World War Z

Just caught up with this audio book of the Oral History describing the zombie apocalypse. First off, let me say I'm not a huge zombie fan and was more interested in this book for its allegorical messages than fan-boy fiction. I should also say the pending film appears to be a MASSIVE departure from the book. I knew this going in, which actually made me more interested to hear it as the film will probably be much thinner on substance.

The book is supposed to be oral accounts of survivors across the world compiled by a UN historian years after the war. He makes it clear the point of the book is not to detail numbers, logistics and the science behind the war, but the human spirit involved.

So onto the allegorical applications:

• An actual outbreak of a virus. This has to be taken seriously regardless of whether you favor science fiction or fantasy, God or evolution. Here is some light reading and video on the subject. Of course, Michio Kaku is in the video. (I love that guy!!) 
• http://www.christadelphianbooks.org/agora/art_less/p-q22.html
• Spiritual Plague - How would people have to band together and fight to overcome tremendous evil sweeping the earth and turning all casualties into enemies? To a certain extent some of us probably think this has been going on since the beginning and is essentially how Satan does his missionary work. 
• What if we allow vampire culture to overrun the earth? We will all turn into Zombies. 
• Others might argue this story is an allegory of the kind of disaster it would take to return mankind to sound conservative principles such as public flogging, hard work, courage and a strong military complex. Hollywood would lose all of its value when people are constantly faced with death by un-dead cannibals. That is way more exiting than any 2 or 3D movie. 
• It is interesting to note that no reason is ever given for the outbreak and no cure is ever mentioned. It was simply war for warm blood. This again implies the allegory of the book is get us thinking about pure life and death struggle and what would we sacrifice to win. 

All I have left now is to wait for the movie and hope that Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) gets at least a cameo after his fantastic voice work on the book.