Max Brooks' World War Z is the “Patient Zero” of zombie literature: a contagious classic that went “viral” in a way that few horror novels do. Readers everywhere caught the zombie bug, and when they did, the shelves of nearby bookshelves began to fill with with zombie horror (along with zombie crime, zombie sci-fi, and even zombie romance). Although a number of great zombie novels have come along since World War Z, none have been able to match Brooks’s legendary telling.

One of the things that sets World War Z apart from its competitors is its format. Brooks eschewed a traditional narrative format, choosing instead to present his globe-spanning story in the form of an oral history. Every chapter is an individual survivor’s tale, all of them transcribed and arranged in chronological order by an anonymous United Nations employee. By doing so, Brooks dazzles readers with dozens of perspectives on the horror of the zombie apocalypse, beginning with the first case in a rural Chinese village and ending in the near-complete collapse of global civilization.

World War Z’s survivors are a diverse bunch: soldiers, housewives, scientists, and more are on hand to offer their stories of horror and desperation. Not all of them are “good guys,” either: Zombies don’t care who is good or bad, and the greedy, venal, and violent are among those lucky enough to have escaped their grasping hands and gnashing teeth. Every story needs its villains, and in World War Z, there are plenty. The zombies are horrifying, but there’s no true volition behind what they do: They’re automatons -- eating machines. The human criminals of World War Z have no excuse.

The stories fit together like the pieces of a mosaic: Individually, each survivor's tale is interesting enough, but when all of them are put together they form a great work of art -- in this case, a panoramic perspective on an apocalyptic event.

Fans of World War Z have been clamoring for a movie adaptation since the first day the book hit shelves, and clearly Hollywood saw the same thing readers did: a riveting tale that begged to be resurrected on the silver screen. The buzz about the book only got louder when a bidding war for the movie rights broke out between Appian Way and Plan B Entertainment, production companies owned by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, respectively, and then the buzz became a deafening roar when Max Brooks revealed that Brad Pitt would star in the film during a panel discussion at San Diego Comic Con 2010.

It remains to be seen whether the film will meet the high expectations of readers, but the brilliance of Max Brooks’s novel will remain undiminished. World War Z is a reading experience that isn't easily forgotten: It infects the imagination like a virus, leaving the reader -- and his or her expectations of what horror fiction can be -- forever changed.

In Peter Clines’ Ex-Heroes, he introduced a world crackling with pop culture resonance: a post-apocalyptic, zombified Earth where a ragtag team of superheroes is all that stands between humanity and the hungry, chattering teeth of the “ex-human” undead horde. It was a tricky balancing act, but one that Clines deftly handled. Ex-Heroes’ sequel, Ex-Patriots, expands on that novel’s characteristic mix of horror, action, and irreverence, pulling readers into Clines’ world with the irresistible strength of a thousand zombie hands.

Months after the epic zombie vs. gangbanger vs. superhero brawl that nearly spelled the end for human colony The Mount, its residents are resuming a somewhat normal life -- or at least what passes for normal in the zombie-blighted streets of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. Fighting zombies and scavenging supplies are still a necessity of everyday living, but the colony is stronger. A Fourth of July celebration reminds residents that as long as The Mount survives, so does the United States. But whose United States?

Following a chance encounter with surviving elements of the US Army, the heroes and citizens of The Mount learn that the country is now officially under martial law, and that includes them. Thanks to a top secret program called Project Krypton, the Army now has their own super-soldiers -- heavily muscled titans equipped with high-caliber weaponry led by a man known as Captain Freedom. Further scientific experimentation has also given them a horde of Exes drafted into service by way of electronic brain implants. This ghoulish new army has plans for The Mount and its heroes -- whether they want to be a part of them or not.

One could say that Ex-Patriots is every bit as good as Ex-Heroes, but that’s not true: This is one case of the sequel being better than the original. The stakes are higher and the action is more explosive. That’s not just a metaphor, either! Captain Freedom and his friends carry massive weaponry and aren’t afraid to use it. These guys make the gangbangers from Ex-Heroes look like a bunch of kids with pellet rifles.

