Showing posts with label Post-Apocalyptic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Post-Apocalyptic. Show all posts

The Girl With All the Gifts Summary

The Girl With All the Gifts

Published: June 2014

Author: M. R. Carey (Mike Carey)

Part of: Girl With All The Gifts (2 books)

Genres: Action, Dystopian, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Movie Tie-In, Post-Apocalyptic, Science Fiction, Supernatural, Survival, Suspense, Thriller, Zombies



Check out the review of this book here:



Summary:

A variety of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, endemic to South America, infected humanity twenty years ago, causing the Breakdown - the end of society as we knew it. The afflicted, dubbed "hungries," lose their mental abilities fast and feast on the flesh of healthy individuals. The illness is transferred by blood and saliva, but it may also be carried through the air via fungal spores. The few uninfected people left in England either dwell in tightly guarded locations like Beacon or roam in gangs of hostile, scavenging "Junkers."

Authorities in Beacon established a secluded military outpost to research a specific group of kid hungries. Unlike others, they can keep their mental abilities and only lose control when they get too close to human scent. The only method to mask the odor is to employ an e-blocker chemical, which is in short supply.

Soldiers, commanded by Sergeant Eddie Parks, track down hungry children and transport them to Hotel Echo, a location 30 miles outside of London and 74 miles from Beacon. The youngsters are schooled by instructors at the base and tested by Dr. Caroline Caldwell, the chief scientist. Helen Justineau, a behavioral psychologist and instructor at the facility, dislikes it when she has to vivisect the kids.

Melanie, a 10-year-old with a genius-level IQ who is enthralled with Greek mythology, namely the story of Pandora, is one of Justineau's favorite children. As a surrogate mother, Melanie adores Justineau. Melanie, like the other kids, has no idea that she is different from the grownups.

Melanie is chosen to be dissected by Dr. Caldwell, who believes she is close to finding a treatment for the fungus. The base is besieged by a gang of Junkers and hungries as Justineau interrupts and attempts to save her; Caldwell is seriously injured, and Melanie consumes flesh for the first time in rescuing Justineau, reawakening the fungus' "hunger." Parks and Private Kieran Gallagher are found and the three escape the base together.

The party chooses to drive to Beacon, which is 74 miles distant, but the grownups disagree over whether Melanie should accompany them. Parks agrees only after the youngster is muzzled, handcuffed, and forced to ride on the tank's roof. Melanie cooperates now that she realizes how dangerous she is to the others.

Melanie is valuable to the grownups since she is not attacked by hungry and can guide them away from humans. While Caldwell continues to regard Melanie as a specimen, the others begin to have faith in her. After many encounters with hungry creatures, including a few adults that exhibit human-like behavior, the party discovers Rosalind Franklin's mobile laboratory. It was created with cutting-edge facilities for testing and attack shortly after the pandemic began, but it vanished while on its research mission. Caldwell, who is dying of sepsis, uses the facility's technology to expedite her study.

Melanie discovers a group of hungry children while she satisfies her hunger apart from the others by eating wild animals. Melanie notices that they keep their mental processes as well, even though they lack a language of their own due to their lack of education. Melanie tells the grownups she spotted a huge bunch of Junkers instead of revealing the truth to Justineau because she is afraid of being experimented on. Gallagher flees the lab because he is afraid of junkies. The clever hungries find him, kill him, and devour him.

Caldwell, concerned with completing her studies before dying, catches one of the intelligent hungries and experiments on him as Parks and Justineau seek for Gallagher. She makes amazing discoveries, but she won't let anybody else in because she's afraid they'll interfere. Melanie discovers a massive clump of fungal fruiting bodies that have increased in size over the years since the infection began; while there are enough spores to infect the whole planet via air currents, the sporangia pods do not open on their own.

Caldwell is duped by Melanie into allowing her in. Caldwell tells Melanie about her findings before she dies: The fungus has neither a cure nor a vaccination. Intelligent hungries are the offspring of hungries who maintained certain human characteristics. People who are born this way keep their mental talents.

Parks and Justineau are surrounded outside the lab by hungry people. Melanie manages to scare them away, but Justineau is knocked down and Parks is bitten and sick as a result. Parks requests that Melanie shoot him before the infection cycle is completed so that he does not develop into a ravenous creature; she complies. She instructs him to blast the spores with a flamethrower, correctly assuming that fire is the environmental trigger that causes the spores to open.

