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

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OoC:
GreatWyrmGold said:
None of World War Z's problems would be solved if it provided a pseudoscientific explanation for Solanum.
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The problem is that it *does*, and goes out of its way to harp about how you have to defeat the Zombie in a specific way that conveniently makes literally anything but the Author's Personal Favorite form of Combat useless.

The OP said that the Zombie Survival Guide isn't being treated as Canon mostly because it makes the entire story *worse*, becayse there should be no reason why things go the way they do when there exists mountains upon mountains of evidence of this shit happening through history, (and Not!Redeker being used by the Romans, which somehow makes anyone with access to the bluntly common sense info magically capable of fighting zombies effectively.)

WWZ is shit for many reasons, primarily because the quote unquote "Hand of the Author" is visible through the entire work.
 
NemoMarx said:
Imo it's the inverse - if wwz admitted that zombies were supernatural, immune to certain weapons, hell is full and the dead walk yada yada it would probably help the tone a little. It's treated like a scientific thriller basically because it suits the militarism stuff and let's brooks do that hand waved stuff with organ smuggling.
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I don't think the handwaved organ smuggling stuff is the problem. I think the problem is that he implied that China was distributing infected organs around the world, either as some kind of medical terrorism or just out of sheer incompetence.
And even if the handwaved organ smuggling itself bugs you, I don't see how it would bug you less if he spent more words explaining it.

If we're trying to autopsy the author, I think Brooks didn't do an overtly supernatural zombie apocalypse because he was riffing on a genre which is usually not overtly supernatural. Asking why Max Brooks didn't say hell is full and the dead walk is kinda like asking why Gene Roddenberry didn't say the Holodeck was powered by fairy dust.


InquisitionAI said:
OoC:

The problem is that it *does*, and goes out of its way to harp about how you have to defeat the Zombie in a specific way that conveniently makes literally anything but the Author's Personal Favorite form of Combat useless.

[-snip-]

WWZ is shit for many reasons, primarily because the quote unquote "Hand of the Author" is visible through the entire work.
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Point 1: Solanum is a handwave. People are complaining about how it's just a handwave, apparently thinking that Brooks should have tried to write a more scientifically plausible way for corpses to walk around.

Point 2: I agree that the problem is "Hand of the Author," but I don't think that explaining zombie mechanics more would help. At best, it would mean Brooks spends several more pages justifying why zombies need to be fought the way he thinks they should be fought. At worst, it does that and also highlights the contradictions in his anti-zombie strategies.

I agree that parts of the book are unrealistic in a way that is a problem. I agree that the least realistic part of WWZ is the Zombies. I do not think the zombies are unrealistic in a way that is a problem, and have no idea why some people think they are.
Or why they're ignoring my arguments in favor of pointing at problems that we both agree are problems.
 
veteranMortal said:
Finale

Article:
WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON, USA

More than anything, outside of America, most places saw the demise of individual homeowning, outside of places of profound rurality. We all live in apartments now, or houseshares.

And so yes. In that situation, you will, in point of fact, have a greater sense of community. It isn't what he meant but it is true.
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Article:

One factor you might not realise was how the post WW2 experiences "unified" America. The real reasons was much more prosaic than we fought in a war against Nazis and fascists of course. Mobilisation of armies, shared foods of hamburgers and etc, the rationing and etc was a touchstone of American cultural history and helped unify American politics after.

THis is clearly the Juanta attempt to redo said propaganda. And it might well work, albeit more along the lines of the UK where harsh rationing led to the society massed rejection of conservatism and embraced a better society post war. Afterall, what were we fighting for ?

All hopes that this turns out true, rather than the other.

[
Article:
TAOS, NEW MEXICO, USA

[The steaks are almost done. Arthur Sinclair flips the sizzling slabs, relishing the smoke.]

Of all the jobs I've done, being a money cop was best. When the new president asked me to step back into my role as SEC chairman, I practically kissed her on the spot.


Article:
Just trying to solve the surplus bill dilemma is enough for any administration. So much cash was scooped up after the war, in abandoned vaults, houses, on dead bodies. How do you tell those looters apart from the people who've actually kept their hard-earned greenbacks hidden, especially when records of ownership are about as rare as petroleum?


The American fetish for ownership here is crazy. Just let people have this money. More money being spent in your economy is good, actually, but they are so perpetually scared of people having more than they've "earnt" that they're deliberately stifling their own economic recovery.

