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Did none of them read World War Z? Might be a good idea to see what happens when doomsday occurs with respect to secure compounds.

Speaking of which, I highly recommend World War Z by Max Brooks. It is a brilliant book and provides an amazing insight into human and society behaviour in time of crisis.

http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Oral-History-Zombie/dp/03073...

"World War Z" [1] -- the book, not the movie -- is based on the premise that people would work together to ultimately overcome the zombie plague. Notably, Max Brooks wrote "The Zombie Survival Guide" [2] before he wrote "World War Z".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zombie_Survival_Guide

Oh, I love some good world-building, and especially when there is a set of rules that's followed to their consequences. [Ayuc sums it up nicely in this comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9056594 ]

If you look at it this way, it CAN be done in fantasy. Check out Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker (a great one-off), or the Mistborn series. (There are quite a few similarities between them.)

Or Max Brooks' World War Z was great in this way, I think. Although it's been quite a while since I read that.

(I know this is an older thread, so I hope you'll find this comment. Made a HN account for this. :D )

My favourite books read lately are Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and Perrotta's Metaprogramming Ruby. If you haven't read Free by Chris Anderson, it's also highly recommended. It's just an article, but Anarconomy by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies was a very interesting read (http://www.cifs.dk/doc/medlemsrapporter/MR0309UK.pdf).

If you are willing to check out an audiobook, World War Z is truly an amazing book. Absolutely the best audiobook I have heard so far.

Enjoy your weeks off!

"Off to be the wizard" is pretty light and fun. "John dies at the end" was fun, not really sci-fi, more buffy the vampire slayer esque. "Existence" by David Brin made me want to puke it had so many good ideas. A tiny bit dated, but very smart. "The Martian" I expect you've read it. Good romp, easy to read. Reminded me of a Michael Crichton. "World War Z" was good.

The reader(s) can really make or break a book.

James Marsters reads the Dresden Files books and he is amazing. It really is a performance by a good actor and (IMHO) adds to the book. He does use "voices" for different characters and it works really well. Most other readers will try to do this has well. It can be hit or miss.

A really good ensemble book is World War Z by Max Brooks. The cast is incredible (Alan Alda, Martin Scorsese, Simon Pegg, and more)

With respect, The Expanse is fluffy and very average. World War Z is well structured but hardly amazing. Ancillary Justice is just... boring. The characters are awful given the excellent concept behind the book.

That said, I find Le Guin quite dull, though the characterisation is excellent.

In suspect we're in that ambiguous area in which people have different opinions but I do find it a little absurd to reference those three books in response to a comment which implicitly disses Vonnegut.

The book was so great, I have to read it again. The movie, so, well, it has nothing to do with the book, does it?

The book is also the only zombie fiction that really covers, somewhat realistically, the period between case zero and the break down of society. All other shows just show the early outbreak and then jump right into the post apocalyptic anarchy.

One good historical precedent to build this kind of fiction upon would be the Black Death in Europe. Good sources, real apocalyptic pandemic without counter measures. And yet society didn't completely disintegrate. World War Z is the only work I know of that comes close.

I read the book 'World War Z', and at the risk of ruining the book for someone, there was a statement near the end that really stuck with me. Some guy was reflecting on how they'd won, and he said 'Tell that to the whales', paraphrasing.

I cannot deal with the guilt of the loss of megafauna. I just can't. If justice only includes humanity, then it isn't justice. I feel as if I've reached this place using sound ethical logic, and I'm culpable for what we are doing to this planet. We are bacteria in a petri dish.

Okay, let me pull out some post-2005 fiction that does the same thing:

James S. A. Corey writes beautiful socio-political commentary in The Expanse series.

Max Brooks' World War Z was biting in its own special way, more (admittedly positive) social than political commentary.

Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice shows us a world where the only pronoun is "she", and what it might mean for a ship to love her crew.

There are lots of people who write social and political commentary through the vehicle of fiction. It has kind of been one of the defining features of fiction for all of its existence, no?

> Just read more. You'll get it eventually.

This is reasonable. I get that some things can't be communicated too well, and a lot of my favourites I could recommend only in the same way.

Why didn't the article simply begin and end with those two phrases?

By sheer coincidence I’ve been reading World War Z and it’s amazing how in the real world we’re making the same mistakes that countries in the book made against the zombies. Of course the situation is entirely different, but it’s interesting.