Clines' sense of humor and deep genre knowledge are in top form in his second novel. This is the kind of book where the heroes keep a running tally on the number of celebrities-turned-zombies that they’ve managed to dispatch (an argument about whether the long-dead Vincent Price had somehow reanimated had me laughing loud enough to disturb the other customers at my local coffee shop), and drop one-liners from fan-favorite films like "Ghostbusters." The heroes of Ex-Patriots are all too aware of the the same superhero and zombie movie tropes that readers are: They know that Project Krypton is a Superman reference, and that the surviving elements of the Army are likely to be insane, based on their knowledge of zombie movies like "Day of the Dead." Meta-fictional gags keep the novel rooted squarely in the genre universe, celebrating and subverting it simultaneously.

Ex-Patriots is highly recommended for the horror and comic fan looking for a fresh new take on both.

Imagine all the horror of "The Walking Dead" injected with the flash and action of "The Avengers" and you’ve got something that might approximate the sustained, pop culture sugar high that is Peter Clines’ novel Ex-Heroes.

Just because the world has been overwhelmed with the living dead doesn’t mean that a superhero gets to hang up the spandex and wait it all out at the Fortress of Solitude: Lives still need saving and bad guys aren’t going to let a few walking corpses get in the way of their evil schemes. When the zombie apocalypse arrives in Los Angeles, heroes Gorgon, The Mighty Dragon, Stealth, Zzzap, and Cerberus step up to the challenge by serving as the protectors of the Mount: a film studio that has been converted into a fortified shelter.

Keeping peace inside the Mount is a challenge: close quarters, short supplies, and boredom have all taken a toll and patience is wearing thin among heroes and civilians alike. Meanwhile, things on the streets are getting weird -- even for a world taken over by the living dead. Some of the heroes’ super-powered allies have fallen prey to the zombies, and now they’ve resurrected ... with their powers intact. (Fighting a zombie is one thing, but having to go toe-to-toe with a zombie that has the power to manipulate electricity is almost too much, even for a superhero.) To make things worse, a former street gang has formed an army and somehow they’ve managed to enlist the aid of what appears to be “smart” zombies that can talk and think for themselves. A threat unlike anything the Mount has ever faced is just around the corner, and it will take every resource the heroes can muster to defeat it.

Juggling zombies and comic book superheroes is a tall order, but Clines proves himself more than up to the task. Action and humor both abound in Ex-Heroes, but so does real terror: Grueling scenes of bloodshed and gut-munching share equal billing with high-flying super-powered antics. Clines’ heroes embody some of the same broad archetypes famous characters like Iron Man, Batman, and their ilk do, but they’re not carbon copy knock-offs with the serial numbers filed off. Stealth, Gorgon, and the rest of the gang are authentic-feeling protagonists that will be readily embraced by any fan of comic book heroes.

Readers are going to want a lot more of Clines’ zombies-and-spandex universe when they’re done with Ex-Heroes. Happily, there’s a sequel, Ex-Patriots.

Everyday eBook recently spoke with author China Mieville about his latest brilliantly imaginative novel, Railsea.

Everyday eBook: What do people need to know about Railsea? What's the essential premise?

China Mieville: Basically the book is pinned on a very simple, very silly joke, which is Moby Dick -- only with moles instead of whales, and once you do that then a lot of things spin off from it. If you've got moles, which are rising out of the earth instead of rising out of the sea, then obviously you're not chasing them on ships. So, then what are you chasing them on instead? You could have said cars or carriages, but I like the idea of trains because it's so counterintuitive since trains supposedly have fixed routes and the sea is infinitely possible -- so how do you get around that? You get around that by having a tangle of rails that goes on forever and so on and so forth. So the basic peg was the combination of a very silly joke about a kind of misprision of Moby Dick combined with an interest in inverting the usual cliché about the teleology of the railway.

EE: Moby Dick is an influence on Railsea. How do you keep that recognizable but not create a derivative work?

CM: I can only speak for myself -- obviously different writers are going to do it different ways -- but for me, while Moby Dick is an enormous touchstone, the book is not intended to be a retelling at all. It takes a couple of aesthetic and philosophical tropes and a basic narrative hook -- look for that big, weirdly colored animal -- and it goes off and does whatever it wants. There are books that retell particular stories in different settings. You have a retelling of The Odyssey or Beowulf in a different setting -- but that wasn’t my aim; it's not a structure that particularly interests me. There's absolutely no slavish attempt to follow the structure of Moby Dick; it was really more as just a kind of hook and then kind of whirring off and taking influences from other stuff. There are other influences, maritime books. It riffed on Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe and various other things. The way that I hope that it doesn't become completely derivative is that it always had kind of a relaxed attitude. If you like, a piratical attitude toward its source material.

