Just read WWZ

[Mr Bean]

CaptHawkeye do you even grasp how shall I say... ironic it is of you to bash a book you've not even read?
Do you see me asking people to buy the book or touting it's virtues?
No?
Now don't you feel silly

For the record I am a supporter of World War Z the audio book which is a very entertaining listen, the book was contrived, lacking in research in places and interesting only in it's method of presentation. Something the audio book version(Read by a full cast) really lets shine through, but in book form just barely peaks out.

[CaptHawkeye]

CaptHawkeye do you even grasp how shall I say... ironic it is of you to bash a book you've not even read?

Bzzzt sorry. I've read some of the book's excerpts and it's not interesting at all. I've also been warned by friends, people with taste etc, that it's shit. Thus the logical conclusion is...I shouldn't waste my time? But no. Apparently, I am bad man for agreeing a largely typical book just makes the same typical storytelling stupids of every zombie movie before it? When the fans stop treating Z like it's some kind of huge quality shift in the genre maybe I wouldn't get annoyed at it.

Do you see me asking people to buy the book or touting it's virtues?
No?

I wouldn't give a shit if you were.

Now don't you feel silly

Ah-hyuk.

[Mr Bean]

Bzzzt sorry. I've read some of the book's excerpts and it's not interesting at all. I've also been warned by friends, people with taste etc, that it's shit. Thus the logical conclusion is...I shouldn't waste my time? But no. Apparently, I am bad man for agreeing a largely typical book just makes the same typical storytelling stupids of every zombie movie before it? When the fans stop treating Z like it's some kind of huge quality shift in the genre maybe I wouldn't get annoyed at it.

So your evidence from this from a purely debate prospective is that other people have told you it's crap and you've read excepts. Do you no grasp the simple concept that your doing the equivalent of what dozens of right wingers do everyday? Condemn that which they never read or don't understand?

Not to say you don't understand WWZ (This is not higher level science after all) but you freely admit you've not read the book, by excerpts I assume your read the back cover (Which is the standard in this Ann Coulter level criticism). And can conclude the book is under crap based that alone.

I wouldn't give a shit if you were.

Then why did you not more than two posts ago say

I'm amused Bean thinks anything in that description makes the book sound at all interesting. It's not like I have limited time and am not interested in head slamming my way through is obvious nerd-pandering shit.

Maybe if it was more technical and less wanktastic cautionary tale I might be interested but whoopslolzomgbbq it isn't. Of course, I wouldn't even give a shit about if nerds didn't act like zombies are some kind of revolution in horror and storytelling. WWZ is their bible. Hint: They're a story element about social change. Whoops there goes the genre.

If you did not give a shit why did you bother responding? To humor me? Hardly since you "don't give a shit"
No what you've done is come in post criticism on book you've not read on issues that were covered... in the book.

Feel free to give in now

Now don't you feel silly

Ah-hyuk.

Indeed

[Samuel]

Fine. I read it and I support his position.

[weemadando]

I haven't read WWZ, but I have read the Zombie Survival Guide which is the predecessor this book and is also filled with painful, pandering, shitty advice. Which makes me in no way confident that WWZ would be any good. Especially combined with the released excerpts, audio-book snippets and website guff I've seen and heard and the overwhelmingly negative feedback from people.

And I don't want more stupid fucking "magic" zombies which defy just about every law of physics and nature.

[ray245]

I haven't read WWZ, but I have read the Zombie Survival Guide which is the predecessor this book and is also filled with painful, pandering, shitty advice. Which makes me in no way confident that WWZ would be any good. Especially combined with the released excerpts, audio-book snippets and website guff I've seen and heard and the overwhelmingly negative feedback from people.

And I don't want more stupid fucking "magic" zombies which defy just about every law of physics and nature.

Why do people treating WWZ as science fiction then?

[CaptHawkeye]

So your evidence from this from a purely debate prospective is that other people have told you it's crap and you've read excepts. Do you no grasp the simple concept that your doing the equivalent of what dozens of right wingers do everyday? Condemn that which they never read or don't understand?

This isn't politics dumbshit. This is us talking about a shitty book being shitty because it does nothing to seperate itself from everything that's come before it. My evidence? The fact that everyone not you has told me it's shit. If you think i'm going to get into a point-by-point debate over the book's strategy then that's hilarious. It's not like i've been repeatedly pointing out I only consider Z a symptom of the entire horror/thriller genre these days.

Not to say you don't understand WWZ (This is not higher level science after all) but you freely admit you've not read the book, by excerpts I assume your read the back cover (Which is the standard in this Ann Coulter level criticism). And can conclude the book is under crap based that alone.

