Can imagine that there is quite a few scientists doing that and put the updates in whatever is the big zombie research group and it's constantly updating and new research papers?
Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
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Alectai
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Yeah, if I recall correctly, Zombies do decompose through environmental circumstances, even if it's way slower than it should take, but there's no discernible microorganism that decomposes zombies because Solanum is 100% fatal to all life that it's introduced to, with reanimation only happening if it reaches the human brain before death
Yeah, if I recall correctly, Zombies do decompose through environmental circumstances, even if it's way slower than it should take, but there's no discernible microorganism that decomposes zombies because Solanum is 100% fatal to all life that it's introduced to, with reanimation only happening if it reaches the human brain before death
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I try not to think about the mechanics of how Solanum is supposed to work. It's bonkers to me that Brooks came up with the concept of a virus that works in a way that's borderline impossible and then has the gall to be like "but it's not anything supernatural or alien, it's just going to take some time to figure out"
Alectai
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It's because the idea of actual no shit Zombies is already fantasy land. Even the way they work is straight up "It basically creates a Perpetual Motion Engine through means we can't even begin to discern, and its only vulnerability is that the body itself will eventually decay to uselessness, but it's still technically alive until the brain is destroyed."
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Did Orson Scott Card receive one-tenth as much flak for insisting that his telepathic aliens, FTL communication, and Dr. Device weren't magic as Max Brooks did for doing the same about zombies? Because the sum total of those (and other soft-sci-fi tech in Ender's Game and the like) break the laws of physics way worse than Max Brooks's zombies, and I don't see anyone insisting that the formics are secretly demons or whatever.
hellgodsrus
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OSC was too busy receiving flak for being weird about women and children, and being a homophobic piece of shit
More seriously, Ender's Game and OSC's other works don't present themselves as A Gritty War Documentary (where the war happens to be against zombies), they say 'we're scifi, we're fiction, buy in'. It's about different premises and genres. Additionally, as I understand it, most of the IC 'it's supernatural' stuff is partly, well, the fact that the zombies don't make biological sense and of course survivors would have different explanations as to why. The idea it's some kind of uneven conspiracy by the Evul Forum Users seems very silly.
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As Hellgod put above me, OSC received a lot of Flak for a *lot* of things, including the fact that they had an entire planet socially and genetically engineered with crippling OCD for no real good reason.
But Ender's Game isn't a story about the Aliens, or the Little Doctors, or the FTL, they are set dressing that everyone lives with as facts of the setting.
The Zombies of WWZ get repeatedly and vigorously insisted that there is no magic shenanigans, that they exist purely through scientific means, and can be understood through the scientific process.
And in the next scene, they're shrugging off Artillery, walking across the ocean floor, not reacting to physical trauma, etc etc, and the Author expects us to just... assume that these are Totally Logical and Not Plot Fiat.
WWZ Zombies only obey rules so long as they serve the Author's own biases, while OSC (for as problematic as some of the elements of their story get,) obeys the rules of their own setting.
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OSC was too busy receiving flak for being weird about women and children, and being a homophobic piece of shit
Have you forgotten Max Brooks's brainworms so quickly? There are differences between Brooks's brainworms and Card's brainworms, of course, but it's the same principle.
Have you actually read Ender's Game? It's not presented as a documentary, of course, but it's very much a war story, not a goofy sci-fi tale. It focuses on officer training and (to a lesser extent) politics, but it's still a story about war.
As for the grit...well, children don't get eaten alive, but one child does murder other children. Also the formic genocide, that's kind of an important plot point. And there are plenty of references to other heavy topics, from prejudice to suicide.
In-character stuff is one thing. Out-of-character stuff is another. And plenty of the mockery of WWZ for daring to ask us to extend our suspension of disbelief to the existence of zombies is, explicitly, out-of-character.
Fuck off, I never implied anything evul or conspiratorial. No conspiracy or malice is necessary for a lot of people to share a bad take.
Ender's Game is as much a story about aliens and warships as World War Z is a story about zombies. Both are using their sci-fi premises as a vehicle to discuss warfare and society. There are plenty of differences (Card seems way less enthusiastic about warfare than Brooks), but their relationship between premise and narrative isn't that different.
I don't understand how this is distinct from Mazer Rackham insisting that humanity reverse engineered formic telepathy to create the ansible.