Before Melanie agrees to Parks' request to murder him, she reveals that the conflict between healthy humans and the hungries will continue as long as there are healthy people. Every human must be infected before second-generation hungries may be born and restore the world.

In the Rosalind Franklin, Justineau wakes. Melanie takes her to a group of clever scavengers, to whom Justineau, dressed in an environmental suit, begins teaching the alphabet.


Rating: 95/100
Recommended: 100/100 Yes.

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World War Z Summary

An Oral History of the Zombie War
Published: 12, September 2006

Author: Max Brooks

Genres: Action, Fiction, Horror, Horror Comedy, Humor, Military, Post-Apocalyptic, Satire, Science Fiction, Supernatural, Thrillers, War

Check out the review of this book here:


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Summary:

It's been nearly two decades since the beginning of the apocalyptic global pandemic known as the Zombie War, and about ten years since humanity triumphed. The novel's framing device follows "Max Brooks," the author of the Zombie Survival Guide (referred to simply as "the civilian survival guide" in this book) and a UN Postwar Commission agent, as he travels the world interviewing survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

Although the exact cause of the zombie plague is unknown, the first cases of what would become a global pandemic were reported in China. The virus is thought to be ancient and was released as a result of the Three Gorges Dam's geological disruption. The Politburo is concerned that the outbreak will be perceived as a sign of weakness by foreign powers, so it is attempting to conceal it (much like it did with the SARS outbreak in 2002–2004).

Realizing that large-scale security sweeps for zombies can't be hidden, the Politburo creates a military crisis with Taiwan to divert attention away from the sweeps. Despite the lockdown, human trafficking, refugees, and the black market organ trade continue to spread the plague to neighboring countries. The first large-scale, widely publicized outbreak occurs in Cape Town, South Africa, earning the disease the moniker "African Rabies."

As a result, the public dismisses the outbreak as a severe strain of rabies affecting primarily poor African countries (mirroring how the first name used to refer to HIV, "Gay-related immune deficiency", treated it as a disease that only affected a minority group). Despite medical experts' warnings, world governments and the general public respond to the growing epidemic with total complacency, refusing to invest resources in disaster response and prevention for a full year.

Israel is the only country that has taken reports of the infection seriously, owing to a policy instituted after the surprise of the Yom Kippur War that requires its intelligence community to consider every threat, no matter how ridiculous. Israel declares a "voluntary self-quarantine," shutting down its borders and erecting a massive wall around its entire perimeter. Israel abandons the Palestinian territories in order to retreat to a more defendable position (including all of Jerusalem).

To persuade its neighbors that the quarantine is not a land grab, Israel allows all uninfected Palestinians safe passage into its borders before they are completely closed. This refugee policy, combined with the loss of Jerusalem, led to a brief but bloody civil war among Israel's right-wing ultra-orthodox, which was put down by the IDF.

The majority of other countries do not take Israel's quarantine seriously. Because of its overconfidence in its ability to suppress any threat and a desire to avoid causing panic during an election year, the United States does little to prepare. Although special forces teams are able to contain small-scale domestic outbreaks, a widespread effort is never launched: "brushfire wars" sap the US of political will, and the widely distributed and marketed placebo vaccine Phalanx creates a false sense of security.

A journalist reveals the following spring that Phalanx does nothing to prevent zombification and that the infected are not rabies victims but walking corpses, sparking the "Great Panic." As countries realize the true scope of the disaster, order breaks down around the world, and for a time, the rioting and breakdown of essential services kills more people than the zombies. As the undead take over entire regions, millions of terrified refugees flee to safety: Iran's attempts to stem the flow of refugees from Pakistan result in a nuclear exchange that obliterates both countries. 

To put an end to and prevent mutinies, Russia decimates its own military. Because zombies, unlike humans, are unaffected by nerve gas, Ukraine uses its stockpile of chemical weapons against large groups of refugees and soldiers to separate the infected from the uninfected.

After zombies take over New York City, the US military sets up a high-profile defense in the nearby city of Yonkers in the hopes of restoring public order through a show of military might. The "Battle of Yonkers," on the other hand, is a disaster; Cold War-era weapons and tactics designed to disable vehicles and wound or frighten the enemy are ineffective against zombies, who use human wave attacks, can only be killed by direct brain damage, and have no self-preservation instincts. On live television, the unprepared and demoralized soldiers are routed. Human civilization has been on the verge of collapse for several weeks.

