Realism in "A Song of Ice and Fire"

Game of Thrones takes place in a land that feels somewhat post-apocalyptic — there are occasional glimmers of hints that something really bad might have happened to Westeros long ago, and that's the reason for the irregular and attenuated seasons. But even more than that, we know Westeros is on the brink of a zombie apocalypse from the very first moment of the story. And part of the genius of Martin's slow-as-soil-erosion storytelling is that the zombie threat never quite arrives, but we ke...

 No One Will Join the Military to Fight the Zombies

Even if the coffers hadn’t been empty, if we’d had all the money to make all the uniforms we needed to implement Phase Two, who do you think we could have conned into filling them? This goes to the heart of America’s war weariness. As if the “traditional” horrors weren’t bad enough—the dead, the disfigured, the psychologically destroyed—now you had a whole new breed of difficulties, “The Betrayed.” We were a volunteer army, and look what happened to our volunteers. How man...