You could say the same thing about Orson Scott Card. "Oh, so in the first two wars they don't understand humans well enough to realize that killing individual drones could cause an incident, but by the end of the war they've somehow read Ender's mind well enough to make a whole giant playground thing out of his memories of that video game at Battle School?" A lot about the formics is arbitrary. A lot about Ender's Game in general is kinda arbitrary, if you're willing to pick at it—things that the genius kids can't figure out despite being geniuses, or how the Giant's Drink game was somehow invented on the fly, or that Ender Wiggin is so special that he does all sorts of basic things that no one has thought of before.
The things that Ender needs to do first, no one else has thought of. Formics work the way they need for OSC's thesis about warfare to make sense.
The difference is, to be blunt, that Card is a better writer than Brooks. (Also that Card recognizes wartime mass murder as a tragedy and gives it appropriate weight.) And that has nothing to do with the plausibility of the science-fantasy nonsense he built the plot on.
Strunkriidiisk
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This hostility is weird and uncalled for.
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This kind of misses the point.
Ender's Game and its successor stories are within the genre of science fiction, where two of the accepted genre conventions are (1) the secondary world of the story is significantly different from our world, widely removed from it in time, space, or both and (2) technologies that defy our conventional understanding of reality are possible.
World War Z breaks the first genre convention by placing itself very firmly in our world. This is not unprecedented for science fiction, but importantly, it then leans heavily on the reader's suspension of disbelief by practically taunting the reader with its interpretation of (2). The zombies are called out as being both extremely powerful and extremely vulnerable, and the narrative repeatedly insists that they don't violate our conventional understanding of reality, even as they clearly do.
Card did a lot of very questionable things, but he never had his characters get together and solemnly swear that the ansible was absolutely and unambiguously a normal thing that fits within the established scientific paradigm of the year he wrote the book. Brooks more or less did exactly that.
No, that's the problem; even in-character we have this dissonance where the characters and the narrative insist that "Zack" has supernatural abilities, while also insisting that "Zack" is not a supernatural creature.
It's a very specific and rather unusual thing for a writer to do, and there's a good reason most writers don't do it. In most settings, the guy who says "there must be a scientific explanation for this" about a clearly paranormal process, and who importantly does not admit that there must be unknown scientific principles at stake that would violate our current understanding, turns out to be wrong.
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You accused me of turning an observation about other people's WWZ opinions into a "conspiracy by the Evul Forum Users". What reaction did you expect? "Golly gee Mr. Strunkriidiisk! You sure got me there! There really isn't a difference between getting annoyed at fandom double standards and conspiracy theories!"
Because it's a zombie story. Sorry for dismissing the apparently-correct interpretation of the argument, but...zombies existing is kinda important for a zombie story? And pretty much every aspect of Brooks's zombies is just an explicitly-stated version of something that standard movie zombies do.
The exceptions are having zombies be functionally immune to artillery and such, but that seems less like something Brooks does with the zombies and more like Brooks not understanding how artillery works. Zombies being immune to overpressure is kinda irrelevant unless artillery actually kills humans via overpressure, you know?
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Again, the point of complaint is that Brooks does this in a lot of things. It's not just artillery in particular, it's more general. And that it's combined, specifically in Brooks' work, with a more outspoken assertion of "the zombies are totally obeying our understanding of science" when they are really, really not.
If Card had had his character stop and metaphorically address the fourth wall by saying "the ansible is totally, totally scientifically plausible and could exist within a 20th century understanding of science," it would definitely have seemed weird. People would criticize his work on these grounds.
The reason Card dodged this bullet is that Card was familiar with the way science fiction normally introduces 'gimmick' technologies that violate our real-world understanding of science, and used the methods previous science fiction authors had pioneered. Most importantly, he followed the paradigm of "have a gadget that does X, and then let the logical implications unfold." All you need to know about the ansible is that it enables real-time communications across interstellar distances, and then you can just chillax and let things go. The ansible doesn't arbitrarily start working and stop working.
By contrast, zombies do stop and then start being immune to forces that would structurally wreck their bodies, depending on what mechanism is delivering this force. This means the reader is more repetitively exposed to the ways in which the story's premise deviates from known reality, which in turn undermines suspension of disbelief, which is a valid point of criticism.
Strunkriidiisk
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First off: that wasn't me, you're angry at someone else.
Second, the original statement could not have been more clearly not about you. You took a general statement about in-universe conspiracy theories, decided for some reason it was criticism directed at you, and got mad about it.