Yeah I can conclude that, because amazingly, intelligent people with taste have cleanly pointed out on more than one occasion that the books sucks and provided specific reasons why it does. Why you keep thinking I need to conduct a serious investigation into this book before I conclude it would be awful is just awesome. I can't imagine what had to disconnect in your mind for that to make sense.

Then why did you not more than two posts ago say

I'm amused Bean thinks anything in that description makes the book sound at all interesting. It's not like I have limited time and am not interested in head slamming my way through is obvious nerd-pandering shit.

Actually that's exactly what I said in that post. Thanks for doing the quote work for me though.

[weemadando]

I haven't read WWZ, but I have read the Zombie Survival Guide which is the predecessor this book and is also filled with painful, pandering, shitty advice. Which makes me in no way confident that WWZ would be any good. Especially combined with the released excerpts, audio-book snippets and website guff I've seen and heard and the overwhelmingly negative feedback from people.

And I don't want more stupid fucking "magic" zombies which defy just about every law of physics and nature.

Why do people treating WWZ as science fiction then?

I don't fucking know. Ask the person who started this fucking thread.

[Samuel]

I haven't read WWZ, but I have read the Zombie Survival Guide which is the predecessor this book and is also filled with painful, pandering, shitty advice. Which makes me in no way confident that WWZ would be any good. Especially combined with the released excerpts, audio-book snippets and website guff I've seen and heard and the overwhelmingly negative feedback from people.

And I don't want more stupid fucking "magic" zombies which defy just about every law of physics and nature.

Why do people treating WWZ as science fiction then?

I don't fucking know. Ask the person who started this fucking thread.

You fool! He was doing it to point out the problems he saw with it

[Pulp Hero]

Yes, I was pointing out flaws. And yes, I know any zombie work is not going to be completely realistic (duh), but that is no excuse to tack stupid SoD breaking stuff onto the premise. Especially things like the Battle of Yonkers which could have still been lost by the humans, but written less stupid.

On a lighter note, the timing between Homer and the zombie attack always cracks me up.

[Ford Prefect]

A long time ago zombie movies were actually fun because it wasn't about shitty social commentary.

That's pretty amusing, given that the progenitor of the zombie apocalypse film, Night of the Living Dead, was social commentary. I Am Legend, one of the other highly influential pieces of fiction on the 'zombie genre' was also its own piece of social commentary. Obviously if you go back far enough you get stuff like White Zombie, but zombie films have been used for commentary or society and human nature since Things to Come.

[K. A. Pital]

Wait, did someone just refer to Yonkers as a "surprize zombie attack"? "Surprise zombie attack"? What's that? Zombies catching the military by surprise - people on foot gathered in the millions right ahead of the military and they couldn't observe it?

That's ridiculous. It just shows once again, Brooks has no clue about military. At all.

[Ford Prefect]

I have not read World War Z nor do I intend to, but I have read the survival guide by the same author, and I think I understand Brooks' actual problem. He takes zombies as being an end to themselves. Most zombie films do not actually treat the zombies as being antagonists, as such, Land of the Dead is the only one I've seen where the zombies are the 'enemy' and it was pretty goddamn terrible. I mean, blah blah blah, social commentary, but most of the time zombies are just a convenient method for putting a group of people in an unusual situation and seeing how they react to it. Even in fantasy stories zombies are rarely more than tools of an actual person with motives and so on. Comparitively, World War Z decides to cast lumbering, motiveless corpses as the antagonist.

[[R_H]]

EDIT: Also. America is pushed back to the west coast and its industry is basically shattered. How in the holy hell did it manage to start producing a completely new rifle type and a new size of ammunition in the needed numbers? Especially considering the in-story praise that .22 rounds get against zombies, the current 5.56mm used in M-16 rifles on single shot with optics should be the perfect weapon.

Replacing the .223 round with a .22 (depending on which one it is) is probably going to be a ballistics fail, isn't it? Most of the common .22 rounds are weaker than the .223 and have a smaller effective range. Wouldn't you want to be able to effectively engage the enemy from as far away as possible?

[Pulp Hero]

EDIT: Also. America is pushed back to the west coast and its industry is basically shattered. How in the holy hell did it manage to start producing a completely new rifle type and a new size of ammunition in the needed numbers? Especially considering the in-story praise that .22 rounds get against zombies, the current 5.56mm used in M-16 rifles on single shot with optics should be the perfect weapon.

Replacing the .223 round with a .22 (depending on which one it is) is probably going to be a ballistics fail, isn't it? Most of the common .22 rounds are weaker than the .223 and have a smaller effective range. Wouldn't you want to be able to effectively engage the enemy from as far away as possible?

What I'm saying is that the .22 is weaker than .223/5.56, and the .22 gets heaps of praise in WWZ/ZSG as a light weight round that is powerful enough to kill zombies.

