World War Z

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
© 2006 Max Brooks
352 pages

Reading Night of the Living Trekkies put me in the mood for more weird fiction, and World War Z fits the bill!  Fictional, but not a novel, it presents itself as an 'oral history' of the great zombie war -- one that began as a medical crisis before metastasizing into a global struggle to survive.

 The writing is clever;  this isn't the retelling of an action novel, but a depiction of global society  reeling under the threat and changing to take on new circumstances.  Early on we see nation-states struggling under waves of refugees, the stresses producing conventional warfare. As the epidemic morphs into a war,  we are with the soldiers and generals who realize how poorly suited modern warfare is to fighting the undead.   Zombie hordes have no supply lines to guard, no officers who can be shot,  and no problem replacing fallen comrades: every enemy they kill reanimates to fight for the horde.  Destroying their bodies merely slows them down; death necessitates headshots or decapitations.    The author has a good handle on how diverse the human race is;  the plague has different names throughout the globe, depending on how it was first discovered.  This can lead to tragedy;  one name for it, "African rabies", lead people to think that rabies  inoculations would keep them safe.

 Responses to the threat vary by nation; some survive, some vanish, and some -- Cuba, incredibly -- thrive.  The author also create some sense of the psychological toll the war is having on people, through the creation of 'quisling's, humans who pretend to be zombies. It's not simply a matter of playing possum; they actively live as the undead, even trying to eat people.  Civilization doesn't collapse completely; although strategic retreats abandon much of the planet, castles and strongholds provide safer areas where abandoned material can be refashioned into tools for war. The war has a strange combination of modern and medieval;  airplanes are used only for  supplies and recon, and melee combat returns in a big way.  The American infantry's favored melee weapon is a combination spade and axe, the Lobo.

With characters from across the planet, and a similarly diverse set of pondered topics, World War Z  must be the most intelligent zombie fiction out there!

Night of the Living Trekkies

Night of the Living Trekkies
© 2010 Kevin David Anderson
256 pages

Braaaains and braaaains, what is braaaaiiins?!

Oh, reader, good times ahead.  When Jim Pike returned from Afghanistan as a psychologically scarred veteran, the last thing he wanted was responsibility. That's the reason he took a lowly job at a hotel as a bellhop; lives weren't on the line. Too bad his hotel and the entire Houston area are ground zero for an zombie epidemic -- one that erupts most dramatically at a Star Trek convention. To protect his sister, Jim will fight side by side with a squad of redshirts, saving Princess Leia in the meantime. Night of the Living Trekkies is a glorious parody of both zombie fiction and Star Trek, grounding its invasion of the undead in science fiction. Its reanimated corpses are under the control of an invasive alien parasite, not a necromancer's spell, but the attraction here is not the zombies or the action, but the humor.  This is a novel saturated with Trek references; every chapter  heading is drawn from the shows' bank of episode titles, and virtually all of the characters are Trekkies who constantly argue about the shows -- about whether the Animated Series is canon, for instance. Gloriously, though, the authors also have the chutzpah to include a character dressed as Princess Leia, who (as a running joke) 'unwittingly' drops lines from Star Wars in stressful situations.   ("Some rescue! When you came in here, didn't you have any plan for getting out?!") It takes chutzpah to mix Star Wars references into a Trek book, but I thought it succeeded marvelously.  This being a zombie novel, naturally there's a body count....but even that becomes funny when so many corpses are wearing red shirts.  Similarly appropriate are the zombies still dressed as Borg, whose shamble lacks only the Borg clacking and whirring to be authentic.  I purchased this on vacation and it made my night.

Seriously the most fun I've had with a book this year.

This week at the library: the cosmos, Jane Austen, zombies, and the Middle Way

-- Minireviews -- 

Some zombies like to lurch about groaning for brains. Some zombies like to ride the escalators, listen to Frank Sinatra, and daydream about their past life. That's R,  a zombie who has forgotten most of his life, even most of his name.  R is of the mobile damned shambling around a ruined Earth, living in a hive of the undead in an abandoned airport. He sometimes goes into the remains of civilization to find someone to nibble on. Brains are especially fun, because eating them allows the diner to experience the memories of the dined-upon. It adds a bit of color to the zombies' dreary, grey not-lives. But when one young man dies saving his girlfriend's life and R munches down on his memories of growing up with her, R unexpectedly develops a crush -- and instead of turning her into a second course, he totes her home and hides her from his moribund brethren.  Such is the beginning of Warm Bodies, a novel of the living and the damned, and the bridge between them.  I checked it out not because I like zombies, but because a friend of mine -- a mature, knows-how-to-manage-her-time-well friend -- stayed up all night reading it. While the premise intrigued me, the humor and earnestness of a zombie yearning for more, even love, snookered me completely. I read it in one sitting, as it's the kind of novel that doesn't let you go away: it continues to rise in intensity until the very end.

                                                             

With Warm Bodies out of the way, you know now that the title does not refer to my reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies again. My Jane Austen reference was to The Jane Austen Book Club, a novel  which covers the stories of five women and one man who get together once a month and discuss a given Jane Austen novel, each taking it in turn to host. As a guy who has read Pride and Prejudice, I thought it might be fun to see another fellow go through it. His responses aren't all that remarkable. I hate to admit it, but this is the rare instance wherein a book doesn't compare favorably to its movie  Admittedly, I saw the movie before reading the book, and in fact read the book after finding out it was the source for a money I thought hilarious. (The Austen-reading man is developed far better in the movie: he's a riot: I screamed in laughter at the faces of the women as he, an SF buff, tried to compare the plot of an Austen title with the development relationship of Luke and Leia through the original Star Wars trilogy.  Great movie, all-right book: I might have enjoyed it better had I actually read more than one Austen novel. It made me feel guilty, actually..

