How 'World War Z' Fully Realises Speculative Writing

Dystopian and apocalyptic fiction has to be one of the most popular genres in all of fiction, dominating shelves both personal and in stores. Hell, even on this very blog it’s the topic I’ve covered the most. There just seems to be something endlessly appealing about fiction concerning extreme disaster, widespread danger, and societal collapse.

And if you have any interest in books that speculate on future end of the world scenarios, there is no shortage of literature for you to read.

What you don’t see quite so often, though, is literature that concerns world ending calamities written with a retrospective approach, as if these apocalypses have already landed, passed, and been slotted into place in our modern history books.

This is the unique angle taken by Max Brooks in his novel, World War Z.

Actually, calling it a novel doesn’t seem quite right.

Calling it speculative fiction, or even fiction at all, doesn’t seem quite right either.

It is for sure both of these things – this isn’t a work of non-fiction, since the zombie war at the core of the story has not actually happened in our lifetime. (Please don’t let that sentence age poorly…) And it wouldn’t be accurate to say that this is a compendium of essays, articles and interviews, although that is ultimately the epistolary form the writer chose.

All this to say, the experience of reading World War Z does not feel like the experience of reading a conventional story. It feels like a study, a stretch of research the reader partakes in.

It feels real.

There are a number of fascinating reasons that, by the end of my reading of this ‘novel’ as I will submit to calling it, I was left with the feeling that the zombie apocalypse has actually happened before my lifetime. And I will get into some of these over the course of this essay.

But let’s start, naturally, with the introduction.

Much like a work of non-fiction, World War Z starts with a short foreword in which the editor, the person who collected all these disparate writings in the course of his research, writes a brief overview of the historical event to be discussed, as well as his own role in this field of study.

This editor is Max Brooks, the author of the novel casting himself as an interviewer through whom all the following pieces of writing are connected.

We’ve spoken a lot about first person perspectives in fiction on this blog, and the reason it is my favourite, as always, is that it is so much more immersive than the alternative. But this is true in a very different way for World War Z – rather than immersing the reader in the psyche of one individual character, Brooks instead immerses the reader in the tangibility of his worldbuilding.

The author really did all this research, interviewing all these people who really did live through the zombie apocalypse.

Of course, everyone reading knows that this is a novel, a work of fiction, and yet there’s a powerful speculative realism to the work that had me personally thinking, at the very least, that if a zombie apocalypse were to take place, well, this is exactly what it would look like.

The temptation with a project like World War Z is to use the speculative element – in this case, the zombies – as an allegory for one broad theme more relevant to our real world. But what makes this particular book so much more investing and believable is that the author did not do this.

I’m not saying necessarily that he has no allegory in the book – the introduction alone makes references to this being history’s “greatest conflict,” and how we might risk “one day to repeat it,” phrases very reminiscent of historical documents on the real World Wars, which the book’s title is obviously a reference to. No, instead I’m saying that he never reduces the book to a single allegory.

In fact, these phrases are themselves an argument to not exclude the intimate, human angle of this worldwide event, and it’s this human element that muddies – in the best sense of the word – the story’s allegory. There are so many thematic angles to this book, sometimes isolated but often conjoined together, deepening the emotional and intellectual value of the book, but more importantly for this essay, adding to its believability.

But let’s start with that most obvious theme – war.

There are two aspects of this book’s so-called zombie war that have stuck with me ever since I first read it. One is the battle of Yonkers. And the other is the idea of total war.

I’ll discuss these together as they are linked thematically, and both scared me for similar reasons. That being, how they develop zombies conceptually.

Such a ubiquitous monster is the zombie that it’s easy for its inclusion to become as thoughtless and mindless as the monster itself. The story they populate might well still be interesting in other ways, while its antagonist remains boring, a sort of default antagonist.

This flaw is avoided in World War Z, whose author has put much more thought into this undead underling.

See, at Yonkers, the military put into place an infallible strategy that would eliminate vast quantities of zombies with very little effort – first would come the major explosions, tanks, missiles, and the like. There would be traps in place, whittling the horde away. By the time the actual battalion of soldiers at this gauntlet’s end point came into play, all they would have to do is fire on what must surely be only a handful of wounded zombies.

But this didn’t happen. The infallible strategy… failed.

We all know zombies can only be defeated by destroying the brain – and with all the military might in the world, this still remains true.

So after all those explosions, traps and heavy weaponry, the soldiers are faced with a horde that has suffered absolutely zero losses – because the brains were never destroyed.

This leaves the awaiting human army completely overwhelmed, both physically and emotionally, by an undead army completely without limits. Total war, then, is given a new meaning in a story where the antagonist is so mindless, so without emotion or conscience, and so without care of physical bodily destruction and injury and fear, that the only thing it wants, needs or works towards, is the total annihilation of its opponent.

As the book itself points out, we use the word total war often, but it can only ever be hyperbole. A country is not fully onboard with the war, and even those individual soldiers who are devoted, must occasionally sleep, eat and… use the facilities. On top of this, their minds falter, and when their bodies break, their ability to fight ends.

Not so with a zombie soldier.

Zombies are unified in their desire to attack their target, their sole means of attack involves eating their opponent, and they do not sleep or defecate or otherwise take a break from their endless assault – not even bodily destruction can dampen their strength and devotion. Pair all this with the fact that every opponent they defeat adds another soldier to their ranks and they become this impossible, insurmountable threat. It is true total war – you cannot stop fighting against the horde for even a second because the zombies themselves are a ceaseless menace.

Of course, due to the nature of this story’s presentation we know that it is possible to defeat the undead, and their threat is, in fact, surmountable. But it does the story much justice that even knowing this, the commentary here is unsettling and filled me with dread.