EE: The captains in Railsea are chasing "philosophies." What are those?

CM: This is a world in which there are lots and lots of burrowing animals, which are mostly very dangerous and voracious and the captains are hunting them. If we have learned anything from Moby Dick, it is that chasing giant hidden animals is a kind of intrinsically metaphorizing thing to do and much ink has been spilt on what exactly it is that is being chased. What does, to use that horrendous phrase, Moby Dick represent? It's just such a horrible, deadening way to think about fiction, but it's also something that is done a lot. I like the way of literalizing that and affectionately riffing on it and spinning it out a little bit so that it's done more directly and more explicitly. Where as I suppose that you could say, very crudely, that in Moby Dick the captain is chasing the whale and we the readers are aware that he is also chasing whatever that symbolic thing is. The only thing that is different in Railsea is that the captains are also aware that they are chasing symbols as well as actual animals. Some people might see it as a metaphor for scholarship. I couldn't possibly comment!

Want more with China Mieville? Check out Suvudu.com.

George Dyson is a best-selling author and historian of technology who has long studied the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications. Alan Turing was a mathematician who is considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. In Dyson's latest brilliant work, Turing’s Cathedral, he explores the origin and expansion of the digital universe -- which began with Turing's innovative vision, how code has taken over our world, and where the digital universe may be heading next. Dyson spoke with Everyday eBook and left us craving more of his theories and insights as to where our future lies.

Everyday eBook: Tell us about Turing's Cathedral, your most recent book.

George Dyson: It took me ten years to write it, and it was long overdue. The subtitle is The Origins of the Digital Universe. We are all living in this digital world -- you've got your digital recorder there probably filling up 32,000 bits per second from our conversation -- but we don't really have a common creation myth of how this all began. And it goes back to a single point. With biological life we don't really know where life started, but with the digital universe there's a point at which it didn't exist and then a point when it did exist. I went to find this out, and of course, it's a very interesting story. Half the work is doing your research, but the other half, the harder part, is making it into a story people can read.

EE: With a ten-year span of creating this story, the digital world has changed quite a bit. Did this rapid evolution change the way that you had conceived of this book in the beginning?

Dyson: No, I think that this is one of the good things about studying history: If you're writing about the beginning of the digital world you can take ten years to develop the story and the origins are still there. Whereas if you set out to write a book about Google and you take two years to write it, it will be out of date.

EE: What does the title refer to, exactly, and why is this a good point to start?

Dyson: Alan Turing was this very bright young student who, at twenty-four, published a paper that remains absolutely the most important thing that has ever been written about the way computers -- computers that weren't even invented yet -- work, and he did it out of thin air. He also became very interested in the question of artificial intelligence, and he thought about that long before other people. He made a statement in 1950 to answer the critics who said that he was trying to play God by creating intelligent computers. He said no, just as with human reproduction, we are not creating souls, we are creating the mansions for the souls that only God can create. I'd had that thought in the back of my mind for a long time, and when I went to visit Google in 2005 I saw that Google really is doing this, they're building a true artificial intelligence and doing everything Turing ever dreamed of. I thought about Turing's mansion: his mansions for souls, and this wasn't a mansion, it was a cathedral. The phrase stuck and became the title for the book.

EE: Casual readers may know about Turing, but might not know the extent of his work. Is your book something that the layperson can pick up and read?

Dyson: I don't think that it takes a technical background. The reason to start at the beginning is that when Turing had to explain his ideas no one then knew what a computer was, and he had to explain it very clearly. Most of the book is non-technical. It's the human story of who did what and when and the relationships between these very interesting people. Like many people who become known for one idea, Turing was misunderstood. In the same way that Darwin was not really a Darwinist, we think of Turing as having invented this very deterministic form of computation but he actually spent a lot of his life thinking about non-deterministic computation. And that's the future that still awaits.

Want more? Check out a few additional questions with Turing on Suvudu.com.

Humanity has always had a love-hate relationship with technology: If you’ve ever caught yourself “arguing” with a malfunctioning toaster then you know what I mean. Writer and humorist Paul Jennings coined the word “resistentialism” to describe the half-serious belief that inanimate objects are out to get you, that they can sense when you’re running short on time or money and malfunction or break down out of spite.