I also read Buddhism without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor, which wasn't as ferociously compelling as I thought it might be, possibly because I've taken Buddhism's extrareligious applicability for granted for a few years now.  Batchelor treats Buddhism as a practice in response to certain realities, and invites readers on meditations to cultivate a sense of compassion within them. Batchelor's philosophical explanations sometimes seemed like vague esoterica (the chapter on emptiness, for instance), others were eye-opening, like the section on no-self. He compared us to clay spinning on a wheel:  the thing that emerges is the result of a lot of actions acting in concert: the constituency of the clay, the pressure, the wheel; there is no ideal Pot that will suddenly materialize there. The same is true for us: there is no ideal Self floating around inside us, or out in the ether: we as beings are being constantly created by drives internal and external.

And on a final note, a book I need to re-read because it's been a few months since I finished it:  The Universe Within reveals the profound connectivity of the universe, exploring the ways our biology has been shaped by astrophysics and geology. But it's not actually about us: his account demonstrates how all of nature is bound together in cycles -- water evaporating into the air, then returning as rain; sea crust being formed at ridges, and dissolved again in volcanic explosions --  and how no field of science can exist without connection to another. A rock can tell you about physics, chemistry, and biology.  Had the book been about the interconnectedness of the sciences, it would have been a triumph. It's supposed to be about how these processes have shaped human beings, though, and the human connection is added in only tangentially at the end.

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Today I also received two books through interlibrary loan: Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which examines human-plant coevolution, and Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte.  I'm looking forward to both:  Pollan is a weird author in that I'll finish his books regarding them too problematic to recommend, and yet I never stop thinking about them. Neither The Omnivore's Dilemma nor In Defense of Food are never far from my mind.

Look for more food books as the spring matures!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
© 2009  Seth Grahame-Smith
319 pages

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the old story of girl meets boy, girl declares boy to be Worst Man in the World and humiliates him, girl and boy fight off horde of drones from hell together and decide the other's alright after all. And there's dancing, lots of dancing.

Hearing about this book some many months ago scandalized me at first. The idea of modern people, taking a Classic and sullying it with their infantile obsession with monsters and sparking vampires! -- and yet after I read the  Classic, the idea of Elizabeth Bennet dispatching zombies with a musket was too good to pass up. (It was a bit silly of me to defend the honor of a book I hadn't read, anyway.) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in a word, hilarious, largely because the author has managed to take most of Austen's text and set it against a completely bizarre background, one in which England is suffering under a prolonged plague of zombies.  The dead refuse to stay properly buried, and insist on shambling around trying to nibble on people's heads -- and being bitten can cause the transformation of the living into the undead.  In this world, families who can afford it send their sons and daughters to the East to learn martial arts, and children spend their time learning musketry instead of the pianoforte.


The woes of Mother Bennet in trying to marry off each of her five daughters are now complicated by the fact that every trip into the countryside between homes is perilous  attacks on  carriages by zombie bands are common, and solitary travelers are suicides. It's not as if she's rich enough to support a security force of ninjas, not like Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Those who have seen the Leonardo de Caprio version of Romeo and Juliet may have been amused, as was I, by the combination of Shakespearean language and modern scenery, wherein the Capulets and Montagues fight not with swords in a plaza, but with pistols at a gas station.  That kind of contradiction is here: the archness of Austen's writing and the dignity of her characters stand against the absurdity of zombies and ninjas. For the most part, Grahame-Smith makes subtle adjustments: Mr. Bennet is cleaning his musket while Mrs. Bennet prattles on, Mr. Darcy admires Elizabeth's martial poses rather than her piano playing, and so on. He also adds to the plot; characters in general are much more aggressive here, with Mr. Bennet and Darcy both threatening violence against chatterbox women who won't leave them alone.  Some alterations are more substantial, like the fates of Charlotte, Mr. Collins, Lydia, and Wickham. At its best,  the tension between Austen and Grahame-Smith is wildly funny, as when a ball is interrupted by a zombie attack and Elizabeth's impulsive plan to follow Darcy outside and kill him for insulting her (it's the warrior code, doncha know) falls apart.  Other times, it's a bit too absurd.The Bennet sisters being warriors, renown for their expertise in slaying the walking damned, that's hilarious -- ("Girls! Pentagram of Death!"). But ninjas? That's just silly. At its worst, Graham's brief additions can be gratuitously vulgar:  one character becomes lame and incontinent in the course of the story, and the humiliation of their constantly soiling themselves becomes a running joke for the final third of the novel -- a tasteless display which dampened even my enjoyment of the Epic Duel between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth.

I would have like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a lot more were it not for the toilet humor.  The zombie plague almost makes the book like a western, with lots of action and the wilderness being a dangerous, hostile place.  Unlike in the original novel, here the blue-blooded characters have use: they're not sitting around gossiping, they're out defending the realm against the 'sorry stricken'. And the invisible 'other' characters, the legions of servants  and laborers who were nonexistent int the original, make quite a few appearances here. Usually they're beating eaten, but they're there.   I don't know that I'll be reading any more of the "Quirk Classic" series, but this is definitely a work I'll remember, and it met the yearning in me for more of Pride and Prejudice.