombies rot), and the population density would be low enough that it's hard to imagine human threats would rise above the level of occasional raids.

This is probably easiest to justify if the zombies are explicitly supernatural in origin. Dismembered or pulped virus-zombies rising again as new types of monster feels out of genre; doing the same with demonic-possession zombies feels less implausible. It's demons! Who says they can't turn one functional zombie and a bunch of formerly-animate corpses to create some kind of undead troll? An ogre-ghoul? Oghroul?
 
I think its been brought up before, but I also really like a zombie plague as a chronic endemic threat, not one big instant 90% ghoulification and afterwards having a big ??? on how the swarms keep coming, but a constant risk of infection with infectious vectors and materials being super hard to deal with as like magic prion diseases and the like. Not that everyone is a zombie but that anyone could be a zombie days or hours away from symptoms, with seasonal waves coming like the tide- like living in the great age of malaria in antebellum New Orleans, or the cesspits that were Early Modern cities like London and Venice and such. Zombies as a focus of constant besieged pressure on modern alienated suburbs-turned-enclaves and turning inward the paranoia and abuse and spiraling failure much as what our societies already heavily police and proscribe as potential security threats, with the Futureyear Paramilitary Guards complaining that no wonder the zombies come predominately from the ghetto sorry refugee processing center whose dividing web of security checkpoints they're manning, since they don't lift themselves up by their bootstraps and "voluntarily" live in such filth and squalor.

Bringing the war home with how coalition forces operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, with how migrant communities and homeless encampments are treated... all that really good stuff already touched on in a lot of zombie classics with zombies as cinematically speaking very nearly the exact same thing as consumerism and modern society, macho military culture, and such, and bringing all that together under the dehumanizing machines of car-based infrastructure and the security state and incarceral complex. Maybe wrap it all up with the only way forward is with everyone moving forward and no one left behind, or something.
 
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bookwyrm said:
Not that everyone is a zombie but that anyone could be a zombie days or hours away from symptoms, with seasonal waves coming like the tide- like living in the great age of malaria in antebellum New Orleans, or the cesspits that were Early Modern cities like London and Venice and such.
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The thing is, early modern (and premodern) cities could only sustain such epidemics because they were supported by the countryside. I mean that both in the sense that cities and their plague-generating conditions can't exist without 90% of the population farming around the cities, and also the sense that more people died in cities than were born there until the advent of modern sanitation.

If a significant fraction of survivors can expect zombie death by the end of the year, whether by spontaneous zombification or zombie mauling, society is unsustainable. Even if it's possible to raise a child to maturity in such an environment, it's impossible to raise enough children to replace those who die to zombies (to say nothing of other illnesses, or violence, or starvation, etc).

My point is, there's a pretty low limit to how lethal a constant disease-like threat can be before it tips the setting into hopeless decline. I think that's why zombie media so often focuses on the physical threat posed by zombies; it's much easier to create tension from violence than disease. It's easier to convince the audience that our heroes and humanity as a whole can pull through with a good plan and a little luck, but also that they could be exterminated if they fail.


"Zombies as a catalyst for a police state" is a more workable premise, IMHO, but in the same humble opinion, it's shifting away from "zombie apocalypse" to "dystopia with zombies in the background".
 
I mean, has anyone else read the dead (pun intended!) Webcomic of The Zombie Hunters? (TV Tropes Link Here [WARNING! Wiki Walk and finding yourself reading about a random trope several hours later possible!]) Having a Zombie Plague where you can have someone be a carrier who'll only turn when they die? You could have at minimum a significant percentage of a surviving population be carriers, or you could go the other way and every survivor could turn on death, or anywhere on a spectrum of that.

Say take a Pandemic, of some kind of more lethal flu. Kill 10% of the population off, they reanimate as Zombies. Mix in something like a 10% long covid of the original population. Then of the other 80% of the world population? You have say at least 10% of the original population or 1 in 9 of the population could turn into a Zombie if they die.

Such a pandemic would probably cause a break down in society, would cause governments to fall and new ones to rise. Along with people thinking it's the Apocalypse and going a bit crazy based on what they know of Zombie Fic. Then you can explore the different governments which are left in the aftermath as people go to rebuild.
 
SemiSaneAuthor said:
I mean, has anyone else read the dead (pun intended!) Webcomic of The Zombie Hunters? (TV Tropes Link Here [WARNING! Wiki Walk and finding yourself reading about a random trope several hours later possible!]) Having a Zombie Plague where you can have someone be a carrier who'll only turn when they die? You could have at minimum a significant percentage of a surviving population be carriers, or you could go the other way and every survivor could turn on death, or anywhere on a spectrum of that.