Chill the hell out.
Mazeka
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@Coyote Niff, quick question: How many boomer submarines would the UAI have at Naval Base Guam?
@Coyote Niff, quick question: How many boomer submarines would the UAI have at Naval Base Guam?
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it's pretty standard for zombies to be explicitly supernatural? Like night of the living dead only offers the hell is full explanation. Mysterious viruses are a later part of the genre and honestly usually flimsy.
(You can say there's nothing supernatural in resident evil but then I'd eat a pill that generates mass from nothing and erupt in tentacles at you, etc.)
(You can say there's nothing supernatural in resident evil but then I'd eat a pill that generates mass from nothing and erupt in tentacles at you, etc.)
Kadmus
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There's a difference between in-universe supernatural and out-of-universe supernatural; the RE universe is just Like That, and so although the zombies are, to us, highly magical, within the RE world they're explicitly not.
Whereas the WWZ zombies are kinda in-universe supernatural, it's just sorta talked around because Brooks doesn't actually care about the zombie bit. Which is fair, because zombies are almost always the least interesting and least engaging part of any zombie fiction, being basically malicious weather at best.
Whereas the WWZ zombies are kinda in-universe supernatural, it's just sorta talked around because Brooks doesn't actually care about the zombie bit. Which is fair, because zombies are almost always the least interesting and least engaging part of any zombie fiction, being basically malicious weather at best.
Coyote Niff
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Shit, that's a great question-I initially had no idea! I'm working off personal information and a lot of research for the way the Islands got all their military tech; much of it's (obviously) old USAF gear and I imagined their nuclear deterrent being air-based; B-1s and 2s are meant for SAC work. Per public info, Guam has four 688i's (Los Angeles), but those aren't boomers, so I'd say two of those made it to home port during the panic and the rest made for Hawaii-it's not much of an ideological split if the vast majority of forces stick around, after all ;-p
Speaking more seriously about scientific zombies, I don't think it really, like, matters if they're plausible?
The purpose of establishing them as a scientific explainable phenomenon is, essentially, restricting the narrative space. This way, you don't need to ponder if hell is real, if pop culture Voodoo actually works, if the planet is alive and wants us dead or any other possibility introduced by the existence of supernatural. The mystery of zombie origin has an answer, it has been answered, and so it can be put into a box in favor of other things.
And I don't think it necessarily a wrong approach. The kind of story WWZ wants to be, the epic tale of surviving a grand disaster and rebuilding afterwards, is not one that requires or possibly would benefit from introduction of the supernatural or even leaving the origin of zombies an open question. They're unrealistic, yeah, and contradict the presumed reality of the setting, but so are space ships making noise in space, and only boring pedants care about those. Ultimately, it is a valid choice for the story to say, it's science, deal with it, when it serves a narrative purpose, and I think it does in this case.
I feel people are attacking the concept of scientific zombies because their properties are carefully selected to enable a very specific vision of zombie warfare by the author, with artillery immunity and all that. Which is nothing new, half of Star Trek aliens are designed as walking parables about whatever social ills the authors wanted to talk that episode (half-black half-white racist aliens, anyone?), but given the author's particular brainbugs and the thread's general aversion to them, there is an understandable desire to demolish every setting element that supports them.
Basically, deriding zombies as unscientific is an easy vector of attack on the work's ideology without actually talking about the ideology, which is encouraged by both this thread conception as in-universe communication and the general fandom sensibilities.
The purpose of establishing them as a scientific explainable phenomenon is, essentially, restricting the narrative space. This way, you don't need to ponder if hell is real, if pop culture Voodoo actually works, if the planet is alive and wants us dead or any other possibility introduced by the existence of supernatural. The mystery of zombie origin has an answer, it has been answered, and so it can be put into a box in favor of other things.
And I don't think it necessarily a wrong approach. The kind of story WWZ wants to be, the epic tale of surviving a grand disaster and rebuilding afterwards, is not one that requires or possibly would benefit from introduction of the supernatural or even leaving the origin of zombies an open question. They're unrealistic, yeah, and contradict the presumed reality of the setting, but so are space ships making noise in space, and only boring pedants care about those. Ultimately, it is a valid choice for the story to say, it's science, deal with it, when it serves a narrative purpose, and I think it does in this case.