It’s a hilarious idea for now, but as our machines become increasingly intelligent it may not become considerably less amusing. Sure, Siri is fantastic, but what if – deep down inside – Siri is a jealous, spiteful creature just waiting for the opportunity to do you harm? Would an advanced artificial intelligence respect a species of fumbling, upright apes who can’t circumnavigate a short trip to the Save-A-Lot without asking their cellphone for help? That’s the question that author and roboticist Daniel H. Wilson addresses in his fiction debut, Robopocalypse.

In the near-future world of Robopocalypse, mankind uses robots for all sorts of tasks that human beings can’t or don’t want to do. There are robot caretakers for the elderly, robotic construction equipment, robotic toys, and more. When a newly created artificial intelligence goes rogue, humanity finds all of its dependable robot servants out to get them. It all begins with a few isolated instances chalked up to malfunctions and fluke accidents that only a handful of people – scientists, hackers – suspect as something more. Within days, humanity finds itself in a war for its very survival against a cold, implacable enemy -- an enemy growing smarter every day.

It would be easy to compare Robopocalypse to the Terminator series, but that’s selling the book short. This isn’t the story of a messianic super-soldier and you won’t find any walking slabs of Austrian beef toting heavy caliber weapons here. Robopocalypse is about regular people doing whatever they can to survive as the very tools they created turn against them. It’s a plausible technological adventure tale from a guy who knows his stuff and doesn’t mind using it to scare the living daylights out of you.

I hope that we’ll never face the kind of situation described in Robopocalypse, but I’m probably going to take the batteries out of the Roomba just in case.

Travel literature has a long history, perhaps stretching into the earliest days of the written word. Homer’s Odyssey thrilled contemporary readers with its description of exotic lands and terrifying perils, and while it can safely be assumed that it is not entirely factual account, the Odyssey is at the very least an antecedent of the modern travelogue.

While our world has become a lot smaller since Homer’s day (modern writers don’t, as a rule, run afoul of witches and six-headed sea monsters), there as yet remain corners of the globe regarded as near-mythical by the less-traveled among us. Like Australia, for example. Ask around and you’re likely to hear fanciful tales easily the equal of Homer: Almost everything is poisonous! The beaches are prowled by man-eating sharks! Didjeridoo-toting Aborigines wander about with kangaroos in tow!

In the late nineties travel writer and humorist Bill Bryson turned his attention to the land down under with In a Sunburned Country. Determined to look past the vegemite clichés and Paul Hogan Stereotypes, Bryson began an Australian walkabout to experience all that the country had to offer, from the hospitality of its cities to the primal beauty of natural wonders like Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef.

In his journey, Bryson learns that while there is indeed some fact in all of the stories people tell about Australia, the truth is so much more than just a few scary or silly anecdotes can convey. Danger can be found here for those who seek it out, but so can extreme beauty, a fascinating history, and a people whose sense of independence and unflappable cheer were shaped by both.

While Bryson’s humor is usually inspired by exasperating circumstances, here it comes from a place of wonder and genuine charm. In a Sunburned Country is an ideal selection for anyone interested in learning more about this beguiling, beautiful country.

As Francisco de Goya once said, “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” A brief survey of apocalyptic fiction in recent years would seem to support this. Delving within the literature reveals a haunted house of ghoulish horrors: the shambling flesh-eating hordes of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Alden Bell’s The Reapers Are the Angels, and the monstrous chimera of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to name a few.

What of more prosaic depictions of society’s collapse? Do they carry the same worrying charge? In the case of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the answer is a resounding (admittedly hilarious) “Yes.”

Perhaps it is unorthodox to consider Super Sad True Love Story in the context of apocalyptic or dystopian (and really, a dystopia is only one gunshot away from an apocalypse) literature, but make no mistake: This an apocalyptic tale, even if it’s a humorous one.

Lenny Abramov is a man out of place in the near-future of Shyteyngart’s America, a society teetering on intellectual and fiscal bankruptcy. Abramov is a book collector. He’s sentimental, deaf to the vagaries of style, and he’s aging: All of these are no-no’s in Shteyngart’s world.

