World War Z
“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War. Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event.
Stats for nerds
27recommend
60mentions
56people
2009–2026years
47% recommend48% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- That’s true, your comment reminded me of The Electric State which maybe 50 pages of drawings with descriptions and the trailer for the movie was unintentionally funny to me like it was a parody and World War Z where I loved the short action packed book which seemed like an easy translation but I was so wrong.
- You haven't read World War Z! Zombies don't need to swim, they just walk on river and ocean bottoms. When there's billions of them, a few will make it anywhere.
- I remember this being the only part of that World War Z movie that I thought was interesting.
(I enjoyed the book quite a bit for its variety of stories and passion for zombies during a time when zombies were in a bit of a lull.)
- I very highly recommend World War Z the audiobook version. It's great, and IMO, much better than the movie.
- Or zombies ripping humans litterally apart. No idea where a dead body would take the strength from for that.
Take the living dead for example: From what I understood, it is the Wildfire virus that causes it, with everyone (I assume everyone who contracted it) turning upon death. As soon as people figure that out, every dead person is getting his brain stem severed. And there are not that many people dying, outside of war zones and such, for that to be a world ending problem.
28 days later, 28 weeks later is just bad, does mention that: when the rogue army officer states that the indected to build or tend fields, he rightly concludes that one can just wait until they starve or die of dehydration. Zombies should, unless one assumes some magic virus as in World War Z (the book, again), just rot away. Which posses another problem: how to deal with millions of contagious corpses lying around. Using the Black Death as a basis for how such things did play out in real life, would make for a really grim story. Of course, armed survivors scavanging the world has some more fun angles.
- > But if you train twice as many electricians, its not like there will be twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply.
I don't know that I agree with that, right now at least on the data I have available and the anecdata I have observed there is a serious shortage of skilled blue color work, plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc. so there is definitely a shift that would be beneficial for society at large and individuals.
But let's explore this idea a little bit more, right now we are used to the idea that there are X jobs for Y persons, especially in white color work. This seems to derive largely from the fact that white color work is focused not on production of goods and services but in the production of information (and to some extant bullsh*). For example there are only so many marketing jobs out there because there are only so much marketing a company needs done. Sure adding your first 3 marketers may increase your revenue by 50% but adding your 300th marketer probably isn't going to increase your income at all, in fact it's likely it might actually be a negative investment. The problem is the marketer doesn't actually add a resources to the world, they aren't producing marketing widgets, they merely identify and optimize existing distribution channels, and help others become aware of your company, and there is only so much you can do in that area, there is only so much inefficiency that can be optimized away.
Contrast this instead with a plumber. You hire your first plumber he can do say 5 jobs a day, if you hire 3 more plumbers you can do 20 jobs a day now. Well let's suppose later on you hire another plumber he still adds the value to do 5 more jobs a day. Now you may say that there are only so many plumbing jobs out there, only so many people have their 3 year old push a bouncy ball down the toilet, but the plumber is also working on new housing and new business, the plumber isn't just optimizing the existing pie they are causing the overall size of the pie itself to increase. Now there does of course exist some sort of maximum to this, but after reading World War Z that explores this concept in quite a bit of depth (and has no similarity to the movie at all) I've realized that if society did collapse I as a software engineer have absolutely no real or applicable skills, whereas an electrician or a carpenter, they will be able to keep on doing their job as they were now, because they are creating actual wealth, not just optimizing existing wealth generation activities.
My point being a society with an overabundance of electricians, carpenters and plumbers is probably better off than a society with an overabundance of project managers, paralegals, and risk analysts.