I feel people are attacking the concept of scientific zombies because their properties are carefully selected to enable a very specific vision of zombie warfare by the author, with artillery immunity and all that. Which is nothing new, half of Star Trek aliens are designed as walking parables about whatever social ills the authors wanted to talk that episode (half-black half-white racist aliens, anyone?), but given the author's particular brainbugs and the thread's general aversion to them, there is an understandable desire to demolish every setting element that supports them.
Basically, deriding zombies as unscientific is an easy vector of attack on the work's ideology without actually talking about the ideology, which is encouraged by both this thread conception as in-universe communication and the general fandom sensibilities.
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To be fair, World War Z's ideology (advanced technology bad, Old Ways good; freewheeling consumer society bad, regimented authoritarian society that abandons tens of millions of its own people to 'save' the rest good) has a very, very punchable face.
The zombies that exist to validate that ideology are, of necessity, unusually contorted zombies.
The zombies that exist to validate that ideology are, of necessity, unusually contorted zombies.
Strunkriidiisk
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To be fair (ew) one of the main bits of weirdness about the zombies in WWZ basically exists to enable the ability to have zombies at all - if they weren't mostly immune to decay they'd fall apart within weeks (tearing themselves apart from mechanical strain, literally being eaten 'alive' by scavengers).
SemiSaneAuthor
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OOC: I mean, didn't Brooks write a short story about Vampires in a Zombie setting?
Going with the notion of, "The US goverment in World War Z is actually a puppet state of a vampiric conspiracy, vampires who deny the supernatural so they can run around in the background," as a thing? Could also be an interpretation. Namely the Supernatural exists and it's still hiding and coming up with bullshit about Zombies being, "SCIENCE!"
Going with the notion of, "The US goverment in World War Z is actually a puppet state of a vampiric conspiracy, vampires who deny the supernatural so they can run around in the background," as a thing? Could also be an interpretation. Namely the Supernatural exists and it's still hiding and coming up with bullshit about Zombies being, "SCIENCE!"
Ben Who Devours
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I think it became a whole comic series actually, though I'm getting that info second hand.
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The immunity to decay probably wouldn't draw much attention in and of itself as the highly selective immunity to structural damage. Which ties into the exact way that Brooks zombies 'force' the plot towards Brooks' political message.
It's the immunity to structural damage that does so much heavy lifting in making them a force of nature that mandates the "new high-tech artillery shells and napalm bad, old bolt-action-with-wood-furniture good" paradigm. Since they can basically only be killed by Hard Men Shooting Them In The Head (While Hard). Not by, say, explosions turning their brains to jelly, or fire physically destroying their bodies.
And this, furthermore, this in turn does a lot to force the "new egalitarian societies with every citizen mattering bad, old authoritarian systems that consign tens of millions to suffer and die good" option, because it ensures both that the old governments suffer terrible crisis 'forcing' Redeker Plans, and that the new governments will 'uncompromisingly' shoot their way back across the continent with big armies of Hard (TM) light infantry who will also be shooting the "lame-O's" and of course "feral bulls" they meet along the way.
It's been a long time since I read the book, but IIRC they were engineered as supergeniuses with an easily exploited crippling flaw so that they could be used but not take over, and then the flaw was mythologized into a religion so that they wouldn't try to fix themselves. Whether that's a good reason or not is, of course, subjective, but it is at least internally consistent.
Unlike the zombies in WWZ - to abruptly pull myself back on topic - who are only vulnerable to physical trauma when the plot says so. They're immune to decay because even bacteria die when they try to take a nibble? Sure, I can buy that from a sci-fi virus. They generate energy ex nihilo so they can still move years after they last ate someone? It's zombie fiction, that's just genre conventions. They can only be killed by a shot to the head, nevermind that bombs would trivially inflict the same kind of trauma? Now we're entering "this is bullshit" territory.
Like, there absolutely are ways to do that. If they're magic then you can say that it's really a person's force of will that kills them and the bullet or sword or shovel is just the delivery method; in that case, a bomb is too many degrees removed, too impersonal, to actually work.
What you can't do is have everyone in universe and out of universe say that this is a completely legitimate non-supernatural event and then expect it to be taken seriously.
To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with the zombies being designed to support the message the author is trying to send. In fact, I prefer that as opposed to just saying "generic zombies, let's go" because bespoke zombies implies that the author put some thought into it. It's just that in this case the worldbuilding is colliding with itself; you can't have everyone strongly insisting that a blatantly magical virus - above and beyond that which is required for genre conventions - is completely natural.