Remittance Girl's Reviews > World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

I have a love-hate relationship with post-apocalyptic novels. I tend to hate the ramboesque junket of the more action-oriented ones, but the premise also lends itself well to satire, social critique and interesting experiments in rewriting social orders.

I read WWZ in the context of Max Brooks's earlier The Zombie Survival Guide and after seeing the film and reading the critiques about the book being completely different.

The stereotypes that some other reviewers refer to are most definitely there, but I read them as rather clever satire and he does succeed in many places of taking cliches and turning them sideways.

Yes, there's the tough, overcompensating female pilot a la GI Jane, but the end of that narrative turns weirdly mystical and eerie.

Yes, there's a blind Japanese 'si fu', but Brooks also takes the opportunity to critique how deep conformity, usefulness and a sense of one's place plays into the rather fascist side of the Japanese psyche.

If you are picking this up to get yet another hit of 'blow them all to hell' zombie slaughter, then definitely don't buy the book.

But if you want to know how speculative fiction can act as a rather intelligent critique of the current state of the world, nationalism, bureaucracy, and economics, then I encourage you to give this a go.