Tag: history

On The Beach

by Event Horizon

by Neville Shute

This should have been posted weeks ago

April 21, 2025

On The Beach by Neville Shute – an early dystopian speculative novel – came out in 1957. It sold over 100,000 copies in the first six weeks of publication and went on to sell 4 million copies. Within two years it came out as a movie with an ensemble cast of Hollywood A-listers. It’s a good enough book. In 68 years of critical and popular scrutiny, the reviews are decidedly mixed. But timing is everything. The launching of Sputnik in 1957 that year stoked Cold War paranoia into a frenzy. Senator Joseph Mcarthy’s career as a communist hunter may have collapsed but the hysterical terror of communism that he exploited had not. The prospect of a nuclear war was personal and a part of every day life. 

The characters in On The Beach are in the other hemisphere – that is, in Melbourne, Australia; the Northern hemisphere has been wiped out by the massive nuclear exchange of World War III. It is known that much of the population in the north is dead from attacks on the cities and that everybody else is dying from radiation and fallout poisoning. The poisonous cloud of radioactive fallout is being tracked and it is only a matter of time till the cloud reaches far south and finishes off the rest of the world. A premise of the story is that death and extinction are unavoidable. The science is dated. Many observers were incredulous about the behavior of the characters or the presumed response by government.

Neville Shute was an engineer, a journalist and a moderately successful novelist by the time he published On The Beach. He had seen the front lines of World War II and was well-versed in the Cold War politics that engendered terrifying prospects of a nuclear war. Communism was accepted in the West as a legitimate threat (not to say it wasn’t) and Shute responded to the visceral elements of menace and paranoia on everybody’s mind.

In two years On The Beach, A Canticle for Liebowitz, and Alas, Babylon were published – all with the theme of end-times or at least, post-apocalyptic times. This was a departure from prominent prior examples of dystopian fiction. 1984, published in 1949, is about the final evolution of a hyper-totalitarian society. Day of the Triffids published in 1951, deals with giant carnivorous plants capable of locomotion.

But the theme or the fear of nuclear war has legs. It makes a comeback in the 1980s when fear of the Soviets and fear of a nuclear confrontation reach another fever pitch. It has not subsided well into the 21st century.

Should you read On The Beach? If you are a student of the genre as a whole, yes, you should absolutely read On The Beach. If you are a wide-ranging reader looking for the next great choice, then as usual, you won’t know why you should or shouldn’t have read it until after you are done.

Alas, Babylon

by Event Horizon

by Pat Frank

April 14, 2025

Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, is a dystopian science fiction novel. Perhaps it belongs in its own sub-genre of Cold War speculative fiction; the signature theme is the question, what is the aftermath of a nuclear war? Three primary examples are On the Beach, Alas, Babylon and A Canticle for Liebowitz, published in 1957 and 1959. There was a surge of new entries published in 1980 that mirrored a resurgence of Cold War fears in that political climate.

            These earlier novels are uncluttered by threats of EMPs or nuclear winter. Such constructs  were not yet fully developed by 1959. There is, however, widespread destruction at multiple bomb sites throughout the country plus conferred pariah status if you happen to live in a “contaminated zone.” Telecommunication is skeletal, spotty and unreliable. Re-supply of basic necessities from the outside is non-existent. The social fabric shrinks to the size of your neighborhood. Outsiders are suspect and reasonably so. Local defense and search for alternative food sources become primary long-term concerns.

            Pat Frank was an experienced journalist and active observer of the political and military context of the Cold War. In Alas, Babylon he devotes considerable storytelling to developing the military and geo-political scenario that unravels so dramatically into a nuclear exchange. This political-thriller prologue deftly undergirds the atmosphere of dread and panic that ensues.

            Frank introduces some amusing ironies. The government leans on nuclear energy to try and restore power to the population. The US receives aid of food, fuel and medicine aid from ‘third world’ countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and Venezuela. “Three Greats,” India, China and Japan have replaced the US and the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent powers in the world.

            The rest of the story is taken up with character development and the challenges of rebuilding a sustainable way  of life. There is misery, privation and death. But rising from necessity, we see ordinary people finding ways to survive, with more or less success, by cooperating with each other. Far from being a dirge of doom and gloom, Alas, Babylon closes on a rising mood of hope and optimism.