History Literature / WorldWarZ

* ADateWithRosiePalms: The traditional start of [[{{Hikikomori}} Kondo Tatsumi's]] day, before he TookALevelInBadass.

''World War Z'' is a 2006 companion piece to the ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide'' by Max Brooks, the son of Creator/MelBrooks and Creator/AnneBancroft.

** One survivor wonders why freezing doesn’t cause a zombies cell walls to burst. Human cells don’t have cell walls. It is possible that this survivor was incorrectly referring to the cell ''membranes''.

** One survivor wonders why freezing doesn’t cause a zombies cell walls to burst. Human cells don’t have cell walls.

** "Roy Elliot" seems to be an {{expy}} of Creator/StevenSpielberg. He actually really helps the war effort by making morale-boosting propaganda movies, initially just using his own hand-held cameras to make documentaries funded out of pocket, similar to the kind that got us through the darkest days of World War II.

* KillEmAll: The Ukrainian method for dealing with mobs of potentially-infected refugees is ''nerve gas.'' This revolts the troops that thought they were there to escort refugees into the safe zone - until some of the gassed refugees get back up as zombies.
** This is what happened to Iceland. With no standing army and a poorly armed population, Iceland was left defenceless when the American NATO troops had to withdraw and was quickly overrun when refugees brought the virus to the island. It's one of the very few countries that became classified as a total dead zone.

More recently, Brooks has released the short story "Closure, Ltd." in the zombie anthology ''The New Dead'', set in the same style and universe as ''World War Z''. In it, Max interviews the head of a company dedicated to finding closure for survivors of the zombie war--namely, by killing their zombified loved ones. This has now also been published in a (very short) short story collection ''Closure Limited and Other Zombie Tales'' which includes another story explicitly set in the World War Z 'verse (''The Wall''), one which may be and [[Literature/TheExtinctionParade another]] which is completely disconnected featuring [[NinjaZombiePirateRobot zombies versus vampires]]. It also received a SpiritualSuccessor in Brooks' 2020 novel, ''Literature/{{Devolution}}'', which is also a ScrapbookStory about [[BigfootSasquatchAndYeti Bigfoot.]]

* DanBrowned: The book is supposedly extensively researched regarding military equipment and doctrine, putting forward what it claims is an entirely realistic and probable scenario regarding the military's response to a zombie apocalypse. While the part with the zombies obviously has an excuse for being as unrealistic as it wants, since the exact nature and capabilities of zombiedom in his setting are entirely up to the author to decide, the parts that involve human beings and organizations and their capabilities and probable reactions are not a realistic or believable portrayal of a real-world 21st-century military in action. See the HollywoodTactics example for more details.

* CrapsackWorld: Hooboy. Most governments at best ignored and at worst actively covered up the impending disaster, while unscrupulous people misrepresent the pandemic and sell bogus cures. Once the problem became too big to ignore, the militaries chose ineffective strategies to try to defeat the zombies, allowing the epidemic to become uncontrollable. In the chaos, India and Pakistan exchange nuclear strikes; the Canadian wilderness is devastated by millions of North American refugees fleeing in panic; the Chinese government run their country into the ground until being eliminated by a nuclear strike from one of their own naval officers; billions die either from infection, illness, exposure, food shortages, or hostile actions from other humans (including their own governments). Even though things are largely hopeful 10 years after the end of the war, it's still bad: population centers that used to number in the millions are now in the tens of thousands, the oceans are hopelessly polluted and lifeless as well as many other ecosystems, and despite countries coming together to fight the zombie menace, the global situation is deteriorating (Russia, for example, is a corrupt theocracy that is using women as baby factories to rebuild their population and exploit the current state of affairs).

* CoolOldLady: Please rise for [[UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.]]:

## The North Koreans' plan ''worked perfectly'', and some day 24 million heavily-armed fascists are going to emerge from those bunkers to find a new world ripe for the taking, where their decadent western enemies have all been greatly weakened. Now, if they intend to ''stay'' down there, then the people of North Korea likely live in a society totalitarian to such an extreme that [[Literature/NineteenEightyFour Big Brother]] would either be proud of ''[[HorrifyingTheHorror scared]]'' of, where a mad tyrant [[AGodAmI controls every last aspect of his subjects' lives down to their access to the air they breathe.]]

