Collected Miscellany

The recent review of J. Michael Straczynski’s script for the movie version of
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars (apparently due out next year) is the impetus for today’s review:
presuming that the review is accurate, the movie is going to be more than a
little controversial, thus suggesting that a review of the original book may be
in order.

If the lycanthrope was the preeminent monster of the
medieval period, the vampire that of the Victorian era, and the bug-eyed monster
that of the 1950s, then the zombie is almost certainly the favored boogeyman of
the modern era.  It’s not all that
unsurprising to understand why.  The
concept of the zombie – and here I explicitly speak of the shambling, undead
human moaning about brains, not the Caribbean metaphor for alienation from the
community – lends itself well to our tastes in horror (which are not so much gruesome as they are exceptionally visual), while permitting a surprising
amount of social commentary to presented alongside the undead hordes.  Every generation finds a suitable monster to
build its scary stories around; the zombie is ours.

World War Z by Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks, for those
inclined to trivia) is, in its way, a sequel to his seminal The Zombie Survival Guide (ZSG), a book which is probably on the bookshelves of every fan of the
genre.  The conceit of the ZSG is
that zombies are real, and not overtly supernatural; that their tactics,
advantages, and disadvantages are both knowable and uniform; and that there can
be workable, practical methods of surviving a zombie outbreak.  The bulk of the ZSG is dedicated to
discussing what tactics work, what tactics don’t, and what tactics will just
get everyone killed, with not a hint that the subject matter is anything except
completely real.  While it is not
necessary to have read the Zombie Survival Guide in order to enjoy World War Z,
the latter uses the zombie described in the former for its template, and the
ZSG is an entertaining book in its own right.

World War Z is presented in the form of after-the-fact
personal interviews with survivors of a world-wide zombie outbreak (one which
was as apocalyptic as possible without actually destroying either human
civilization, or even the human race itself). 
The story is traced through the first cases in China, followed by the
slow spread of the undead through Western Asia and South America, then Western
Europe and America; step by step, the reader is led through an increasingly
nightmarish scenario brought about in equal parts by bad planning, wrongheaded
assumptions, shortsighted thinking, and a simple unwillingness to accept that
the dead could be walking around, hungry for human flesh.  The middle part of the book explores the
permutations of the “Great Panic” (somewhat a self-explanatory
description of the almost-collapse of civilization) and surviving governments’
retreats to defensible territory; obviously, given the aforementioned conceit
it shouldn’t be surprising that the last part of the book is dedicated to how
humanity finally was able to reclaim the Earth from the zombies.

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Terry Pratchett’s Making Money is his latest addition to his longstanding fantasy Discworld series. For those unfamiliar with either the author or the series – or indeed the fantasy genre in general – the series is set on the eponymous Discworld, which a flat world that is supported by four elephants that stand on a turtle swimming through space. This is in much the same way that the Lord of the Rings is a very long book about a midget trying to toss the Ultimate MacGuffin into a lava pit without anybody noticing, or how the Chronicles of Narnia are a bunch of books about magical talking creatures and the English kids who love them. In other words, there’s quite a bit more there: while the series began as a relatively straightforward (if hysterical) send-up of classic heroic fantasy (we’re talking Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance territory), it quickly morphed into something a bit more complex. The series is exceptionally versatile: it can and has supported everything from Shakespeare to police procedurals, and usually quite well*.

Making Money is the second (the first being Going Postal) in a sub-series about a character improbably-named Moist von Lipwig. Moist is a conman and swindler (although not, in point of fact, actually a bad man) who has become a more-less-voluntary fixture in the improbably-named Ankh-Morpork***, thanks to the decision of its current Patrician (one Lord Vetinari). Vetinari, who actually has the sort of mind and abilities that people erroneously ascribe to famous political operatives, decided that Moist’s skill set was of value to the city, so he hanged the man, and then gave him a job running the Post Office. After the events there (excellently described in Going Postal), Moist is then given a new assignment: fixing Ankh-Morpork’s banking system. Whether the current operators of it like it, or not.

There are also golems.

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The Sky People has just been released in paperback; it is the first of two books in S.M. Stirling’s The Lord of Creation series (the second, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, is scheduled to be released in hardcover in May 2008). This series is science fictional, and technically in the subgenre of alternate history; the central divergence in the Lord of Creation universe is that Venus and Mars are habitable planets for human beings, and that in fact human beings live on both planets – something proven conclusively in the early 1960s. Venus (the central setting for The Sky People) is a universally tropical jungle planet where ferocious dinosaurian and mammalian predators may be found coexisting; Mars is a slowly dying desert world inhabited by the decadent descendants of a lost empire.

If any of this sounds like the setting for an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, it’s deliberate. In writing this, S.M. Stirling had consciously made the decision to extrapolate how our world would have reacted to a situation where the assumptions of 30s pulp science fiction writers were actually true. The history of Earth itself does not seriously diverge until the 1960s, but changes accelerate quickly. By the time of the late 1980s (the time when the action takes place) Earth has been rather smugly divided between American/British Commonwealth (self-explanatory) and “Eastbloc” (Warsaw Pact & PRC) control, with the European Union (Western Europe) being a distant third. Brushfire wars are largely a thing of the past (the last being in 1967 in the Middle East, with the end result being a mandated settlement enforced by both major power blocs), and what conflict exists is mostly Cold War spy/counterspy black operations. The great political and scientific focus is on the exploitation of space resources, to the point where the biological sciences are several years behind our timeline’s activities. In short, aside from the existence of transistors and absence of ray-guns, very little about this universe would be surprising to a pulp hero.

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Opening Atlantis is Harry Turtledove’s latest work of alternate history; the book jacket promises that this is the first book in a trilogy, and the author has already written at least two independent stories in the same universe, so we can expect a somewhat detailed exploration of this particular terrain. For those unfamiliar with the genre, “alternate history” is a type of either science fiction or fantasy where historical events turned out differently. The most common (if not stereotypical) examples are works where Nazi Germany won World War II, or the Confederacy won the American Civil War, but the need for novelty has encouraged authors to branch out to all sorts of plausible, implausible, and frankly impossible scenarios*.

Harry Turtledove is widely regarded to be one of the best, if not the best, in this field; he has explored most of the popular themes in this genre and has probably created a few of his own. In the Atlantis series he has chosen as his divergence point either the independent formation of a small continent in the mid-Atlantic, or the breakup of the existing North American tectonic plate to create one (the cover suggests the latter). The first English explorers of the island – the first discoverers being Basque fishermen in the mid-15th century who had traded the knowledge of its existence – called it “Atlantis,” and immediately began independently settling there, as did French and Spanish fishermen. The general narrative traces the fortunes of several members of the Radcliffe family, who are descendants of the head of the original English settler, over the next three centuries, in three separate vignettes.

There are two things that are of note regarding this book. The first is the land of Atlantis itself, which has clearly been a separate continent for a long time. Fans of Turtledove’s work will know that he has explored ecological divergences in his work before (see A Different Flesh and Down In The Bottomlands for well-developed examples), and in Opening Atlantishe takes the time to discuss the implications of an ecology where there are no native four-legged mammals, let alone human beings, prior to discovery. Weather patterns also have an effect on the narrative, although not to the same extent: Atlantis is southern enough to enjoy balmy-to-tropical weather over a large part of its surface, which informs some of the geopolitical decisions made about it.

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