"I confess to being a latecomer to the World War Z craze—and indeed to the zombie craze, full stop. The Walking Dead, Professor Dan Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies, and now World War Z itself have put to rights this woeful shortfall in my literacy. Rather than read Max Brooks's book, I listened to it while meandering up and down the Narragansett Bay enroute to and from work. Lucky guess at the medium: it's doubtless good in print, but the recorded version is more old-style radio show than audiobook. Think War of the Worlds minus the creepy sound effects.
Indeed, Brooks accomplished the previously unthinkable: he drove Imus in the Morning off my car radio for the duration of the audiobook. The conceit behind Brooks's post-apocalyptic yarn is that a UN official is publishing his after-action interviews with protagonists in the zombie maelstrom. People you've heard of—Alan Alda, Jürgen Prochnow—play the parts of these eyewitnesses, delivering personal accounts of how humanity rides out a plague of ghouls, gets its act together to prosecute a new and macabre mode of warfare, and goes on to eventual victory. The chronicle alights in China, Cuba, Israel, North America, and many other quarters along the way. No region escapes this undead pandemic.
Like all good science fiction, World War Z is about people and societies, not space battles, or gee-whiz special effects, or even zombies. Those things provide spectacle, but they're basically just plot devices. Which is why classic sci-fi epics remain compelling despite their rudimentary special effects. If the characters are wooden, on the other hand, who really cares whether they win or lose yet another battle brought to you courtesy of CGI wizardry? Not I. What such devices do is let writers or filmmakers deposit human beings in strange settings or historical epochs, plunging them into a galaxy far, far away, or the age of Crom; impose stresses on them; and explore how they navigate—or fail to navigate—topsy-turvy surroundings…"
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Amicalement
Armand
sends a sci-fi platoon to Ukraine for painting.
