I recently revisited World War Z. I originally read this prior to the movie rights purchase by Brad Pitt. To say I was excited to see the movie was an understatement. I was so let down. The book is nothing like the movie. And I don’t mean on a small level like they cut a scene I really like. No, the movie was absolutely nothing like the movie. Where the movie was a typical zombie movie with an absurd ending that wasn’t in the books, the book was a masterclass in world-building.
World-building is something usually associated with high fantasy and futuristic Sci-Fi. One wouldn’t really think world building was something so intricate in a What If? type story. Max Brooks takes a often visited genre and reimagines it on a global scale. What if the zombie apocalypse happened and humanity survived. What would that look like? How would humanity overcome the zombie hordes? What would each nation’s individual response to the threat look like?
The book is told through interviews conducted with different people from multiple nations who retell the pertinent details of World War Z. It starts (after a forward by the interviewer explaining why he undertook this project) with an interview of a Chinese doctor who discovered patient zero. Told in a chronological order, the interviews cover the first cases, the world’s discovery and reaction to the presence of zombies, the failed defense and retreat of humanity, the turning of the tide of war, and the lasting ramifications of a world pushed to the brink of extinction and recovering.
This isn’t a hero’s journey. There is not one protagonist and there are no significant stakes for the characters being interviewed. We know they survived World War Z. We don’t have much time to get to know each character and connect with them emotionally. What Max Brooks does is something every writer should take notice of.
Often times, when reading fantasy and Sci-Fi, there are elements of our world that are reintroduced to the world-building without much thought to why they exist in our world. The writers don’t factor in why they would exist in the fantasy world. For instance, the existence of technology. In a world where magic is real: people can be healed with spells, wars are fought with giant balls of fire, and great distances can be teleported, why would technology exist? War is a great catalyst for the invention, but if magic is inherently more powerful than current technology, why would people invest precious resources into creating something like gunpowder instead of trying to make more powerful magic? If magic is the weapon of war, would technology advance?
Max Brooks imagines a world taken from our own and critically thinks about each piece of the puzzle he is putting in place. He examines why the greatest war strategies to crush the opposition’s spirit would be absolutely useless against an opponent with no fear. He examines current weaponry and whether it would be effective against an opponent that would only die from a headshot. He also imagines each country’s reaction to the zombie threat and how their political leadership, geologic location, and culture would effect the response.
If you’ve seen the movie, I suggest picking up the book so you can be equally disappointed in how Hollywood took something truly unique and turned it into a generic cash grab. World War Z would be a difficult movie to make, but it would have been better to have no movie, rather than one that was nothing like the book. One bright spot is the audio book. Each interviewee is voiced by a different person (usually an actor of merit or popularity) and I can just imagine how the movie I imagined would have been.
Very good
Awesome