It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. . .

Last weekend I read Alas Babylon by Pat Frank. A student was thinking about doing his senior project on it, so I said I'd take a look. The novel--half-forgotten today--was almost certainly one of the first in a long series of cold-war era apocalyptic nuclear scenarios. A late 1950s Florida small town survives the initial nuclear attack from the USSR, while Miami, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and eventually Orlando go up in a mushroom cloud around it, along with quite a bit of the rest of the planet. The survivors, of course, have to fashion new modes of survival, including transportation, medicine, and a new economy.

The novel was amusing in at least one way that it probably wasn't when it was first published. The novel is almost charmingly dated--it was a bit like watching an episode of _Mad Men_, except one where the Cuban Missile crisis doesn't end well. Imagine Don Draper and Pete Campbell climbing over the ruins of a destroyed Florida, saying things like "Well, this is a fine donnybrook, I must say," and you might get a rough feel for the novel.

Frank apparently wrote the novel, in part, because he didn't think his contemporaries realized how bad a nuclear war could be. He wanted to show that the world would NOT get back to normal after a nuclear exchange, and today it's an interesting reminder that anyone ever thought that that would be the case; it goes a long way to explaining the early years of the cold war when you realize that people on both sides thought that a nuclear exchange would be like a conventional war, only more so. Frank wanted to point out that the U.S. would essentially turn back the clock of civilization by at least a couple of thousand years. From my perspective, Frank was still almost charmingly optimistic about nuclear annihilation. Within a year after The Day, his heroes and heroines have new food sources, new sexual partners, and a new economy. There's almost something bracingly Thoreauean (if I can use that word) about the whole thing: these people have had to simplify their lives with a vengeance, but after having done so, they seem to be enjoying themselves. Yeah, okay, there's the little matter of radiation poisoning, but, Frank seems to say, life ain't ever going to be perfect.

As I was reading, I also couldn't help think about the way in which recent fiction has turned its back on the nuclear scenario. My favorite 'end of the world as we know it' novel of the past few years is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, wherein an engineered super-virus, introduced into the world through vitamins, takes out all but a handful of engineered mutants. Despite the presence of thousands of nuclear warheads in the world, we're more worried about catching a super-cold these days.