Logicially, the 5.56mm should be even better at killing zombies, plus it should have further range. Therefore I think it is stupid for the American army at the end of WWZ to create a new standard rifle round, when they already have the 5.56mm.

[Vehrec]

Suppose the same amount of time it takes any corpse to rot in given conditions.

WWZ zombies at least don't do that for a while since most microbes and such take one look at a zombie corpse and go 'no fucking way man!'. There are still some that will attack an infected corpse but it results in a massively slowed decay process.

It really shouldn't. Consider what we have here. It's a moving corpse that doesn't engage in any cellular upkeep. It strip-mines everything except it's muscles and bones to keep moving. It doesn't gain any fuel for it's cells from the 'food' it eats. If it gets caught on something, it pulls until either it or what caught it breaks. Every scratch on it's skin is a point of entry for bacteria and fugni. It doesn't even drink water so any zombies in a hot desert would be mummies in a couple of weeks, tops. As it's body dries out and the chemistry changes, you can expect numerous structural proteins and fibers to stop working properly. Collagen alone is 25% of the body, holding together everything from skin to tendons and collagenase is a fairly common enzyme produced by bacteria. Any Zombie more than six months old-even without bacterial degradation- should be so badly damaged as to be unable to catch a little old lady. Given the power of Freeze/thaw cycles to lyse cells, one year is all it should take to render a horde of Zombies pretty much useless from detached joints and lost mass.

[[R_H]]

What I'm saying is that the .22 is weaker than .223/5.56, and the .22 gets heaps of praise in WWZ/ZSG as a light weight round that is powerful enough to kill zombies.

Logicially, the 5.56mm should be even better at killing zombies, plus it should have further range. Therefore I think it is stupid for the American army at the end of WWZ to create a new standard rifle round, when they already have the 5.56mm.

That was a misunderstanding, I was agreeing with you

If there was a change to another .22 round, FN's 5.7mm round is just about the only (mainstream) round that is still somewhat capable at 200yards. There's probably a bunch of wildcat rounds that would do as well, but logistically, any replacement would be absurd, seeing how all the other viable .22 rounds are obscure compared to 5.56mm NATO.

[CaptainChewbacca]

It seems to me that WWZ zombies are the perfect enemy to fight. They have every single disadvantage you would get of fighting the Posleen from John Ringo's books, and none of their advantages. Their only saving grace is their immunity to chemical weapons, but other than that they are absurdly easy to kill.

[Samuel]

It seems to me that WWZ zombies are the perfect enemy to fight. They have every single disadvantage you would get of fighting the Posleen from John Ringo's books, and none of their advantages. Their only saving grace is their immunity to chemical weapons, but other than that they are absurdly easy to kill.

Depends on the chemical- I am sure lye and napam would be extremely effective against them.

[Shroom Man 777]

This is amazing. It's like you've never seen a Romero zombie film, where at no point are the zombies ever really a threat, and at no point does it fulfill some sort of silly 'survivalist fantasy' thing. In Night of the Living Dead, the zombies are dangeorus only to the isolated group of mostly unarmed and frightened people stuck in a house clawing at each others' throats and at the end of the film a cobbled together militia is effectively containing them. In Dawn of the Dead, which is mostly a black comedy about materialism, the zombies pose essentially no threat to the characters unless they're unlucky or careless. It's basically the same thing in Day of the Dead, though the themes are different. I could go on. Additionally, the situations in both Dawn and Day fit the world-wide pandemia situation you're talking about better than almost any other zombie story in existence, given that anyone who dies will reanimate, regardless of who killed them, zombie or otherwise.

Land of the Dead was also a Romero zombie film too, Ford.

[[R_H]]

From the interview with Todd Wainio (Battle of Yonkers)

Why didn't they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a
couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat Tops. They could have put a whole company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole valley, and we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this apartment building, about twenty stories, I think . . . each floor had a com­manding view of the freeway. Why wasn't there a rifle team in each window?

Which would have made supplying these units with ammunition difficult, not to mention withdrawing them from their positions, if everything goes FUBAR.

You know where they put us' Right down on the ground, right behind sandbags or in fighting holes. We wasted so much time, so much energy preparing these elaborate firing positions. Good "cover and concealment," they told us. Cover and concealment? "Cover" means physical protection, conventional protection, from small arms and artillery or air-dropped ord­nance. That sound like the enemy we were about to go up against? Was Zack now calling in air strikes and fire missions? And why the hell were we worried about concealment when the whole point of the battle was to get Zack to come directly at us! So backasswards! All of it!

And you'd want that cover in the event of friendly fire, or artillery being called in close.

