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World War Z
Max Brooks

I started this book with the preconception gathered from both its title and that of its companion volume (The Zombie Survival Guide) that it would be a tongue and cheek affair, a textual Shaun of the Dead. It took about ten pages before I realized that World War Z had anything but a tongue and cheek approach. This bad boy is horror: dark, grim and bloody.

The most striking aspect of the novel is its structural approach. It's presented as a collection of oral histories gathered after the titular zombie apocalypse. The histories range in length from one to several pages, never returning to the same point of view. These vignettes (they aren't numbered, per se, but there are probably around a hundred total in the book) are arrayed chronologically from the first stirrings of a zombie plague, through the near collapse of civilization, the rousing and difficult process of starting to push back, all the way to a sort of victory. It's an approach generally found in histories, especially collections of primary documents. I've never seen it used in fiction, but it is incredibly successful in World War Z.

Think of the best Stephen King books, or any horror for that matter. There are probably a half dozen brilliant and gripping scenes from any of the books that sucker punch you and stay with you. World War Z is a novel composed entirely of those sucker punch scenes. Because there are no main characters specifically, the book can continuously change perspective and skip to new characters in different situations. In twenty pages, you might see the breakdown of society from the point of view of a teenage recluse living in a high rise in Japan, to Chinese sailors smuggling their families aboard and stealing a nuclear submarine once they decide the government has lost control, to a soccer mom who fleeing north out of the infested suburbs with her kids into the Dakotas because of rumors that the zombies freeze in the bitter winter.

What makes this approach work is the fundamental realization that in certain horror stories, the human characters are incidental. The true main character is the monster. So instead of feeling like a shallow story skipping from vignette to vignette without gaining traction with any one set of characters, the reader settles on the zombies themselves as the main character. We watch the growth and spread of the zombie plague, explore the aspects and permutations of zombie infection with a variety and breadth that would be impossible or at the very least eye-rollingly ludicrous if focused on one particular set of characters. But it's not just a freak show, it is a systematic and focused telling of a story from start to finish. It just isn't a story in which the human characters are constant fixtures from start to finish.

The end result is one of the most horrific and gripping horror novels that I have ever read.

Death by Black Hole

Neil deGrasse Tyson's anthology of science articles only briefly deals with the eponymous scenario, but delves into a myriad of other scientific details in a meandering book that is sometimes brash, sometimes humorous, but always fascinating. At the center of Tyson's writing is the idea central, but often ignored, in all science: we are not special or unique. This simple realization is at once obvious and terrifyingly unbelievable, but is also critical to making the smallest headway in scientific understanding. What exists out there, is fundamentally the same as what exists here. Without that basic understanding, there is no way to understand at all what goes on in the universe outside our insulated sphere.

The universe is vast and old. So vast and so old that we cannot even really understand it on familiar terms, but only at several removals of distance. We can only understand the scale logarithmically, like Russian dolls. The sun is so big that we could fit a million earths inside it, and it is so far away from us that we could fit ten thousand earths between us and it. Space is so vast and distant that the fastest spacecraft we have ever built would still take over 70,000 years to reach the nearest star. That's ten times longer than we've had civilization. The galaxy is so big that it would take 700 million years for us to send that same spacecraft across it. That's ten times longer than the dinosaurs have been extinct. And the galaxy is not just vast, but filled up with a mind-boggling number of stars: at least a couple for every human being who has ever been born in all of history. Top that off with the fact that in the known universe, there are at least as many galaxies as there are stars in our galaxy. In the grand scheme of the universe, our entire planet and history are less proportionately significant than a single cell of your skin.

The other point I took from Tyson is the phenomenon of the God of the Gaps. When we understand something, it is explainable, we only attribute the hand of god to things that we don't understand. Even physicists like Newton took this shortcut, attributing the stability of orbits (something his own work could not reconcile, and which waited another century for LaPlace to figure out) to the periodic intervention by god himself. We see god in the gaps in science's understanding the same way that primitive man explained the rising and setting of the sun with god's hand. The key is that the things science can't explain at the moment should not be scoffed at or defined as limitations in the concept of science itself. This is the central belief in science that has never been disproved: the universe is fundamentally knowable. It obeys laws and rules which we can work out, however shallow our current understanding of those laws may be.

Here's the topper, the great equalizer of science: all those unimaginably distant and huge and alien objects are composed of the same materials as your body. We are billion year old stardust. That doesn't make us special, it makes the universe knowable.

Ancient Shores, Jack McDevitt

A bureaucrat abused Jack McDevitt when he was younger. Each of the books in which his characters interact with bureaucracies are case studies in the small-mindedness of people, which is amplified whenever they are embedded in a bureaucracy. No one is responsible for either failure or success. All that matters is that the waves are smoothed out so that the whole floating wreck keeps meandering along to the horizon.

McDevitt takes a terrific exception to the common cliched comedy of manners so often used to represent bureaucracy. The problem with making something a stock comic resort is that it ends up papering over and excusing the horrors that can be perpetrated in the service of bureaucracy. Sure, it can be funny (if not original), that someone gets shuttled from line to line at the DMV, university, hospital or bureaucracy de jour, finally ending up back at the initial window with the original indifferent and overworked office worker, but it's a story that masks the real dangers of bureaucracy. When no one is responsible, the only motivator for individuals from the top to bottom of an organization is what will cause them the least hassle. More to the point, individuals cannot be rewarded for productivity in such an environment because productivity is not a measurable entity in a vacuum of responsibility. Therefore the inverse quantity of caused hassle is the driving force for promotion, not productivity.

Bureaucracies combine the disdain of responsibility with another great flaw in the human psyche: the scantron subconscious. Our brains work on a multiple choice basis shoehorning everything into the predefined situational options, with no "fill in the blank" option provided. When you see a giant furry thing try to attack you in the middle of the night when you're out for a walk, your brain fits the existent evidence into either: a. a large dog, b. your asshole roommate in a gorilla suit or c. your imagination. Regardless of whether it is a full moon, or the thing runs away at the sight of your silver cross, a sane mind does not write in "d. a werewolf". Writing in one's own options is our best measure of both insanity and genius. A bureaucracy demands that the options be filled in with a rabid single mindedness. If your application to the DMV has some irregularity (like the fact that you don't already have a driver's license, but you can provide your Ugandan passport for proof of identity), it doesn't meet the easy options and the easiest way to keep from rocking the boat is just to casually drop your application overboard and into the shredder.

Now imagine a bureaucracy having to deal with something truly earth-moving, like the discovery of alien technology that will revolutionize everything about energy and manufacturing. That is essentially the question posed by McDevitt in Ancient Shores. A bureaucracy's response will be to shove that thing under the rug so fast that the rug gets rug burn. The horror is never caused by evil but by human mediocrity. The government doesn't try to destroy the most fantastic discovery in human history because of evil conspiracies or arcane power struggles, it does it because dealing with something so extraordinary is just a big hassle. The challenge to leaders is to break that attitude in bureaucracies, force accountability and vision.