Here's your alternative history question to ponder

Colin Powell elected president in 1996.

Discuss.

There was actually an interesting angle on this in the novel I just finished reading World War Z. WWZ is a fascinating work of alt-history that stands right up there with Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Where Roth takes the genre of memoir, and tells the story of his childhood growing up in Jewish lower-middle class neighborhood in north Jersey, but gives it the twist of Charles Lindberg being elected president on a Hitler-sympathetic platform in 1940, World War Z takes the genre of the Ken Burns-style documentary narrative, and tells the story of.....the world war against zombies. Okay, I lost some of you right out of the gate with the mention of Zombies (or "Zachs" as the soldiers refer to them), but WWZ is not some pulp zombie horror mashup. It's a cautionary tale about globalization, information war, overreliance on technology, environmental degredation, and loss of common sense and practical survival skills. The story is told looking back on the Zombie Wars ten years after victory was "declared." The narrator interviews a wide variety of survivors who played instrumental roles in the war, from the Chinese military doctor who treated "Patient Zero" from a supplanted village near the Three Gorges Dam resevoir, to the Australian astronaut left stranded on the international space station, to an American soldier who fought in critical engagements, to ordinary people who survived the horrors of the Great Panic and learned how to fight back against an enemy with no remorse. The author nicely eschews falling for a War of the Worlds answer: there is no "cure" for the virus that causes the dead to rise, and, ten years later, they haven't figured out exactly how the virus works, or what could be a "cure" for it other than destroying the brain of the infected. The plague spreads in a way that would be totally unsurprising to anyone who has read "The World Is Flat" and is only pushed back when different nations each fix on a Rourke's Drift style strategy. Colin Powell is alluded to (not by name) as the man who becomes president during the crisis, and aquits himself nobly. The image alone of the zombies attacking out of the water alone gave me the creeps three nights straight.

Definitely a Three Orgles read.

BRAINS.....BRAINS....YIPS from Steve-O: Holy crap, but The Colossus has had Zombies on his, um, brain for quite awhile now.