I'm sure whoever was in charge must have been one of the last of the Fulda Fucktards, you know, those generals who spent their nard-drop years training to defend West Germany from Ivan. Tight-assed, narrow-minded . .. probably pissed off from so many years of brushfire war. He must have been
an rr because everything we did freak in stunk or Cold War static De­fense. You know they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted them right out of the A&P parking lot.
you had tanks?

Fulda Gap...hordes of armed to the teeth and mechanised Soviet troops versus a shambling horde of undead. Quite a few similarities there actually, and the Soviets were a more dangerous enemy anyways.

[[R_H]]

More on being inside = bad idea

From page 213 (the Otaku)

Wouldn't it be more dangerous once you reached the streets?
No, safer.

[Catches my expression.] No, honestly. That was one of the
things I'd learned online. The living dead were slow and easy to outrun or even outwalk. Indoors, I might run the risk of being trapped in some nar­row choke point, but out in the open, I had infinite options.

[Gunhead]

Obviously the writer knows fuck all about urban warfare. First, taking and holding buildings with a commanding view of the surrounding terrain is paramount. If this is not feasible then their use should be denied to the enemy. Secondly, supplying someone with ammunition if he's in a building is not significantly different than supplying him anywhere else. Logistic difficulties in urban combat are a consideration, but not so much when facing an enemy who completely lacks ranged capability. Third you prepare your positions so you can fall back to a prepared position if the need arises. Sometimes if time allows this can include a third position as well. You can even sometimes connect these positions via an underground route so moving from one position to another can be made undetected. Infantry should be kept indoors, in cover against enemy action and intelligence.

Artillery is of limited use in an urban setting and air power also suffers somewhat. But mortars excel in this enviroment. One can even prerange targets for them and since infantry is in hardened positions indoors mortars can be fired really close to the positions and fired constantly. Armored vehicles take and hold key crossways and are covered by the infantry in the buildings and if need be also on the ground.

This is like basic urban fighting 101. And I really mean basic bacause I don't have to worry about shitload of things because the enemy in question doesn't possess them.

-Gunhead

[CaptHawkeye]

That's pretty amusing, given that the progenitor of the zombie apocalypse film, Night of the Living Dead, was social commentary. I Am Legend, one of the other highly influential pieces of fiction on the 'zombie genre' was also its own piece of social commentary. Obviously if you go back far enough you get stuff like White Zombie, but zombie films have been used for commentary or society and human nature since Things to Come.

Yeah, you're right. They've always been pretentious social commentary. It's unfortunate that the only options in horror films anymore are mindless SHOCK thrillers with predictable scares or posturing self-righteous social commentary scripts with nary a emotionally stressing moment. You know the kind of movie. The kind that feels like it was made more for the director's sake than yours.

[Lord Relvenous]

Obviously the writer knows fuck all about urban warfare. First, taking and holding buildings with a commanding view of the surrounding terrain is paramount. If this is not feasible then their use should be denied to the enemy. Secondly, supplying someone with ammunition if he's in a building is not significantly different than supplying him anywhere else. Logistic difficulties in urban combat are a consideration, but not so much when facing an enemy who completely lacks ranged capability. Third you prepare your positions so you can fall back to a prepared position if the need arises. Sometimes if time allows this can include a third position as well. You can even sometimes connect these positions via an underground route so moving from one position to another can be made undetected. Infantry should be kept indoors, in cover against enemy action and intelligence.

Artillery is of limited use in an urban setting and air power also suffers somewhat. But mortars excel in this enviroment. One can even prerange targets for them and since infantry is in hardened positions indoors mortars can be fired really close to the positions and fired constantly. Armored vehicles take and hold key crossways and are covered by the infantry in the buildings and if need be also on the ground.

This is like basic urban fighting 101. And I really mean basic bacause I don't have to worry about shitload of things because the enemy in question doesn't possess them.

-Gunhead

Erm, did you read the post above yours? The author brings most of that up. The ammunition logistics problem was a poster's point, not the author's. Have you read the book? I ask because it's hard to get the presentation of the Battle of Yonkers from this thread. The excerpts quoted in the post above yours help in that regard though.

I enjoyed WWZ as light reading fare, but am not a rabid fanboy for it, so I understand it has its significant problems. However, the Battle of Yonkers doesn't seem to me to be that huge of a problem. Bean already brought up the mistakes the military made that are presented in the book, so I'm not going to restate them. I just don't find it as unlikely as some that a combination of commanders trying to fight a different style of warfare and lack of experience with the enemy could result in the outcome of the Battle of Yonkers. Yes the artillery could shred them, but only as long as it has ammunition, and IIRC, the artillery runs out pretty quick. I doubt the artillery was given enough to handle millions of zombies. Again, in light of Bean's points, I didn't find it that SOD breaking. A stretch, sure.