Social mobility is one of the great promises of American capitalism, but also one of its greatest nightmares.

Hollow, evil country.
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Ah, you fallen into their trap. This isn't about the ownership of money. Even though much of it was digital, the American economy pre war had infinitely much more money chasing much more goods and services.

You simply cannot reintroduce that much money back into the economy without causing massive inflation and more likely than not, an abandonment of the monetised economy back to more primitive barter systems.

Which he denigrates as the Turnip economy (in reality, such economies are much more favor based than commodity based , hence why the capitalists want to crush them. )

The simple solution would be to abandon the old US dollar and mint a new currency. This has been the norm throughout history. However, do that and the old geezers who are such avid supporters of the regime may find themselves poor again.
That or they bankrupt the Juanta when converting their USD to the new dollar.

Hence this dilemma.
 
OoC:
GreatWyrmGold said:
Solanum is a handwave.
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The problem is that the Zombie Survival Guide, which is Canon to WWZ, spends multiple chapters in the First Section simultaneously discussing the scientific reality of the Zombies and the fact that this Zombie Virus (which it totally is because it Absolutely Has A Scientific Explanation,) defies all conventional understanding in exactly the way the Author Needs in order to prevent any possible usage of Conventional Tactics.

Left 4 Dead's Green Flu is Bullshit, but it doesn't make any pretentions otherwise in favor of giving you an actually enjoyable experience with enough Lore for you to actually immerse yourself into the setting.

TL;DR:
The issue isn't that it's a Handwave, it's that the Books consistently bring into focus the parts that stretch Suspension of Disbelief.

Which isn't necessarily *bad*, it's just that it's Yet More Garbage in an already Bad Book.
 
OldGlory76 said:
The Black Tide Rising series has a better example of how to write a zombie virus. They did it by making it a bioweapon that masqueraded as a more mundane infection in its initial stage.
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GreatWyrmGold said:
I've never read Black Tide Rising, but I believe you when I say that their explanation for the zombie virus made the story better.
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So, I looked this up:

Black Tide Rising Series by John Ringo

Under a Graveyard Sky (Black Tide Rising, #1), To Sail a Darkling Sea (Black Tide Rising, #2), Islands of Rage & Hope (Black Tide Rising, #3), Strands o...
www.goodreads.com
Apparently, Black Tide Rising is still an ongoing series. It's just that John Ringo either has a co-writer these days or lets other people write canon novels, like back when he was working on Legacy of the Aldenata and Looking Glass.
 
I'm pretty sure I remember some Brainworms and Gratuitous Ringo Shit in that series, though perhaps not as much as in other series/ the general norms of the zombie genre being more in line with some of his Gratuitous Ringo Shit.

Like the virus I think as part of driving its carriers rabid make them unable to bear the touch of clothes, which is both Oh Ringo No and also, making zombies less zombies and more like feral boogymen and prehistoric ghouls like I dunno I Am Legend's albino plague.
 
Alucard Bellsing said:
I have to say the comments made this thread so much more immersif, even got me a few times thinking they were real trivia.
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Well some of them were genuinely insightful. Too many were low effort RP that mostly repeated back whatever happened in the last posted chapter and broke character too often, but hey that's what threadmarks and reader mode's for you know?
 
InquisitionAI said:
The problem is that the Zombie Survival Guide, which is Canon to WWZ, spends multiple chapters in the First Section simultaneously discussing the scientific reality of the Zombies and the fact that this Zombie Virus (which it totally is because it Absolutely Has A Scientific Explanation,) defies all conventional understanding in exactly the way the Author Needs in order to prevent any possible usage of Conventional Tactics.
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I don't think this is a fair assessment of the source material.

On one hand, almost every way that Solanum defies conventional understanding matches genre conventions. Zombies function without food or drink or sleep, they eat human flesh anyways, they never run or tire, they look rotten without actually rotting away, et cetera.

On the other hand, none of this actually explains why zombies would be immune to getting blown up by artillery. Max Brooks assumes that artillery kills by overpressure and that overpressure only affects living organisms, apso ficto artillery does not affect unliving things. His zombie technobabble is completely irrelevant.

This is why I keep saying that more realistic or better-explained zombies would not fix any problem in WWZ. There is not a single problem in the problem caused by zombie mechanics alone, and none would be solved by only changing the zombie mechanics. Also, I can't think of any where changing the zombie mechanics is actually necessary to solve the problem.
 