Say take a Pandemic, of some kind of more lethal flu. Kill 10% of the population off, they reanimate as Zombies. Mix in something like a 10% long covid of the original population. Then of the other 80% of the world population? You have say at least 10% of the original population or 1 in 9 of the population could turn into a Zombie if they die.

Such a pandemic would probably cause a break down in society, would cause governments to fall and new ones to rise. Along with people thinking it's the Apocalypse and going a bit crazy based on what they know of Zombie Fic. Then you can explore the different governments which are left in the aftermath as people go to rebuild.
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Oh man The Zombie Hunters! I forgot all about this one but the idea of a shovel head by itself as a melee weapon is permanently stuck in my head.

Much as an actual shovel blade can get stuck in your head...
 
Remember that zombie media is like comfort food for a lot of people, so it's not hard to see writers just make what they see what the audience will find fun and not think about the bigger picture or implications because that would get in the way of the protagonist surviving a hoard of zombie baboons or something else exciting.
 
SemiSaneAuthor said:
I mean, has anyone else read the dead (pun intended!) Webcomic of The Zombie Hunters? (TV Tropes Link Here [WARNING! Wiki Walk and finding yourself reading about a random trope several hours later possible!]) Having a Zombie Plague where you can have someone be a carrier who'll only turn when they die? You could have at minimum a significant percentage of a surviving population be carriers, or you could go the other way and every survivor could turn on death, or anywhere on a spectrum of that.

Say take a Pandemic, of some kind of more lethal flu. Kill 10% of the population off, they reanimate as Zombies. Mix in something like a 10% long covid of the original population. Then of the other 80% of the world population? You have say at least 10% of the original population or 1 in 9 of the population could turn into a Zombie if they die.

Such a pandemic would probably cause a break down in society, would cause governments to fall and new ones to rise. Along with people thinking it's the Apocalypse and going a bit crazy based on what they know of Zombie Fic. Then you can explore the different governments which are left in the aftermath as people go to rebuild.
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I remember that webcomic.

A dysfunctional group of infected wasteland scavengers, last seen tasked with searching for a new settlement for their superiors.
An island settlement centered around a science campus, with infected "carriers" segregated and discriminated against.
One unelected government council with a leader of questionable mental state, an isolationist, and a torture technician who wants to exterminate the carriers.

(I asked about societies with asymptomatic zombie virus carriers on Discord. The answer I got was that carriers and uninfected people would have to be segregated by default, but that doesn't mean carriers shouldn't be afforded the same rights as uninfected people.)
 
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bookwyrm said:
Honestly its a shame that, at the time at least, one of the rarer big breakout attempts at doing the zombie genre not as an individual man vs. nature or lifeboat ethics individual band of survivors stuff, just immediately pivots instead into an unthinking worship of the authority of the American government and the chosen priesthoods of the American civic religion in the military and in the right sorts of politicians. Cause like granting your zombie America permission to be wrong in anything but tactical considerations, bringing that to the fore in the possibility space of your setting really allows you to not just grapple with better pathos and philosophical and moral dilemmas and everything, but to bring your America to life.

Like that whole bit of continuing to have elections in the middle of organizing continuity of government safe zones and abandoning most of the country and everything- that could have been so so beautifully American in the idealistic optimism sure, but also in the formal facade of elections granting democratic mandate to basically unilateral extra-constitutional executive action, and in the growth of blursed Tammany Hall political machines out of community elders and fucked-up strongmen reigning over enclaves like the return of the 1900s meets the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and, in the push-and-pull in these factors squashing a great deal of democratic input but allowing some to continue in a debate as to what it means to correctly perform America and be American and all the wild and interesting places that could try to co-opt or reject that label and the loose radio- and airdrop- (and airstrike-) based suzerainty of the "real" government.
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There's always Resident Evil.... Which has corrupt governments and corpos, but you have good people in govt n journalists who are exposing the bad guys. Then the official task forces taking down the Bioweapons.


Although Leon qualifies as most stupid SS agent ever, but well, story advancement hook.

ZabetTheRabbit said:
Now I'm wondering what a truly collectivist take on the Zombie apocalypse would look like. Centering the story on the survival of communities, I suppose. Could fit nicely in the hypothetical "A People's History of the Zombie War" that's been discussed on here before.
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There's a reason why every major zombie story starts with breakdown of govt occurs. Well, apart from WWZ movie.

You just end up with Shaun of the Dead aftermath .


Although there's also the Contagion series .... But that spreads the CDC is evil and incompetent meme.
 
