Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a historian, and while I have a great deal of experience producing straight ‘nonfiction’ work, the idea of reading something ‘non-fictional;’ within a fictional world has always excited me because it allows many opportunities to talk about us while framing it as them. They also play into what I call the ‘Rutger Hauer Effect,’ where his character in Blade Runner mentions the wonderous things he’s seen in passing. I want to see those things too! Fictional nonfiction books provide a fantastic opportunity to tease the readers with things that their author knows and has seen but exist just beyond the reach of our own imaginations.
Chris' book list on fictional non-fiction
Why did Chris love this book?
This is an absolute classic of the genre. Brooks draws in various ‘accounts’ of a recent zombie outbreak and structures them as if the broad details are common knowledge to his in-universe audience.
This approach means the real-world reader is always discovering new details and nuggets of information in a way that really whets the appetite while increasing the sense of horror at the way events unfolded in a world that isn’t quite our own.
24 authors picked World War Z as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginning of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse.
Faced with a future of mindless man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the ten-year fight against the horde, World War Z brings the finest traditions of journalism to bear on what is…