Alas, Babylon: A Novel by Pat Frank, is somewhat dated but holds up surprisingly well, thirty years after the end of the Cold War. The key is good storytelling. We care about the citizens of Fort Repose, Florida, even though the Soviet Union is no more. The book often has the racial and gender sensibilities of 1959, but it is difficult to tell if this is the author’s perspective, or simply a mirror held up to the times.
Like most nuclear war survival books and films, we now know that even a limited nuclear engage would be a species terminating event. Some books and films came close to this realization, especially the BBC’s 1984 masterful Threads. Yet even in this work, ten years after the nuclear exchange, a bare bones government is being formed in northern England. People hang on - but in a nightmare. That would not happen. But I suppose you can’t write a book where the bombs go off, and everyone dies – the likely, but not very dramatic, scenario.
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