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Not exactly well-read in zombie apocalypse media but the "the government/CDC/FEMA are actually more of a threat than the zombies" thing just keeps coming up. Might be mainly an American thing maybe.

Though in the 70s or 80s it'd probably be 50/50 whether a zombie virus outbreak was natural or some alphabet agency or military research outfit playing fuck-fuck games.

It does make sense as a plot point though, neatly removing the most likely sources of help, throwing in a bunch of thriller elements of "who can be trusted?", and reinforcing the usual thing of the band of desperate survivors beset by all the world.
 
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Well, it's the seventh-most-populous country in the world. And it's pretty close to the fifth- and sixth-most-populous, Pakistan and Brazil. So if the region with the most Lá Moé wasn't in Asia, Nigeria's got a pretty decent chance of randomly having the most.

I'm sure there's more to it than that (there are five countries with a higher population than Nigeria, two of which also have a higher population than the USA), but Nigeria's nearly 200 million residents are definitely part of the equation.
 
IC: Note that American propaganda about literally dragging and sweeping the entire continent to eliminate zombies is nonsensical.

If it was true , there wouldn't have been a need to do perimeter patrol or routine sweeps even now.

That ISNT to say they didn't do a dog and pony show about that, dispersing units up and down the continent, with all the supply problems that entails. It also ensured that units which ran into problems larger than expected suffered heavy losses.


Here in Malaysia and Singapore, the approach was much more measured. The twin Highways would form the MSR for the army, although opposition and lack of clean water supplies at Mersing halted the Eastern approach for a while.

The goal was simple. Rather than running convoys between settlements as per pre Liberation days, we would actively hunt and seek out Zack to kill. This means recon units, using drones, although k-9 units were always able to dig up concentrations that drones has missed.

We copied what the Americans transmitted from Hope. But things changed rapidly. The long ranges were impossible in the jungle . No, not even along the roads. It would take too much effort to prepare the positions needed to repeat Hope on a large scale. Hedgehog positions along the roads and lines of advances was set up. Recon would then set out to draw in Zack, killing as many as possible. If a position ever felt it was being overwhelmed by Zacks, they would pack up and move to the next.

Let me tell you. It was scary as shit, not knowing whether the dark figure coming in was Zack or human. There were friendly fire accidents, although we soon learnt the value of the hated reflective vests and a charged radio. My company took out 30 batteries, 3 battery bank, a generator and 6 120kw solar chargers on that FO. Despite the fully charged status back at base, it proved to be a lie and a storm meant both comns and power went dry. It concealed Zacks approaching and we were partially overrun.
God bless Captain Oh, he started firing tracers around a kilometer from the next position and then lit flares. Adrian then ran in, shouting his voice off and got the message that the flares would mark where the last man were, anything past was zombies.

I never figured out how Sarge Ong managed to start said fire with gasoline and a thunder flash but he did. This was WET jungle after a storm mind you. It should had been impossible for anything to burn. It gave enough light and direction for us to reach the next FO, while allowing them to target the chasing Zacks. All the PT we were forced to do was worth it, since a runner was human, not Zack. Don't stumble, don't pant, just keep jogging at the steady pace, don't flinch at the bullets flying past you, never, ever look back. That's what we learnt that day.

Ong did get shot by our own side, since a semi nude guy looked way too much like Zack but he survived. Every year now, we gather at his condo to have a barbecue, although his wife now insists we stop stripping him and throwing him into the pool .

But yeah. Hold and clear was our approach, with a company assigned to a village or town, which some WizKid back at HQ will then try to tie into the logistics network. The guys firing the guns got the glory but it was the drivers who saved the campaign. Driving day and night, bumrushing through flooded roads, fallen trees and the Zack attack disturbing any rest they might get. And at the end, human porters.... they brought in the food, water, ammo and batteries we needed to survive.

Hold and clear. We got everyone armed. Farmers were pleased, claiming that the policy of shotgun ownership was fully justified now. Bleh. Shotguns were useful against boars, but did next to nothing against Zack. What was needed was incendiaries, but we never had enough to give to the militias.


Every year now, we still send out patrols into the jungle. The Orang Laut... It's a tragedy. They knew. And most were lucky, at best a few Zack came upon their villages, easily beaten back. But the sight of villages with brown stains on the wall, bones on the ground and then the moan of Zack.... That was tough. They so... Rotten now they nothing more than vegetation. All those jokes about watching where you pissed, monsters in the trees and roots.... It's true now. I'm not afraid to say that yes, I pissed in my pants. You were already soaked, smelly, urine just didn't make a difference and it felt damn warm.
The doctors would tell us not to, to take better care of our hygiene but out there ......
 
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