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.
Event Horizon 