Quote Originally Posted by Tergon View Post
At no point in the discussion did anyone put it as simply, or as reasonably as you just did. And you want to know what? I can agree with it, the way you just said it. Max Brooks is a clever man, and he did do a lot of research, and he never proclaimed himself an expert on everything, but he got some stuff wrong when he wrote his story.

The problem people have is that, well, the thing he got wrong was the story.

It's like doing a jigsaw when you've got the wrong pieces, you can try and force them to join up, but people will notice that the picture looks wrong.

A really clever person would have realised that zombies are too crap to work in an apocalypse scenario (especially in open combat with modern military forces) and not written that, because the jigsaw simply cannot be put together with those pieces, they don't fit together.

That's why Mira Grant's Newsflesh books are probably the cleverest zombie fiction, because the zombies aren't the story, the story just happens in a world where there are zombies (and Kellis-Amberlee zombies had far more advantages than Solanum ones, 100% infection rate of all mammals, fast mutation rate, active conversion in any mammal over 40lbs bodyweight on either death or contact with live state virus, that means that everyone is going to turn when they die, every mammal is a potential vector, and the Rising was still put down in a few months because zombies are crap, but it's ancient history to the characters of the books. Also, zombie bears).

Hell, even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is better, and that's a book where the joke is basically over when you've read the title, because the book itself is basically just Pride and Prejudice, the zombies are an incidental problem that society just gets on and deals with, just as they should be.

Zombies are rubbish, you can't write a story about them beating modern military and have it work without having the zombies be actively magical or having Romero style spontaneous and arbitrary conversion (Even Highschool of the Dead does better, and that's a zombie pantsu show, as it's arbitrary conversion so the military is instantly composed of 33% zombies because they spontaneously convert, and they still get their **** together and sort things out).