World War Z

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. It is broken into eight chapters—"Warnings", "Blame", "The Great Panic", "Turning the Tide", "Home Front USA", "Around the World, and Above", "Total War", and "Good-Byes"—and features a collection of individual accounts told to and recorded by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, following a devastating global conflict against a zombie plague. The "interviews" detail the experiences of survivors from different walks of life and all over the world, including Antarctica and outer space, and explain the social, political, religious, economic, and environmental changes that have resulted from the crisis.

World War Z is a follow up to Brooks' fictional survival manual The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), but its tone is more serious. It was inspired by The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984) by Studs Terkel, and by the zombie films of George A. Romero. Brooks used World War Z to comment on government ineptitude and U.S. isolationism, while also examining survivalism and uncertainty. The novel was a commercial hit and well received by most critics.

Its 2007 audiobook version, performed by a full cast including Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, and John Turturro, won an Audie Award. A loosely based film adaptation, directed by Marc Forster and starring Brad Pitt, was released in 2013, and a video game of the same name, based on the 2013 film, was released in 2019 by Saber Interactive.

The novel is framed around a series of interviews conducted by a fictionalized version of Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide (this is a real book in-universe, where it is known as the "Civilian Survival Guide"). An agent for the United Nations Postwar Commission, Brooks travels the world a decade after the end of what is most commonly referred to as the "Zombie War".

The pandemic begins 20 years previously in the early 21st century, with the infection of a boy in a village in Dachang, China; the release of the virus, referred to as "Solanum" in The Zombie Survival Guide, is implied to have been caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The Politburo initially covers up the outbreak by engineering a military crisis with Taiwan to avoid appearing weak internationally. Nevertheless, thousands of infected quickly spread the virus outside of China through emigration, human trafficking, and the organ trade.

The virus spreads to Cape Town, South Africa, where the first major public outbreak occurs, leading to the virus initially being dubbed "African rabies". A Mossad agent publishes a report detailing the undead threat and recommending countermeasures, but Israel is the only country to take it seriously. The USA, in particular, is overconfident and distracted by an upcoming election, responding only by deploying small special operations teams to temporarily contain isolated outbreaks. Israel, meanwhile, responds by enacting a policy of voluntary quarantine in which it ceases occupying the Palestinian territories, evacuates Jerusalem, and constructs a wall along the demarcation line established in 1967; the government also offers asylum to any Palestinian living in the formerly occupied territories, and any Palestinian whose family previously resided in Israel. These policies spark a civil war by enraging the Israeli religious right, though the uprising is eventually suppressed by the military. Worldwide, a widely marketed placebo vaccine named Phalanx creates a false sense of security. This period later becomes known as the "Great Denial".

The following spring, an unnamed journalist reveals the uselessness of Phalanx and that the infected are essentially walking corpses, sparking a crisis later dubbed the "Great Panic" in which global order collapses, with rioting, breakdown of essential services, and indiscriminate culling of citizens killing more people than the zombies themselves. Russia imposes a decimation of its military to end rampant mutinies. Ukraine uses VX gas on refugees and its own citizens in an attempt to weed out the infected. Iran and Pakistan destroy each other in a brief nuclear exchange over a refugee crisis. In an attempt to repair public trust, the U.S. military stages a high-profile battle in Yonkers. However, conventional warfare tactics prove futile against the overwhelming horde of zombies, and the military is routed on live television. The catastrophe causes the U.S. President to suffer a nervous breakdown, resulting in his Vice President (heavily implied to be Colin Powell)^{[citation needed]} and cabinet invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment and forcibly removing him from office.

Paul Redeker, a former intelligence consultant for the apartheid-era South African government, develops a drastic survival strategy that designates large groups of humans as unwitting bait, distracting the undead to give safe zones time to fortify themselves and build up resources; most countries go on to adopt the controversial plan. The U.S. federal government and military evacuate west of the Rocky Mountains and establish a new capital in Honolulu. The International Space Station remains crewed by three astronauts who volunteer not to return to Earth; its commander observes miles-wide "mega swarms" of zombies stretching across Central Asia and the Great Plains. The fallout from the Iran–Pakistan War, as well as the millions of global fires sparked by the crisis, creates a nuclear winter. Knowing that zombies freeze solid in extreme cold, many ill-prepared North American civilians flee into the wilderness of northern Canada, where an estimated eleven million people die of disease, hypothermia, starvation, and cannibalism.