The government of South Africa adopts the Redeker Plan, a contingency plan drafted by apartheid-era intelligence consultant Paul Redeker. It proposes the creation of small safe zones, with large groups of survivors being abandoned in special zones as human bait, acting as a deterrent to the undead while allowing those in the main safe zones to regroup and recover. Governments all over the world assume similar plans will work. The US government establishes a safe zone west of the Rocky Mountains, relocating its headquarters to Honolulu, Hawaii.

Those who are left east of the Rockies are told to flee north, as zombies will freeze solid in the cold. Many panicked and unprepared civilians flee to the northern Canadian and Arctic wildernesses, where eleven million people perish from starvation and hypothermia.

Other safe zones are being established around the world by surviving governments. Scotland and Ireland are the only parts of the United Kingdom that remain. Except for safe zones in the Danish and Iberian peninsulas, as well as the Alps, continental Europe is nearly completely overrun. Russia withdraws to trans-Ural Siberia, while India creates safe zones in the Himalayan valleys. Due to its island geography and disproportionately strong military, South American nations retreat west of the Andes Mountains, while Cuba becomes a bastion against the undead.

In the Pacific, Australia establishes a safe zone in Tasmania, while Japan chooses to evacuate its citizens to Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, which is colder. China's Politburo, on the other hand, refuses to make any strategic retreats, making it the war's worst-affected country. Half of China's military revolts against the Politburo's incompetence, and the new government implements the Redeker Plan by retreating north to Manchuria, killing its leaders with a nuclear strike.

Within their new, limited borders, the surviving safe zones spend the next seven years gradually rebuilding their industrial base. The USS Saratoga then hosts a United Nations conference off the coast of Honolulu. While many countries are content to wait for the zombies to decompose naturally, the US President insists that they must go on the offensive to reclaim the planet. The US military reinvents itself to meet the specific strategic requirements of fighting the undead, including the distribution of semiautomatic weapons, retraining soldiers to aim for zombie heads and employ volley firing strategies, and the invention of the "lobotomizer," a melee weapon designed to quickly destroy a zombie's head, all in the name of leading by example.

The military begins the three-year process of retaking the contiguous United States from both undead swarms and groups of hostile human survivors, backed by a resurgent US wartime economy. Because each zombie is an independent fighting unit with no logistical lines or command structure to target, the war is a large-scale campaign of total extermination, slowly clearing and securing every mile of territory, because even a single surviving zombie could restart the infection cycle.

Other nations that voted to attack launch their own offensives: Russia, whose armories are severely depleted, relies on large stocks of World War II-era tanks, firearms, flamethrowers, and ammunition to wage a costly offensive against the undead.

The United Kingdom takes a patient but methodical approach, clearing its territory five years after the war's official end. France, determined to reclaim its pride and reputation after a string of humiliations and defeats dating back to World War I, charges headlong into the undead, its armed forces displaying incredible bravery at an exorbitant cost. As the war draws to a close, an unnamed British Army general observes that there are "enough dead heroes for the end of time."

The world is still heavily damaged ten years after the official end of the Zombie War, but it is slowly recovering. Hundreds of millions of zombies still roam the ocean floor, mountains above the snow line, and arctic regions like Scandinavia, Siberia, and northern Canada. During the recovery, there have been numerous political and territorial shifts. Cuba has evolved into a democracy and now has the world's most prosperous economy.

Tibet is liberated from Chinese rule, becoming a democracy and home to Lhasa, the world's most populous city. Following a religious revolution, Russia has become The Holy Russian Empire, an expansionist theocracy that has implemented a repopulation program that keeps the country's few remaining fertile women as state broodmares. 

North Korea is devoid of people, with the entire population believed to have fled to underground bunkers or died in the outbreak. Iceland has been completely depopulated, and it remains the world's most heavily infested country due to a lack of a properly equipped military force and a large influx of infected refugees. 

Shorter life expectancies, limited access to running water and electricity, and an ongoing nuclear winter have all contributed to a lower overall quality of life.

Despite this, the vast majority of those who have survived have hope for the future, knowing that humanity has come back from the brink of extinction.


Rating: 95/100
Recommended: 100/100 Yes.

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World War Z (Unrated)


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