Why doesn’t the government actually just enforce rules? So many lockdowns, mandates and laws but so little enforcement, or the penalty is not commensurate with the risk. What’s the point?

+1 for "World War Z", the book, which I literally read at the beginning of the current pandemic, by pure coincidence. It was an eye opener, at least the parts about how the [zombie] pandemic began and spread, how people and governments reacted and so on.

However, I enjoyed the movie too, and I think it's one of the best in the genre. Although, admittedly it has very little in common with the book.

I recently read Max Brooks's World War Z and (a) even before Covid-19, he was able to lay out a plausible scenario of stupidity and selfishness that led to a global collapse and (2) as he's said in interviews [1] he couldn't have predicted how much dumber and selfish we would be in real life.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-c...

This is very like what happens in the book World War Z, which was probably inspired by government responses to SARS and other epidemics. A mysterious disease arises in China, and the government strongly censors reporting of outbreaks. This and other factors (people smuggling, illegal organ trade) contribute to its spread worldwide, and it is only when it cannot be contained that the world is aware and can start to understand and fight it.

Have you read World War Z? It covers that very question in great detail.

One problem it highlights is that modern armies and military tactics are incredibly inefficient. The amount of fuel, munitions and calories they use for every kill is staggering. Also much of modern military tactics are based around putting on a massive show of force up front and hoping the enemy surrenders or retreats. That is not a problem if you only have to kill a few thousand people who's spirit to fight can be broken, and you're backed up by a fully functional logistics network. Remove the logistics network and face off against an 'army' of hunderds of thousands of enemies that will never retreat then those tactics will quickly see your fuel and munition stores depleted.

Towards the end of the book the Army has reinvented the infantry square and equipped all their soldiers with bolt action rifles to stop them wasting ammo.

There are a really huge number of books around - it's unlikely that they'll all be destroyed, unless some doomsday cult starts burning every book they can find, so there would be a large amount of knowledge that could be recovered without much difficulty. The scientific method is a fairly easy thing to know; it doesn't seem likely that it's just going to vanish. Realistically, there would also be a lot of people hiding out in bunkers, mountain cabins, or other areas where the number of zombies would be more manageable. So, while a large amount of knowledge is going to vanish (anything computerized is going to be hard to access unless you have a generator), most of it won't be hard to recover unless you wait too long.

I highly encourage you to read World War Z (written by the same guy who wrote the Zombie Survival Guide); while it doesn't directly address most of those questions, you can read between the lines to find the answers. It is, admittedly, only a type 1 Apocalypse, by the TVTropes scale, but still.

"Into Thin Air" (Krakauer)
Journalist/Mountaineer account of an Everest expedition gone wrong. Read it, ponder, but know that there is some controversy. Very interesting look into expedition dynamics.

"Mountains Beyond Mountains" (Kidder)
An account of Paul Farmer's work in Haiti, and later in other parts of the world. If you are interested in public health it is a great read, and may provide a fresh angle on recent Haiti <-> world politics.

"Three Cups of Tea" (Oliver, I think)
Greg Mortensen starts building schools in Pakistan / Afghanistan. Adventure ensues. There's some definite political bias here but it's worth a read.

Fun summer read: "World War Z".

Unrelated, I use Shelfari [http://www.shelfari.com/] to organize my books-to-read, if you need an organization tool.

The novel "World War Z" basically touches on this resemblance. The author seems to have read lots of information about what real humans due when plagues and diseases strike and how human society reacts, and then transposed it to zombie apocalypse, which gives it a strange kind of authenticity.

The book wasn't very film-able, so the movie they made from it was quite different in approach.

I've also heard there's a non-fiction book about the "Spanish flu" outbreak that basically reads like a zombie film (e.g. one interesting tidbit, they call it the Spanish Flu because that is where the first reported cases were, but it didn't start there, the other countries just suppressed the information because they were at war)

I did have a day in there where I was left alone with the book for about 6 hours. How much can you read in 6 relatively uninterrupted hours?

The novels I'm talking about are about 300 pages in paperback. The reading level is not Peanuts, but it's also not Shakespeare.

By comparison, I read the World War Z book over the course of about a week, in bits. I found it very boring and wooden though. Motivation makes a big difference.