GreatWyrmGold said:
This is why I keep saying that more realistic or better-explained zombies would not fix any problem in WWZ. There is not a single problem in the problem caused by zombie mechanics alone, and none would be solved by only changing the zombie mechanics.
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ZabetTheRabbit said:
It defo made me realize just how much, uh, let's call it ideology, is in this book.
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Bro was a terminally online autistic white guy in the 90s, he didn't stand a chance against the fuddlore and his own incompetence. This is the same time period that spawned some of the works of all time like Draka and Salvation War, after all.

The only thing coming for his brain are the worms.
 
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Tiny_Dic said:
Bro was a terminally online autistic white guy in the 90s, he didn't stand a chance against the fuddlore and his own incompetence. This is the same time period that spawned some of the works of all time like Draka and Salvation War, after all.

The only thing coming for his brain are the worms.
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Salvation War was a fanfic that emerged as a inside joke about humanity answer to Stravos question.


Namely, God tells us that Heaven is full and all of us, are going to hell. What will we do with the rest of our time ?

It was decided that one of the reply is most likely true. The bulk of humanity will be pissed off and try to rage against the Machine. The rest is inserting SDN pathos of Science and the Mockery of Stupid People, while inserting inside memes about nukes , TBO and etc.


People should read the even more insane "parody" of the Salvation War where Shrooms get to enjoy the full effects of drugs he on and mobilise bears to fight in Hell.

And a lot of people seem to have not read Salvation War, such as insisting that oh, Americans are spared from Uriel attack (Peso Texas is US soil last I checked ) or how Heaven was winning the Salvation War until Michael opened the Gates to Heaven so Michael could stage a coup.


The Jesus was watching Michael bit disappeared since ahem, "Ukrainian torrent fiasco" so the continued collaboration about Heaven occupation didn't come about.


HBO Rome being super popular also made it's way into the tropes, so now humanity is dealing with a Roman Empire led by Caesar, protected by the Ancient Gods who's intent on becoming the premier power both in Hell and on Earth and offering leadership roles to veterans who died in the Salvation war because of exposure to chemical weapons, toxic hell air or for Broomstick, being shot down early on in the war when it was still in Iraq.
 
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PainRack said:
Salvation War was a fanfic that emerged as a inside joke about humanity answer to Stravos question.

Namely, God tells us that Heaven is full and all of us, are going to hell. What will we do with the rest of our time ?

It was decided that one of the reply is most likely true. The bulk of humanity will be pissed off and try to rage against the Machine. The rest is inserting SDN pathos of Science and the Mockery of Stupid People, while inserting inside memes about nukes , TBO and etc.

People should read the even more insane "parody" of the Salvation War where Shrooms get to enjoy the full effects of drugs he on and mobilise bears to fight in Hell.
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Yeah. A big part of what kept it going, I think, was that it was kind of in this balance between:

1) The author and a few people around him being massively military-familiar nerds who knew the technology of the day fairly well.
2) A bunch of people being willfully goofy and just seeing the whole thing as kind of a meme-filled romp for personal amusement in a period when politics didn't feel quite as "play for keeps" for a lot of people on both sides, this being more like 2008-10 and less like 2016-24.
3) A bunch of online readers who honestly just liked the premise of "attack and dethrone God and Satan, in no particular order, via the power of early 21st century arsenals."

There were definitely brainworms, abso-frickin-lutely, and not only because a sizeable chunk of the creative energy came from Republicans. Though I haven't gone back and thought about it with my 2020s-era political consciousness because I really don't feel like it.

I think to some extent it's less political, in a way, than World War Z, because it's a more straightforwardly total war against an opponent that actually has a culture and ideology of its own- a brutally medieval culture and ideology, in both Hell and Heaven alike. A lot of the energy of the story is thus focused on exploding (literally and metaphorically) this brutally medieval way of life, which is in a perverse way borderline apolitical by 21st century standards because such a way of life is so foreign to our own.