* SealedEvilInACan: When the outbreak first began, the entire population of North Korea vanished into underground bunkers. All 24 million of them, and none of them have been heard from in the twenty years since. This presents two possibilities, and both are equally terrifying: 1) A ZombieInfectee found their way in and now there are 24 million ravenous zombies that were once North Koreans trapped underground, held back from the world only by rapidly-crumbling communist architecture, or 2) The North Koreans' plan ''worked perfectly'', and some day 24 million heavily-armed fascists are going to emerge from those bunkers to find a new world ripe for the taking, where their decadent western enemies have all been greatly weakened. Now, if they intend to ''stay'' down there, then the people of North Korea likely live in a society [[UpToEleven totalitarian to the extreme]], where a mad tyrant [[AGodAmI controls every last aspect of his subjects' lives down to their access to the air they breathe.]]

''World War Z'' is a 2006 companion piece to the ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide'' by Max Brooks, the son of Creator/MelBrooks and Anne Bancroft.

** The people listening to the frantic transmissions of thousands of people the wod over at Radio Free Earth. [[spoiler: One Russian sailor hearing the last broadcast from Buenos Aires blew his brains out on the spot. All of them end up committing suicide by the time the book is written.]]

* MakeTheBearAngryAgain: Post-War, one of the biggest non-zombie threats is The Holy Russian Empire, what remains of the Russian Federation and ''still'' interested in regaining its status before the Cold War. Its program for turning women into [[BabyFactory baby factories]] to restore its population is heavily implied to really be for restoring its numbers for war, just as Russia had done in the past.

* TheQuisling: A psychological disorder here: it's another human psychological response to living in the UncannyValley and dealing with PrimalFear at all times. The human mind snaps and goes "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," and the still-living human begins to behave like a zombie him/herself. This offers no defense from actual undead, though. Many Quislings were so realistic that early news footage of zombies eating Quislings led to people believing that the zombies eat each other, and sometimes when a person was bitten by a Quisling they killed themselves before they learned that they had not become infected by a zombie. While the zombies can tell Quislings from real zombies by instinct, humans can only tell by a) shooting them and seeing red blood come out, and b) seeing if they blink.

* UnreliableNarrator: Since the book is a compiled oral history made by various survivors ten to twenty years after the events occurred, not every piece of information should be taken at face-value. Occasionally the book has footnotes correcting or corroborating specific facts that people have relayed, but in most cases there is no "official" word as to accuracy.

* WildChild: The Ferals, who are young adults, teenagers, and children who were either abandoned or lost by their parents during The Great Panic as very young children, or had their parents killed by zombies, disease, suicide, or other humans. Todd Wainio compares them to very angry feral gorillas. There's a post-war effort to tame and reintroduce them into society; Sharon, the one who is interviewed, is described as one of the luckier cases since she has retained the capacity for language.

** The zombies, particularly massive chain-swarm battles like Yonkers. A massive human-wave attack in which individual zombies are utterly expendable and, using superior numbers, soak up all of the humans' heavy ammunition, then just keep on coming. At the height of the war, the continental United States east of the Rocky Mountains is swarming with 200 million zombies, each of which is its own self-contained fighting unit. In contrast, the ~100 million or so surviving humans west of the Rockies are a support base for the small fraction of humans actually serving in the new military (it's not as if babies and the elderly can fight). So the actual odds are truly something like two hundred to one.

* ZombieApocalypse: The setting for much of the book. And while ultimately Humanity manages to reclaim their place as the dominant lifeform, it does so at great cost, and the fighting is still not over even twenty years after the fact.

* TheSiege: The Hero City, all those other little holdouts, and the defense of the Five Colleges in California.

* ColdEquation: The Redeker Plan was a strategy which involved isolating smaller but well-supplied groups of survivors in such a way that the undead would converge on them, ultimately dooming them. This would have the effect of distracting the hordes away from the larger populations (giving them time to regroup and prepare for an attack themselves), and perhaps even reducing their numbers in the process.