Dread, and terror, is definitely the name of the game, but there’s more to this than a tension filled battle between the living and the dead.

As a ceaseless, unrelenting foe that requires the unanimous strength and commitment of us living humans, this ‘war’ is not a conventional one. It is a multifaceted conflict. See, war is alluded to if not directly explored in most sections of this book, but war is not necessarily a military, guns and explosives deal. There’s the sociopolitical aspects of war, the strategic element, infamous phrases like the ‘war on drugs’ – and other metaphors besides.

Like in many stories before it, World War Z’s zombie apocalypse is equated with a viral outbreak of epic proportions, this zombie ‘war,’ then, also a scientific, medical battle, in which humanity desperately hopes to combat a virus that has already spread too far.

As terrifying as the battle of Yonkers, and the handful of other major campaigns across the novel’s length, are, what might be more frightening is the unignorable fact that none of these battles needed to ever take place. The zombies as a pandemic came first, and if dealt with adequately, zombies as an army would never have been a threat.

This is a volatile grouping of themes, from infection, anti-intellectualism, governments acting against their people’s interests – all leading to the remembered crisis, all very relevant whether reading in the 2000s when the book was first published, reading in the 2020s like I did, or let’s be nihilistically honest, if you’re reading a hundred years from now.

The book raises a certain notion from its first interview concerning a patient zero, and carries this notion through to the end with the implication that we should read this book so there is no ‘Z War Two.’ If those in power simply listened to those with expertise, then mass death, suffering and destruction could be avoided.

For this reason, it's compelling that World War Z opens with a section titled ‘Warnings.’ And maybe this is not merely a preface to all that is to follow in this story specifically.

Much of fantasy, sci fi, and horror, whether it uses allegory in a one dimensional way or in a more complex way, acts as a warning, an exploration of some great danger of importance to its readers.

This is the power of speculative fiction – but this book really emphasises the speculative aspect. There is not a single element of zombies as a trope or apocalypses and dystopias as a genre that this author has not thought about.

Arguably thought too much about.

But I mean no judgment – I’m genuinely super impressed with his thought process and the level of extreme detail gone into this project.

As the introduction mentioned, though, it is not simply scientific, cold, documented detail World War Z has to offer. Important both in this novel and to disasters in our own world, is the human element. And this brings me to my favourite, and perhaps the most original, aspect of this story – Quislings.

A Quisling is a real world concept twisted into something original to World War Z.

In times of crisis, some people decide that in order to save themselves from an oppressive enemy, they will give in, surrender to this oppressor and comply with their wishes, no matter how it harms other victims who may be just the same as them.

But this cannot be done with zombies, not really.

And so, crushed and broken by the nature of this new world, and with any idea of compliance denied them, some people during the zombie war were changed by a kind of trauma-induced psychosis, changed into zombies. Not literally, but psychologically – they lost their minds, their ability to think and perceive, and began to stumble forward, biting what they no longer realised was their fellow human being.

This might have been intended as funny, a kind of dark humour to break from the horror otherwise dominating this book, but for me it was really tragic to read about. The idea that it is human nature to choose the easy path but that in a genuine total war situation, this is impossible, and so, unable to grapple with that fact, the flawed human psychology shatters.

This, to me, is the real core of the zombie horror genre. Yes, there is a real monster out there which fully intends to break human flesh. But the biggest concern is that the intensity and pain of this situation will break the human mind.

Quislings are not the only example of this in World War Z. There are people who have lost loved ones. Leaders who cannot lead due to stress. Entire countries going into blackout – no one knowing if they survived or not.

Ultimately, it is this that Max Brooks explores so effectively. Yes, he speculates on the sci fi reality of an undead foe and the many ways they can be dealt with, or not dealt with. And yes, he speculates on societal collapse, the failure of governments and the desperate attempts of scientists and doctors to convince those governments to listen. But what this author, this novel, really speculated on was the many different ways an individual human mind can break under excessive stress – the collective damage an avoidable, but not necessarily survivable, crisis causes to human beings both as individual animals, and as a species spread across the whole world.

That it doesn’t end the world is crucial – it allows for this unique, retrospective approach to apocalyptic storytelling. The tension of a typical zombie horror novel is sacrificed a little, but with the benefit of a much greater thematic brilliance, and a form of speculative writing so much more believable, immersive, and real.

And there are three main ways this manifests in World War Z.

1. There is so much detail to this story from a technical and science fiction point of view – every single aspect of zombies, as well as their interactions with human civilisation and geography, has been accounted for in the author's mind, leading to believable sociopolitical commentary and also to surprising narrative twists.

2. A vast diversity of characters and subjects adds breadth but also depth to the worldbuilding. From the first person interviewer turning a novel into a collated non-fiction work, to the generals, doctors and government officials he interviews in turn. The sheer number of settings and characters proves that the author 'did his research' into an event that didn't even happen – but feels very much like it could have.

3. Far from being only an exercise in speculative science, this book smartly includes the all important human element not only of speculative fiction itself, but of real crises, allowing for unique human responses in the characters, explorations of mental health and trauma, and tonally dissonant humour and fear, leading to the level of deep and complex thought that speculative fiction is so especially equipped to provide.

There was no spoiler section in this essay. I’ve hinted at this already, but there are so many aspects to the worldbuilding and speculation of World War Z I could have gone into here. Some of my favourite parts didn’t even get a mention, like those zombies who ended up beneath the waves, the effect Winter has on a particularly science-oriented survival horror, or a passage relating to celebrities, isolated off from their fans.

But, hey, that’s where you come into this – if you’ve already read this excellent work of speculative fiction, I’m sure you can tell me three interviews from World War Z that stuck with you the most.

And if you haven’t – there’s so much more for you to discover on reading this masterpiece.