By contrast, World War Z, insofar as it is about anything other than the spectacle of armies retaking a world half-overrun by zombies, is a commentary much more directly on our own society, its supposed strengths, and its supposed weaknesses. So it has a thesis of "the government we have is actually okay and needs to be overthrown and replaced by strongmen willing to write off some of their own citizens to Get Shit Done," for instance. There's... well, I can't recall much of anything like that in The Salvation War.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Yeah. A big part of what kept it going, I think, was that it was kind of in this balance between:

1) The author and a few people around him being massively military-familiar nerds who knew the technology of the day fairly well.
2) A bunch of people being willfully goofy and just seeing the whole thing as kind of a meme-filled romp for personal amusement in a period when politics didn't feel quite as "play for keeps" for a lot of people on both sides, this being more like 2008-10 and less like 2016-24.
3) A bunch of online readers who honestly just liked the premise of "attack and dethrone God and Satan, in no particular order, via the power of early 21st century arsenals."

There were definitely brainworms, abso-frickin-lutely, and not only because a sizeable chunk of the creative energy came from Republicans. Though I haven't gone back and thought about it with my 2020s-era political consciousness because I really don't feel like it.

I think to some extent it's less political, in a way, than World War Z, because it's a more straightforwardly total war against an opponent that actually has a culture and ideology of its own- a brutally medieval culture and ideology, in both Hell and Heaven alike. A lot of the energy of the story is thus focused on exploding (literally and metaphorically) this brutally medieval way of life, which is in a perverse way borderline apolitical by 21st century standards because such a way of life is so foreign to our own.

By contrast, World War Z, insofar as it is about anything other than the spectacle of armies retaking a world half-overrun by zombies, is a commentary much more directly on our own society, its supposed strengths, and its supposed weaknesses. So it has a thesis of "the government we have is actually okay and needs to be overthrown and replaced by strongmen willing to write off some of their own citizens to Get Shit Done," for instance. There's... well, I can't recall much of anything like that in The Salvation War.
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There's obviously political jabs, be itThe ABORTION debacle and then Ken Ham going end to Roe V Wade, Bush slapping him..... Yeah that definitely irritated some readers. Otherwise it was mainly "jokes" such as Bill recognising the succubus from hell and McDonald run, or Obama social programs being cancelled due to the Salvation War.


Otherwise, the main memes were about military and nukes. Be it nuking hell, nuking an entire legion of Angels or the Gray Lady (B52) creating a firestorm of explosives in hell that changed the existing weather.


WWZ tried actual political commentary, be it about the military reformers to Cuba, China and India/South Africa.

Things which could have been jokes in the Zombie Survival Guide became commentary and that's where it suffers. Whereas for Salvation, way too many people took it for commentary because Stuart was an asshole but the fanfic was always meant to be funny.
 
One difference was that if the author annoyed readers by tacking to the right (and he did)... It was an Internet forum. The readers could yell at him. Although I only interacted with the story on SDN, where that was, uh, a thing that might (and did) happen.
 
veteranMortal said:
Bearing in mind that these same people are maintaining the American suburbs that are inherently noxious towards any sense of community - and that's a feature, not a bug - and you realise just how much this is, like, a false concern they have? They don't give a shit about "community", they're just celebrating the ascendancy of this sort of curtain-twitching judgement of your neighbours.
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Other people in the thread here have pointed out that refusing to be "neighborly" is a self selection that used to REALLY increase your chances of get killed.

And the only people reliably talking about the "lost sense of community" around us? Junta hacks and their apologists.

It's similar to how before zombies came shambling along, many people had an idealized version of Levittown and the other 1950s suburbs. Completely overlooking the fact that while lots and lots of lower middle class families with Irish or Italian ancestry left tenements in cities to move there, families with browner skin were explicitly prevented from buying houses in these subdivisions.

veteranMortal said:
The American fetish for ownership here is crazy. Just let people have this money. More money being spent in your economy is good, actually, but they are so perpetually scared of people having more than they've "earnt" that they're deliberately stifling their own economic recovery.

Social mobility is one of the great promises of American capitalism, but also one of its greatest nightmares.
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One of the biggest pre zombie barriers to single payer health care was people receiving benefits they didn't "earn". Usually measured by melanin content. You can reliably map that translation out to a conversation about someone who has stacks of cash.

veteranMortal said:
AN: Jesus fucking Christ, I did it. It's taken a year and a bit, and I've repeatedly struggled with anxiety and writer's block, but I did it!
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OOC: Bravo, well done, and congratulations.
 
OOC: When I first read the book, something felt...off about it and I couldn't put it into words. This thread has done wonders in pointing out the flaws in a way I find coherent, so I thank you greatly.
 