The future America of Super Sad True Love Story is a distorted fun-house mirror reflection of our own. There’s so little difference between the two major political parties that they’ve become one. This coalition government, along with its corporate allies, has created a consumerist fascist state, a situation enabled by a barely literate, youth-obsessed culture too obsessed with jabbering away on a Facebook-like network called GlobalTeens to even notice. As the nation’s Chinese creditors threaten to call in the country’s massive debt, its security apparatus attempts to keep things under control with misspelled propaganda and the deployment of National Guard troops. Not that anyone can pry themselves away from GlobalTeen long enough to care.

Lenny becomes smitten with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American woman who initially finds his affection off-putting and pitiable, but later succumbs to his nebbish charm. She’s a person of her time: suspicious of the books Lenny loves, distracted, and casually cruel. Lenny is drawn to her, but is fundamentally incapable of adapting to her world. He wants something more than she can offer.

Their relationship is improbable from the start, and its inevitable unraveling mirrors the unlikely future of American society as a whole. This is likely as not the beginning of the long American night, and much like Lenny and Eunice’s romance it is both bittersweet and entirely expected.

There may not be any monsters here, no zombies or Frankensteinian predators, but the world of Super Sad True Love Story is no less disturbing. Shteyngart’s acid take on the worst qualities of modern American culture must ring true from anyone who has ever looked upon it and felt a sense of disconnect. This is a love story, but it is indeed “super sad.”

It is the early '70s and the Edbus family -- painter Abraham, his hippie wife Rachel, and their son Dylan -- has just moved into a brownstone on Dean Street, which sits in a poor African-American community in Brooklyn. Rachel, unstable and improbably naive, enrolls Dylan in the local public school, and as the only white child there he becomes a target for unrelenting bullying and threats -- at least until he meets Mingus Rude, a young African-American boy with troubles of his own. And so Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude begins

Mingus is the son of Barrett Rude Jr., a once-famous R&B singer whose drug abuse and emotional volatility has driven him to life as a recluse on Dean Street. Like Dylan’s father, Barrett is practically a ghost in his son’s life, and both boys are left to raise themselves in the bowels of New York City.

Black and white, both boys share a common language based on comic books, rap music, graffiti tagging, drugs, and even a little bit of vigilante crime-fighting with a ring that may or may not be magic. As the '70s give way to the '80s the city changes, and so does their friendship: Dylan and Mingus begin to drift apart.

While Dylan grows up to become a music critic, Mingus succumbs to the drug-fueled chaos of his home life. Years later, a secret they once shared on Dean Street brings them together for one last time.

The Fortress of Solitude is as much the story of a friendship as it is the story of a neighborhood. Dylan and Mingus are at the forefront here, but Dean Street is at the very least a supporting character with its own story to tell: one of cocaine, music and eventual gentrification. Drifting from strict realism into outright magical realism at times, The Fortress of Solitude is a heady, dreamlike book that will stay with the reader forever.

When he left his Missouri home for Japan at age nineteen, Jake Adelstein had no way of knowing that he would eventually cross paths with one of that nation’s most powerful crime figures. Adelstein came to Japan hoping to reinvent himself. He succeeded, but nearly at the cost of his life. In Tokyo Vice, Adelstein invites readers in to join him for this thrilling ride.

After studying Japanese literature at Sophia University, Adelstein passed the entrance exam for employment at Yomiuri Shimbum, one of the country’s five national newspapers, becoming the first American citizen to work as a Japanese language reporter at a Japanese newspaper. He began work as a police reporter in 1993, moving on to the organized crime beat by the end of the year.

Adelstein became immersed in Japan’s underworld, a dangerous place inhabited by the yakuza -- the Japanese mafia -- and their underlings: hired killers, thugs, and corrupt officials. Digging deeply into the criminal culture like no Westerner had ever done before, Adelstein covered horrific murders and tracked cases of human trafficking. As a star reporter, Adelstein’s work attracted plenty of attention, but none more so than from the Yakuza themselves.

Living on the edge of danger was something that came with the territory, but when Adelstein uncovered the biggest scoop of his career -- evidence of a sweetheart deal between the FBI and powerful yakuza leader Tadamaso Goto -- he had to flee for his life. What happened from there would make his career, but at what cost to his family and future?

Tokyo Vice is a sensational work of crime reportage, a work of nonfiction that rivals the best hardboiled crime novel, and a glimpse into Japan’s shadow side that few Americans will ever have.