A Cozy Floridian Apocalypse

Alas, Babylon (1959) by Pat Frank

But yesterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules archaic as ancient Rome’s. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun and Goth. Today a man saved himself and his family and to hell with everyone else. With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan. (p. 98)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the apocalypse, lately. Specifically the nuclear kind.

This isn’t new for me. I’m never not thinking about the apocalypse, really. But it feels like it’s in the air more than usual. 

With two different nuclear powers currently engaged in two separate wars, the New York Times has been releasing interactive guides to nuclear war, Dan Carlin interviewed a woman who went into a hypothetical nuclear attack scenario with terrifying detail, and a TV adaptation of the jaunty post-apocalyptic video game franchise Fallout was released to much fanfare and discussion. (I really enjoyed the Fallout show; I’ve never been a big gamer, but I was hopelessly hooked on Fallout 3 in the summer after high school. The show was fun and made me want to buy a game console just to roam the Capital Wasteland again.) The Criterion Channel recently curated a stellar playlist of post-apocalyptic movies, which my husband and I have steadily been making our way through. And of course, in fast-approaching November, Americans will decide, once again, which octogenarian to hand the nuclear codes to. It feels like the mainstream is finally catching up to the levels of fear and anxiety that are appropriate when confronted with the reality that we are always just two or three decisions away from collectively having a very bad time as a species. World War IV will be fought with sticks and clubs, etc.

I grew up in the 90s and came into political consciousness during the Bush Years and the War on Terror. The Cold War was ancient history, something I learned about in school. Nukes weren’t really a thing anymore, it seemed. The bad guys were all sub-state actors; catching the occasional Mission Impossible villain with a Russian accent felt to me like a silly anachronism. We worried about random terror attacks, not an existential threat to all life on Earth.

But I had a dad who introduced me to Cold War-era science fiction, which is how I came to be obsessed with the end of the world. When I was 11 or 12, my dad handed me Alas, Babylon, which had been one of his favorite books as an adolescent in the Seventies. The book follows one family in a small town in central Florida in the immediate lead-up and aftermath of a full-scale nuclear attack on America. It largely leaves aside geopolitics and military strategy and instead focuses on the daily human drama and challenges of survival after being almost completely cut off from the rest of the world. 

I re-read Alas, Babylon several times in middle school and high school. I found it compelling and oddly comforting. Despite the massive scale of death and destruction the book implies, the tone is hopeful rather than grim—it’s a story about a family and a community that, while faced with some difficult choices, pulls through with characteristic American grit and ingenuity to survive. It feels in a way like a manual for how to survive a nuclear attack. I never forgot the lessons that, as soon as you see a nuclear flash, you should open all the windows to keep them from shattering in the blast, and to fill all the tubs and bottles and spare containers with potable water while you can.

I read the book again recently as part of my present preoccupation with nuclear annihilation, and I’m happy to report that my enjoyment of it holds up—with some caveats. As to be expected of a book from 1959, there are some weird racial dynamics: characters remark on the strangeness of having white kids and black kids in the same improvised classroom, white characters who go slumming in “Pistolville,” a section of town populated by a disenfranchised minority, the Minorcans. Rita Hernandez, a savvy, sexy, greedy Minorcan femme fatale, and Two-Tone, a shifty black drunkard, are particularly problematic, but overall it’s clear that the author’s sympathies were with the progressives of the time. 

Although the quote I started with declares that “With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan,” this represents just one side of the spiritual struggle that unfolds throughout the rest of the book. Randy, the de facto leader of a small band of survivors, manages to retain his humanity rather than descend fully into the barbarism that he meditates on. The book presents an optimism about human nature that borders on naïveté, especially compared to later, darker depictions of the end times.

I know what you’re thinking. Lillian, how does Alas, Babylon compare to the vastly more popular book/movie of the same time period, On the Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute? Listen, man, I don’t know. I haven’t read it. Seems like a big oversight for someone who claims to be obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction. Yeah, I know. I’ve been meaning to read it since I was 12, but it never happened. My dad said it was too depressing, so he didn’t have a copy for me to read. People have been asking me if I’ve read On the Beach for over a decade. Should I have read it in preparation for this post? Probably, but like, I have a full-time job and it’s not this. I’m reading like five other books right now, get off my back.

A number of the films on Criterion’s list veer extremely dark. Threads (1984), No Blade of Grass (1970), Testament (1983), and Panic in Year Zero (1962) each paint a bleak picture of life after the end of the world, in which no one can be trusted and you gotta take what you can from whomever is weaker or more trusting than you. One particularly affecting scene in No Blade of Grass comes after the main character and his family murder a couple living in a rural cottage so they can stay for the night and take their food. The morning after the murders, the wife washes the dishes and tidies up before they hit the road again. “You didn’t need to clean up,” her husband says. “I know; I just felt like doing it,” she replies sadly. This meaningless courtesy soothes her, makes her feel more civilized, even though she has no objection to the necessity of killing these innocent people whose only crime was having something her family needed.

The darkness of the films on the Criterion list rings truer to me than the cozy apocalypse of Alas, Babylon, but the latter is in many ways more enjoyable. If you’ve ever seen Jericho (2006), the short-lived, low budget nuclear survival TV show, the vibes are similar. In Jericho, the prodigal son of a small town in Kansas returns just before a nuclear attack and helps the isolated community come together to survive as they face a series of challenges. The acting and production are… not great and pretty corny, but a part of me loves this show. It came out not long after I first read Alas, Babylon, so I was primed to find it compelling. As much as I enjoy a thoroughly harrowing, fucked up story about how humans are all terrible (shout out to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog (1975), and like half of all Korean movies), sometimes it’s nice to indulge in a slightly more gentle vision of the apocalypse and pretend to believe in America for a while.