A Civil Engineering Nightmare
Several months after learning of World War Z and its critical acclaim, I’m finally getting around to reading it. So far the book, a fictional account of a worldwide zombie outbreak presented in the format of a historical documentary, is really, really good.
Max Brooks eschews the standard horror treatment we inherited from Night of the Living Dead for a science-fictional one, or at least a social science-fictional one. Wisely avoiding the question of exactly how zombies appeared, or how they can exist at all, he otherwise focuses on meaningful questions and does his level best to answer them plausibly. How would various national governments react to the outbreak: fighting it, denying it, or ineffectively blaming it on someone else? How quickly, and how thoroughly, would the story propagate through news media, and how would the news be received? How would populations react once the evidence grew too large to ignore—often upon the point of zombies smashing in the living room window? After the initial panic, what would survivors do to dig in and continue surviving, and even reclaim the planet? Survivors would face hard decisions; who would make them, and what would happen to those who did, and those who didn’t?
It’s this matter-of-fact approach that makes the account so gripping. World War Z figures that, no matter how widespread the zombie epidemic, somebody, somewhere, is going to regroup and dig in. Armies may fail to stop the tide, news services may inform the public too late, the highways may become deathtraps when traffic jams slow cars below zombie speed, and unarmed populations may be easy prey, but the sheer variety of local conditions guarantees that someone gets attacked last, that they get enough of the news in time, that they can fling up a perimeter against attackers who, let’s face it, aren’t going to exhibit the sharpest military tactics. Maybe one in a hundred thousand outruns the crowd, but that leaves a minimum sixty thousand people. Some towns are isolated enough to see the dreadful CNN reports and dig in before the zombies, traveling by Brownian motion, arrive. Some communities inhabit conditions harsh enough to freeze the zombies, or dehydrate them, or whatever, before they can get to the people inside. Somebody has to survive. Then what?
Without pursuing that final question, the book would be pointless. We’ve seen zombie movies already: the hopeless last stand, the front door smashing in, the mumbling of “Braaaains…” Carried to its logical extreme, that would be a short tale: zombies eat everyone, then slowly fall apart from entropy. The end. Retelling the same scenario in every corner of the globe would get old fast. Presuming instead that someone survives in a self-sustaining fashion, and asking “Then what?” is a fascinating thought experiment. Brooks pursues it intelligently enough to keep me hooked, with a curious side effect.
Impressionable people sometimes complain that they don’t like watching horror movies, or reading horror stories, because it gives them nightmares. I was never much prone to this, or even taking horror movies seriously in the first place. Horror tends to break my fragile suspension of disbelief: how on earth did the stalker know to hide in that particular closet, and what could allow a creature to survive complete disintegration, and why in the name of Ned would martians want to mate with our women? No matter how vivid the portrayal of such monsters, they’re not plausible. Not plausible, not real. Not real, not scary. Nor do zombies scare me. I know too much about anatomy and biochemistry.
Nonetheless, I’m dreaming about the zombie menace: each of four nights after reading a bit of the book, a zombie nightmare. Not of shambling corpses breaking through the hedges and trying to eat me, but of supply chains and work rotations. What skill sets are necessary to preserve a town built out of a military strong point? How much of your limited supply of skilled labor do you put to work on the defenses, and how much do you set aside to train a bigger usable labor pool? How do you keep food stores safe, if you’ve got modern science but pre-industrial tools? Is there any reason to consider linking up with other outposts as a high priority? Are bullets a cost-effective weapon compared to, say, chopping zombie skulls with an axe when you have to manufacture them from scarce materials with scarce machinery? At what point do you decide the unfit present an unacceptable strain on (and risk to) the community, and what do you do with them, and how do you get the general populace to agree? Answering these questions quickly and effectively is a civic planner’s nightmare, a nightmare that gets under my skin far more than the thought of the living dead themselves. I dream horrible dreams of resource management. I find this perversity of my subconscious response highly comical.