Zone One – Brown Pundits

In addition to a fairly exhausting travel schedule I’ve been consuming a fair few iBooks.

I’m currently trying to finish my trilogy of Zombie Apocalyptic novels (Zombie survival guide, World War Z & Zone One). Now of course the first two are written by the same author (Mel Brooks’s son, Max Brooks) and thankfully I saw the film before I read the book because that way I didn’t have to complain.

Nonetheless I came across Xone One in some tendentious article complaining about the lack of colored people in Sci-fi (right now the main divide being address is the gender one, my book club just had an interview with Ms. Leckie of Ancillary Justice) but while I simply zoomed through WWZ & even ZSG, Zone One tends to be less easier as a read. It’s simply more elaborate, less plot driven and doesn’t have the pace that Apocalyptic novels demand.

The age of Multi-culti is fast waning to an end, the hidden rise of Indo-China is soon shaking West out of its stupor and complacency as the World’s greatest hegemon (LA-LON is a good axis but it’s not insuperable) and so we pass an age where somehow the colour of ones skin someone incurs automatic advantages. Race will have a novelty factor but the counter-stereotyping of Hollywood (which is still stuck in a black-white dynamic as the only real operating one) sooner or later will have to align to reality..

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Brown Pundits Archive

Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive