World War Z timeline

UN Spacy · Apr 6, 2009

First off, apologies if anything I say does not make sence, as 1) Im French, and 2)Im typing this from my iPhone. (Pathetic, right?)

Anyway, I find it extremely annoying that Max Brooks, while giving enough details to WWZ, never gives good chronology with his events.

We couuld assume that:

-The outbreaks first pop up in China around 2010

-Great Panic starts around May 2013, ends November 2013

-Yonkers takes place circa August 2013 (it said something about it taking place after the November 2012 US reelections)

-Honolulu Conference is somewhere around 2020

-VA Day is 2023

-VC day is 2025

The book itself might be published around 2035.

Any more suggestions? Comments? Add-ons ?

UN Spacy · Apr 7, 2009

Come on, this has been looked at 94 times and no one can respond? =[

Campbell1004 · Apr 7, 2009

Check out the Zombie Surival Guide for ancient outbreaks and the such. The first outbreak in that New Old town or whatever it was was not the first outbreak the world saw.

Kome · Apr 8, 2009

I think he ment the first outbreak of the war.

Oddly enough in the survival guide there was also a small outbreak in ww2 when the Japanese sent zombies to china and a large outbreak where a zombie center in China had some problems.

I would love to contribute but i dont have the book with me.

Lyly · Apr 8, 2009

I think it was not really viewed as terribly important. It's a fictional account, so it makes sense to not give a specific time period for the book.
But hey, speculation is always nice.

gtrof · Apr 9, 2009

Somewhere on the board there was work on a timeline where everyone added something, I'd recommend a search.

UN Spacy · Apr 11, 2009

I didn't like that timeline at all. It says the outbreaks start in 2013, when the outbreaks start BEFORE the U.S. elections of 2012.

David bar Elias · Apr 11, 2009

UN Spacy said:
I didn't like that timeline at all. It says the outbreaks start in 2013, when the outbreaks start BEFORE the U.S. elections of 2012.

They occurred when both the Three Gorges Dam and the International Space Station had been completed, which would put the outbreaks after 2015 or so.

Jan Brady · Apr 12, 2009

I've been lurking, but I wanted to post. I'm a big fan of WWZ and I've read the book twice and have started going back and making my own timeline for it. Unfortunately I don't have enough surplus time to devote to it, to make it worth much right now, but I did want to say that my guesstimate for the events starting is between 2011-2015, around in there.

But I think we're all probably in the ballpark with the correct figure.

Twenty two years from the start of everything to the publishing of the book. VA day in the mainland US came 10 years in; VC day came two years later.

I don't remember the bit about Yonkers being after an election, but it's late and I'm tired and probably just forgetting that I remember. But in my spare down time, to decompress and do mindless work, I'm just going page by page and tossing stuff in an Excel file, and making a graphical chronology with that as I go.

UN Spacy · Apr 12, 2009

David bar Elias said:
They occurred when both the Three Gorges Dam and the International Space Station had been completed, which would put the outbreaks after 2015 or so.

It SHOULD start around 2010, namely because:

-It's mentioned that "a few years before the Great Panic", which we can place at around the summer of 2013 because the Battle of Yonkers takes place on "the August after the November elections". So a "few years before the Great Panic" would be around 2010.

-Like I said above, the U.S. Presidential Elections were coming up, which are in 2012.

And from what I can tell, the dam actually isn't expected to be completed until 2011, and the ISS could have been completed at any time between 2013-2025. Just because the Great Panic was going on shouldn't mean the ISS's remaining parts wouldn't have tried to have been added.