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OOC: As someone who is somewhat sympathetic to some of the initial ideas in the proper dosage (I mean, lose all the eugenics and usefulness bull and Redeker is basically a decent consolidate and regroup plan), this was an excellent take @veteranMortal

You did a good job of giving the "OP," a voice which does make me wonder how much of you is in the character. And whether this was something that was growing in the back of your mind.
 
scorpio723 said:
(I mean, lose all the eugenics and usefulness bull and Redeker is basically a decent consolidate and regroup plan)
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The biggest weakness of the Redeker Plan is that it's being deployed against zombies. Every civilian you write off will be an enemy in the future. Possibly a zombie, possibly a citizen of a new polity furious that their leaders abandoned everyone in their hour of greatest need.

Also—and this may be veteranMortal's writeup distorting my recall of canon—it seems like a plan that works best when you can expect some form of outside aid. It's basically turning all-out war into one big siege, and sieges are generally won either by waiting for the attackers to run out of supplies (unlikely when those attackers are zombies) or waiting for a relief army (unlikely if the rest of the world is also bottling themselves up).
 
To make matters worse, insofar as it's not a horribly misapplied siege mentality ("fort up" when there is no external cavalry to save you and the attacker is biologically incapable of running out of supplies or energy or having to leave for some other reason)...

Well, the closest to a non-stupid justification for a Redeker Plan at the strategic level (or more generally, a strategy of 'trade land for time' plus 'consolidate in a defensible redoubt') is that you need to fall back and reorganize your fighting and productive forces into a form that is properly capable of taking the fight to the enemy. That kind of thinking isn't outright stupid if you're fighting an opponent who's beating you; there are echoes of this in Mao's writings on guerilla warfare, for instance.

The problem is again that the threat is zombies, and in particular Brooks zombies. The way you beat Brooks zombies isn't with some kind of specific special weapon it takes a lot of time to create. All kinds of different groups are doing all kinds of weird shit and seeing it work. Some groups aren't even using guns but supposedly are slaughtering zombies. No, the way you beat Brooks zombies is with badasses, and more generally by organizing large numbers of fighting people with large numbers of fairly simple weapons to just keep fighting, keep calm, stack bodies, and if necessary just... walk away. Or preferably drive away.

Letting large numbers of civilians get killed, in a conflict like this, is an incredibly bad idea. Because you're not waiting for the hoarded tank factories behind the Urals to build a mass of heavy equipment to drown the enemy in steel. You're trying to train warm bodies, and because you just abandoned half your country, many of those warm bodies are now cold, and groaning and out to eat your brains.

They may be disappointed at the size of the meal. :p

...

From a Watsonian perspective, it does make the most sense to handle it the way this Let's Read did.

From a Doylist perspective, I think it's the result of an attempt to rigidly hit the narrative beats of a classical zombie survivor story (survivors fort up until help arrives, having to make painful sacrifices and toughen up a lot to pull through), but on a scale where surviving that way becomes implausible.
 
Let's not forget that one aspect of the Redebeker plan is to KEEP those outposts alive, so that it "relieve" pressure on your main outposts.

It's very evil to subject civilians you abandon to those stresses, especially when you can easily have a barricaded skyscraper serve as a viable zombie base with enough prep time. (Keeping municipal water and power on will be the main problem ).
 
Framing Redekker as having originally been conceived as a way for the Apartheid government to maintain power in the face of a military uprising by the black population of South Africa just makes it even more ludicrous, really.

"Have the government retreat to the most defensible white majority area, and have them send supplies to other redoubts in other white majority areas, so they can hold in the face of non-whites mindlessly besieging like zombies." What a winning strategy.
 
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Geedubs said:
Framing Redekker as having originally been conceived as a way for the Apartheid government to maintain power in the face of a military uprising by the black population of South Africa just makes it even more ludicrous, really.

"Have the government retreat to the most defensible white majority area, and have them send supplies to other redoubts in other white majority areas, so they can hold in the face of non-whites mindlessly besieging like zombies." What a winning strategy.
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I think the implication is that in that scenario the apartheid government is using airstrikes against infrastructure and possibly nuclear or chemical weapons or something to cause mass death among everyone outside their enclaves. That half of such a plan breaks down against zombies, but it'd be a component against human enemies one badly underestimates.
 
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