I just finished Max Brooks’ novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. An astonishingly deep book with a silly premise, I’ve found myself laying awake at night pondering particular survival accounts and the geopolitical climate of this alternate reality. It’s a world that I find ridiculously easy to lose myself in, in the way that many people can endlessly debate the historical goings-on of Tolkein’s Middle Earth.
Some things I’m wondering: (SPOILERS INCOMING)
What’s the origin for the virus, anyway? Patient Zero seems to be a boy who was bitten in a river in China, but how did that zombie get there? Were there zombie wars in the past? How was the first zombie/virus created?
What the hell happened to North Korea? I can’t believe that any country has the resources to construct an underground world large enough to fit their entire population, especially one as poor as DPRK. Was everyone just purged and burned, with the lucky elite hunkering down in bunkers until it all blew over? Korea’s connected to China, so there’s no way they managed to effect a true quarantine.
Russia is now an expansionist theocracy with Kevorkian-priests. The book mentioned that they’d just annexed a former USSR republic and that their sights were now turned to Ukraine. Would they really just roll over like that? I guess I can buy it if Russia’s military was being used to cleanse them of Zach; the price of safety and all that…
Israel and Cuba seem to be the only countries that managed not to get a large percentage of their population infected. Cuba seems to be taking a very active leadership role in the new world order, but where’s the mention of Israel? At the very least, they’ve solved the problem of Palestine, as they managed to save the Palestinians at a time when no other country could even save itself. Will the Middle East experience peace for the first time, in, well, ever?
I love the way the zombies are still around in massive numbers, but mostly in inaccessible places like sewers, seabeds, frozen in the North, etc. Given how the militaries and societies of the world have been so altered to deal with the zombie threat, I can imagine them being fairly vigilant… for a while. Maybe 50, or even 100 years. But after that amount of time, standards will relax, memories will fade, but there will still probably be hundreds of thousands of Gs lying around. Is World War Z II inevitable?
God, I love this book, and I really really hope the movie version does it justice.
It’s always been around - in the Zombie Survival Guide (same universe) it’s mentioned that the virus was first seen in ancient Egypt. The Roman Empire refered to an outbreak as a “XXXVII”. See also: Archaeology of the Undead - Archaeology Magazine Archive
Who I really felt bad for were those left outside of the safety zone, so when the army started regaining ground, they didn’t want to go back to being in the United States. I can’t say I really blame them. The U.S. left them, for the right reasons, but they were still left.
I think the former U.S.S.R. states would rollover because they were probably hit really hard by the outbreak, especially the eastern European countries. They were sandwiched between two huge population hubs and when the Great Panic hit they were bombarded by both sides.
When the doctor phoned in the problem to the authorities who was, in this case, an old friend of his, they seem to have a basic idea of what’s going on already. Otherwise, why send in the govt. goon squad? So either they’d dealt with this problem before or were in the process of dealing with it.
It’s a mystery. They certainly don’t have the resources the support an above ground population let alone one underground.
I always assumed that the virus was let loose when that ancient temple of death was flooded by the construction of the three gorges dam. The virus has been around since the beginning of time apparently, one of the things i loved about the survival guide were the ancient history zombie outbreak tales (like the fact that ancient Egyptians removed the brain on their mummy’s to prevent zombification). What i really wanted to hear about were stories from the Hero City, i was dissapointed the book ended without a single New York survivor story.
Huh. Missed that. Well, it’s been a while. I was figuring, the entire city’s disarmed, there’s dead in surprising places, and people are packed in like sandwiches. I figured there was just no way to get anyone who survived out.
In the Zombie Survival Guide recorded outbreaks section, there’s a story about the Japanese trying to use zombies as bio-weapons during WWII. These zombies make their way to Russia, who also experimented with them, and to China, who were implied to be experimenting with them. I always assumed that the start of the big outbreak was a government bio-weapons test gone wrong.
No, it’s being produced my (IIRC) Brad Pitt’s production company. I’d link to the imdb page, but it seems they changed the way things work over there and they don’t give out any details about movies in production unless you’ve got IMDB Pro.
Uhm, if that were the case, shouldn’t the zombies have been the true winners of WWII? It’s hard to imagine three countries fooling around with Zach and not having them escape and flood the world.
Well I think every country’s version of the Redeker Plan was different. The US seemed to have a slightly more humane version, in that the isolated “bait” outposts that were intentionally left out to draw Zach away from the Rocky Retreat did receive federal aid regularly. I’m not sure how long it lasted, but they got equipment and supplies airlifted in to help them survive. Perhaps part of the motivation was to make them hold out longer and keep Zach occupied longer, but the interviews conducted by Brooks made it clear that the Rockies Retreaters were seriously pulling for 'em, too. Unless they insisted on seceding, in which case they were brutally put down, WACO-style.
I guess when I think about it, the pre-war Russia scares the crap out of me, so it’s completely plausible that the post-WWZ Russia would have a grim determination to do what it felt it needed to do.
That was my read. That China created the virus as a bio-weapon, tried to bury it (quite literally) when it proved untenable, and then flooded the research/disposal site when making the 3 gorges dam. After that, some of their insufficiently incapacitated zombies got loose underwater and bit the “fishermen,” spurring the outbreak.